The Pirates traded pitcher Mike Burrows in a three-team deal that brought back second baseman Brandon Lowe, outfielder Jake Mangum, and left-handed reliever Mason Montgomery.

Earlier in the offseason, they made another trade from their pitching depth, dealing Johan Oviedo to the Red Sox for top 100 prospect Jhostynxon Garcia, who has a chance to play in Pittsburgh’s outfield this year.

With Lowe already added to the right side of the infield, the Pirates turned to the free agent market, signing first baseman Ryan O’Hearn to a two-year, $29 million deal. It was the first multi-year deal signed in Ben Cherington’s seven offseasons as General Manager of the Pirates. It was also the first multi-year free agent signing by the Pirates since Ivan Nova in December 2016. The $29 million to O’Hearn was the largest free agent deal since Nova.

The additions of Lowe and O’Hearn added two players who combined for 48 home runs in 2025 to a team that finished last in the Majors in homers.

One thing is perfectly clear.

For the first time in nearly a decade, the Pirates are active in trying to bring in Major League players who could help them contend.

They’ve also been linked to a lot of top free agents, albeit every one of those stories ends with the Pirates telling their beat writers to report about how close they were to landing a Kyle Schwarber or a Eugenio Suarez.

The latest free agent they were linked to was Framber Valdez, which was a rumor that didn’t last a single day before he signed elsewhere.

One rumor that did pan out was the interest in Marcell Ozuna. After Suarez signed with the Cincinnati Reds, the Pirates’ reported interest shifted to Ozuna. On Monday morning, a day before Spring Training, the Pirates added Ozuna on a one-year, $12 million deal, which includes an option for the 2027 season.

Have things changed for the Pirates?

Are they finally trying to contend in year seven of Cherington’s rebuild, after sitting quiet during the first two years of the career of generational pitcher Paul Skenes?

Or, have they set the bar so low over the last decade that even the slightest resemblance of acting like a Major League team would give the impression that they’re making significant upgrades?

The Pirates 2026 Upgrades

The Pirates have been one of the worst offenses in the league for years.

It wasn’t just the 2025 season where they finished last in home runs and second-to-last in offensive run value.

During Cherington’s entire tenure from 2020-2025, the Pirates have combined for the second-worst offense in baseball, while finishing last in home runs — trailing the next-best team by 54 homers.

Adding a 30-home run hitter like Brandon Lowe is going to draw attention. Ryan O’Hearn coming off a 3-WAR season is going to draw attention. An aging Marcell Ozuna is going to draw attention.

Even the addition of a top prospect like Jhostynxon Garcia will add attention when paired with the hype surrounding a minor league system, which is led by hitting prospects for the first time in years. Garcia and top prospect Konnor Griffin could both boost the MLB club at some point in 2026.

It’s easy to draw attention with offensive additions when you’ve been purely offensive for years on the offensive side of the game.

And it’s easy to draw attention when you’re adding Major League players for the first time in a decade.

But the Pirates haven’t exactly been upgrading in the right areas.

Last season, the MLB average for hitters was a .313 wOBA and a 100 wRC+.

The Pirates only had three hitters above the average wOBA: Spencer Horwitz, Joey Bart, and Bryan Reynolds. Only Horwitz and Bart finished above the wRC+ number. Reynolds was one point below. Andrew McCutchen and Tommy Pham were just below average in both stats. Let’s call the five of them average or better.

The top five Pirates hitters in 2025:

1. Spencer Horwitz - .344 wOBA / 119 wRC+

2. Joey Bart - .317 wOBA / 101 wRC+

3. Bryan Reynolds - .315 wOBA / 99 wRC+

4. Andrew McCutchen - .309 wOBA / 95 wRC+

5. Tommy Pham - .308 wOBA / 94 wRC+

By comparison, here is how the new additions fared:

1. Ryan O’Hearn - .349 wOBA / 127 wRC+

2. Brandon Lowe - .334 wOBA / 114 wRC+

3. Marcell Ozuna - .334 wOBA / 114 wRC+

4. Jake Mangum - .307 wOBA / 95 wRC+

All together now:

1. Ryan O’Hearn - .349 wOBA / 127 wRC+

2. Spencer Horwitz - .344 wOBA / 119 wRC+

3. Brandon Lowe - .334 wOBA / 114 wRC+

4. Marcell Ozuna - .334 wOBA / 114 wRC+

5. Joey Bart - .317 wOBA / 101 wRC+

6. Bryan Reynolds - .315 wOBA / 99 wRC+

7. Andrew McCutchen - .309 wOBA / 95 wRC+

8. Tommy Pham - .308 wOBA / 94 wRC+

9. Jake Mangum - .307 wOBA / 95 wRC+

O’Hearn comes with the disclaimer that 2025 was a career year, and the 2023-24 seasons were closer to the numbers by Lowe/Ozuna.

Lowe has been consistent at that level for the last three years, and represents the best upgrade the Pirates have made. Last year, Pirates second basemen combined for a .283 wOBA and a 78 wRC+. The most common starter, Nick Gonzales, recorded .289/82. Lowe is not only an above-average hitter, but he upgraded over below-average production.

Ozuna took a step back in 2025, during his age 34 season. He had a 4.7 fWAR in 2024, with a .395 wBOA and a 154 wRC+, but dropped to numbers in 2025 that were closer to his career totals. That drop also came with a declining hard hit rate and exit velocities, both in the range of his 2022 season when he was below-average.

Mangum is almost a mirror image of the production from McCutchen and Pham. However, the addition of Ozuna, who is a DH-only, will crowd the roster enough that it will likely make Mangum a fourth outfielder, which would be his role on a contender.

The addition of Ozuna also makes it less likely that Garcia has an impact on this roster. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Top 100 prospect status aside, a rookie like Garcia shouldn’t be expected to arrive in the Majors and relied upon to put up above-average results. At best, he debuts at the McCutchen/Pham/Mangum level, while adding some excitement for what improvements the future could bring.

The best case for above-average production from a prospect might be from Griffin. The top prospect in baseball has received rave reports all offseason about being a generational hitting prospect. The Pirates just watched Skenes, a generational pitcher, defy the odds with two of the best seasons in MLB history in his first two years in the Majors. Such expectations for the 20-year-old Griffin should be limited to hopes and dreams rather than expectations and cornerstones of a contending Pirates team in 2026.

It’s easy to upgrade one of the worst offenses in the game, and the Pirates have upgraded by adding three hitters who would have been in their top four last year.

That said, their upgrades aren’t as significant as you’d expect when adding three above-average hitters.

A CROWDED RIGHT SIDE

Last offseason, the best move the Pirates made was trading from their pitching depth to acquire Spencer Horwitz. The first baseman was the best hitter among their abysmal offense, putting up almost identical numbers to what he produced in Toronto a year earlier.

If Hopium is your drug of choice, Horwitz got better in the second half, with a .395 wOBA and a 154 wRC+. Among 26 qualified MLB first basemen, only Nick Kurtz had better numbers during that stretch. O’Hearn was on that list, ranking 19th.

The road to hell is paved with Pirates hitters who went on a tear the final two months of the season, only to never replicate those numbers again. A year from now, Horwitz could look like the first base version of Chris Duffy.

All of that said, you would have been justified to have hope that Horwitz could have been a player to build around in 2026.

By adding O’Hearn, the Pirates crowded the one area where they were getting production in 2025.

The addition of Ozuna further crowds that group.

Ozuna hasn’t played in the field since 2023, so he’s expected to be a DH-only. That means the Pirates will have to choose between Horwitz and O’Hearn at first base. Defensively, O’Hearn is the better option. Horwitz has played second base in the past, but that spot is taken by Lowe.

In adding Ozuna to the mix, the Pirates will now have to take O’Hearn, their biggest free agent in a decade, and move him to the outfield, where he’s never played a full season in the Majors. Who knows what that will do to the production from the 32-year-old, but it’s a necessary move now to keep Horwitz in the lineup.

While the Pirates have added upgrades to their offense, the roster construction makes little sense.

Based on the production last year, Horwitz and O’Hearn are the best hitters on the team. There is reason to be skeptical of those performances. Horwitz has put up good numbers over the last two seasons, but the combined plate appearances amount to a little over one full season. O’Hearn had a career year in 2025, and might slip to Lowe/Ozuna levels if he falls back to 2023-24 levels. Possibly worse if the wear and tear from the outfield takes away from the bat.

Let’s not forget Jake Mangum. He’s probably a fourth outfielder on a contending team, and he’s now in that role with the Pirates. Mangum replaces what the Pirates had with Pham last season, but with O’Hearn likely needed in the outfield, the role would be lessened for Mangum. That’s not bad depth, but depth is a luxury when you have holes in the lineup.

Outside of the addition of Lowe, the Pirates haven’t significantly upgraded any spot in their lineup.

Lowe replaced a below-average position and a below-average starter with above-average historical production. That’s a textbook example of upgrading one of the worst offenses in the game.

Beyond Lowe, the relative upgrades have been minimal.

Yes, the Pirates committed $41 million to the duo of O’Hearn and Ozuna. However, those two are upgrading Pham and McCutchen. The moves here take the Pirates from average production to above-average production, which isn’t the best usage of a large chunk of a limited budget.

They had five average-ish or better hitters in 2025. They’ve replaced two of those hitters with the new guys. They created a question of playing time with the best returning hitter, which will be answered by playing their biggest free agent out of position.

What’s left unsaid is the gaping hole that remains on the left side of the infield.

Two Reasons Left to Be Skeptical

The Pirates have increased their payroll this offseason, though the increase isn’t as extreme as you’d expect with their spending.

Their estimated payroll for 2026 is $105 million, which is about $10 million higher than the 2025 payroll.

The Pirates shed salary at the 2025 trade deadline, sending out David Bednar and Ke’Bryan Hayes, and cutting $16 million in the process.

This is also a team that shed the 2025 salaries of Isiah Kiner-Falefa ($7.5 million), Andrew Heaney ($5.25 million), Andrew McCutchen ($5 million), Tommy Pham ($4.025 million), and Bailey Falter ($2.222 million), with Falter also being dealt at the trade deadline. They saved over $7 million by parting with Caleb Ferguson, Adam Frazier (deadline deal), Colin Holderman, and Ryan Borucki.

Aside from O’Hearn ($14 million in 2026) Ozuna ($12 million), and Lowe ($11.5 million), the Pirates have added left-handed reliever Gregory Soto this offseason ($7.75 million).

After all of that shuffling, the Pirates have only marginally increased their spending.

With a likely MLB Collective Bargaining Agreement battle coming next offseason, and with the Pirates being the target of a spending grievance from the MLBPA, they needed to spend something this offseason, while making the loud appearance that they were trying to spend money on guys like Schwarber and Valdez.

Their additions this offseason addressed strengths, while leaving out the obvious weak areas of the team.

In an article that has focused so much on offense, Ke’Bryan Hayes doesn’t fit in. He was one of the worst hitters in the game last season. He also won his second Gold Glove award at third base in the last three years.

Currently, the Pirates have no answer at third base. The best hope is that Jared Triolo can replicate the defense of Hayes. That hope comes with a near-promise that Triolo’s offense will be on the same level as Hayes. The Pirates downgraded a defensive strength, and none of their spending thus far has upgraded the third base position.

Lowe is an upgrade over Nick Gonzales at second base, but it’s uncertain whether Gonzales will be out of the lineup. Right now, he’s one of the best options at shortstop, where his bat would remain in the lineup, and his defense would be a downgrade. The Pirates could try Triolo at short, but they’d be worse off at third base.

This is where the upgrades fail to look like upgrades. The Pirates haven’t replaced their lowest performing hitters, and they have created weakness on the left side of the infield, which will inevitably hurt the pitching staff that has been their strength.

It’s not that Lowe, O’Hearn, and Ozuna are bad players — far from it.

The problem is poor roster construction and application of limited resources.

The Pirates had less of a hole at first base and DH than they did at third base or shortstop. It would have been easier to upgrade the outfield with less money than they spent to play O’Hearn out of position.

Soto’s addition, and the trade for Mason Montgomery, helped to offset the bullpen loss of Bednar, who had been one of the better relievers in the game for years. They added Rafael Flores in the Bednar trade, and Flores shows some promise at the plate. He also further crowds the 1B/DH scene, unless he pushes Joey Bart out of the lineup, which would again lead to an attempt to upgrade one of the rare above-average hitters in the 2025 lineup.

The Pirates have increased payroll, and they have added good players.

But this is still a team that will rely on Triolo and Gonzales for two of the most important positions on the field.

You could parse the stats of both players to try and find upside. You could also start dreaming on the instant impact provided by 20-year-old Konnor Griffin, which is an unreasonable expectation for any prospect.

The problem with hoping for upside is that you have to also embrace the potential for downside. The offseason additions have more potential for downside than they do upside.

O’Hearn is probably not going to repeat his career year from 2025. The best you can hope for is that he does repeat the above-average production from the previous two seasons, while being worked in the outfield for the first time at age 32.

Ozuna is coming off a season where his production fell across the board, and you hope it stops there. His underlying metrics in 2025 matched two recent seasons where he was below-average. He’s also a right-handed power hitter going from the ninth best park for right-handers to the 22nd best park with PNC’s spacious left field.

Lowe has been consistent, and is probably the safest bet of the three to remain at his productivity level, but he’s also seen his walk rate plummet the last two seasons. That will put more of his value on the variance of balls in play. Still, even if he declines to average production, he’s an upgrade over the 2025 production at second base.

Even the addition of Soto to the bullpen brings a player who has seen an increase in hits allowed over the last two seasons, and who is years removed from his All-Star campaigns.

The downside potential with these additions doesn’t change the fact that the Pirates have upgraded. It just highlights the problem with their upgrades.

The Pirates spent $26 million in 2026 on Ozuna and O’Hearn to upgrade over two average hitters with above-average hitters. Any decline with Ozuna or O’Hearn would negate the upgrade, meaning the Pirates would just be spending more money for the same production as they had in 2025.

With obvious holes at third base and shortstop, they could have used that money to add a player who would have upgraded the weakest spots on the roster, even with the threat of a decline to average performance.

That would have been significant.

These upgrades that the Pirates actually made highlight poor roster construction.

Perhaps they should be cut a little bit of slack, though.

In seven years under Cherington, this is the first time they’ve actually tried to put a winning roster together. They shouldn’t be expected to get it right on the first try.

Especially since this is their first attempt at spending money in nearly a decade.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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…the Pittsburgh Pirates?

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What a crazy world.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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When O’Hearn made his MLB debut in 2018, I was to the point where I didn’t follow anything in baseball outside of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ minor league system. By that point, PiratesProspects.com was running for nearly a decade, and was one of the biggest media sites covering the Pirates. I had no time to focus on anything other than managing my site and maintaining knowledge of the Pirates prospects.

I start with that disclaimer because this is going to be a writing aimed at figuring out the rare free agent the Pirates have agreed to sign.

Last week, the Pirates reportedly agreed to a two-year, $29 million deal with O’Hearn, which represents their largest free agent position player signing in history. It’s also the first multi-year deal they’ve given out since 2016, when they signed Ivan Nova to a three-year deal.

Their long history of inactivity on the free agent market creates a condition where any signing that makes the Pirates look like a real MLB franchise can become overblown. There’s the risk that the perception of O’Hearn could be elevated, simply because he’s one of the rare free agents the Pirates have invested money into over the last decade. I don’t think their lack of free agent moves should elevate O’Hearn by itself. At the least, the signing of O’Hearn should be seen as a hopeful change in business operations at 115 Federal Street.

I have a theory that the Pirates (and other teams at-risk of an MLBPA grievance) are receiving pressure to be active this offseason. Not long after the Pirates agreed to sign O’Hearn, the Miami Marlins signed closer Pete Fairbanks, while the Athletics signed Tyler Soderstrom to a seven-year extension.

The MLBPA has previously filed a grievance against the Pirates, Marlins, Athletics, and Rays for their lack of spending. The Collective Bargaining Agreement expires next offseason, and I would expect a work stoppage. MLB teams are claiming losses from the collapse of the regional sports network structure; the league parity is a joke that sees the Dodgers with an express lane to the World Series; and the economics of the league are a long-term disaster in part due to teams like Los Angeles giving out massive deferred contracts that have further wrecked the financial imbalance. The MLB owners have an easier case for their financial arguments if teams like the Pirates, Marlins, and Athletics are coming off a year where they increased spending, giving the MLBPA no teams to easily target.

But there’s another theory that isn’t really a theory: It’s now or never for Ben Cherington.

The Pirates added Cherington as their General Manager nearly six years ago. O’Hearn represents the first multi-year free agent signing during this time, and that includes the first two seasons of generational pitcher Paul Skenes. At this point, it would be inexcusable for the Pirates to take the same passive approach to free agency that they’ve so far seen under Cherington, even without considering the CBA-negotiation macro impacts.

All of this is to say that the Pirates were going to be under pressure to be active this offseason. At the local level, there’s pressure to do something to show they’re actually going to try to contend in over half a decade of the current rebuild. At the macro level, the league needs teams like the Pirates to spend this offseason in order to strengthen their position in next year’s battle with the MLBPA.

With that said, what exactly are the Pirates getting with Ryan O’Hearn?

A Career Year or Lasting Improvement?

The biggest thing that stands out to me with O’Hearn is that he’s coming off a 3.0 fWAR season, where he hit .281/.366/.437 with 17 homers. He ranked 10th in WAR among qualified first basemen, although his home run total was 20th among the same 25 players. O’Hearn’s value was driven by a high average (7th among the qualified first basemen), and a high on-base percentage (4th). He’s also steady defensively, ranking fourth among that group.

When it comes to first base, you typically think power. That’s not to say that a high average/OBP option can’t work, especially with the power production that O’Hearn has shown. There’s just more margin for error with this profile on a year-to-year basis, versus a strong power profile.

One thing that stands out is O’Hearn’s improved walk rate.

He made his debut with the Royals in 2018, and had a double-digit walk rate during his first three seasons in the Majors. The walks declined in 2021-2023, sitting around 5% and dropping to 4.1% in 2023. He’s gotten back on track the last two seasons, with a 9.3% walk rate in 2024, and an improvement to 10.7% last year.

What stands out to me is that O’Hearn has been making better swing decisions the last two seasons. He was chasing pitches out of the zone nearly a third of the time from 2021-2023, but reduced his chase rate to 27-28% the last two years. The league average has been above 28%, so O’Hearn has gone from an above-average tendency to chase, to a below-average rate. He’s also making above-average contact on pitches out of the zone, which means when he does chase, he’s more likely to put the ball in play.

The swinging strike rate from O’Hearn dropped to 7.4% in 2024 and 9.7% in 2025. These were the only two years of his career where he was whiffing less than 10%, even back to the high walk rate debut years. What’s interesting here is that O’Hearn isn’t achieving this by swinging less. His swing rate is around league average, compared to earlier in his career when his walk rates were likely due to below-average swing rates.

While O’Hearn had high walk rates in the past, they were largely a result of his reluctance to swing the bat. He’s swinging the bat more often later in his career, making better decisions on when to swing, and he’s making better contact. His walk rate is just as high as early in his career, but this is more legitimate, due to the reduced whiffs.

These are all good signs that his on-base abilities will remain going forward.

Batting average can fluctuate with the average on balls in play (BABIP). O’Hearn hit .289 in 2023 with a .340 BABIP. He hit .264 in 2024 with a .282 BABIP. He went back to a .281 average and a .330 BABIP in 2025. His career BABIP is .296, so the expected results should be somewhere in the middle of the last few seasons. That’s not a bad outcome when paired with his on-base abilities and the power he has.

About that power, O’Hearn is a lefty, which means his power results should play up at PNC Park. I don’t know if he would have a significant boost over his time in Baltimore, which features a similar layout that benefits lefties. I will point out that last year’s power results were dampened by a trade to San Diego, where his power took a significant dip after showing improvements in the first half with Baltimore. O’Hearn could have finished with over 20 homers had he remained in a park better suited for lefties.

O’Hearn has a high walk rate and a low strikeout rate, due to good pitch selection and good contact abilities. He’s got 15 home run power at the least, which could play up to 20+ in a full season playing half his games at PNC Park. He’s solid defensively at first base. He’s also durable, playing 140+ games in each of the last two seasons.

After struggling for most of his first five years with the Royals, the last three years have represented a late career surge from O’Hearn. He’s also entering his age 32 season, so there should be some concerns of a production decline with older age. As a first baseman whose offensive value is driven by swing decisions, I’d think O’Hearn would be more immune to age-related decline, at least in this stage of his career.

Will the Pirates get a 3.0 WAR first baseman? Possibly for one of the two seasons. Even if they get a 1.5 WAR in the other season, that still makes O’Hearn a valuable signing for the cost. He ranks tenth overall in fWAR out of 22 qualified first basemen from the last two years with similar results. Out of 31 qualified first basemen over the last three seasons, O’Hearn also ranks 10th in fWAR.

O’Hearn isn’t a flashy, game altering first baseman. He is a very consistently productive first baseman, and consistent productivity is exactly what the Pirates need when they’ve got limited funds to spend.

Are the Pirates Done?

If the Pirates only signed O’Hearn, it wouldn’t be enough of an upgrade. Fortunately, he’s just the latest addition.

This is a team that has already added Brandon Lowe in a trade earlier this month. Combined with O’Hearn, they’ve rebuilt the left side of their infield, with a significant power boost. They had 16 homers combined from Spencer Horwitz and Nick Gonzales last year, across ~800 combined plate appearances. O’Hearn and Lowe combined for 48 homers across nearly 1100 plate appearances.

They’ve also made some smaller moves with upside. Top 100 prospect Jhostynxon Garcia was added in an earlier offseason trade, giving upside to one of the outfield positions. Jake Mangum was added in the Lowe trade, giving some sleeper stability to the same role. The Pirates can use Mangum as a league-average option until Garcia is ready, and by the time Garcia is ready, they should have four strong outfield options.

The Lowe trade also brought in lefty reliever Mason Montgomery, who will pair with free agent lefty Gregory Soto to upgrade the bullpen.

The Pirates have so far upgraded half of their infield, one outfield spot, and the left-handed relief role this offseason.

There have been rumors that the Pirates aren’t finished with their additions.

The Pirates have been linked to Japanese third baseman Kazuma Okamoto, whose posting window closes on January 4th. There have been some Twitter rumors that the Pirates are the front runners for Okamoto, but I don’t put a lot of stock into the sources that have done the reporting.

Another report from Francys Romero had the Pirates looking at free-agent third baseman Yoan Moncada. Between the Okamoto rumors and the interest in Moncada, the Pirates are clearly targeting a third base upgrade, where they have a need.

I think Okamoto would be better than Moncada, due to reduced injury concerns that have plagued Moncada the last few years. In either case, if the Pirates could land a third baseman, it would result in 75% of their infield being upgraded in one offseason.

Combine that with their comments about giving top prospect Konnor Griffin a chance to win the starting shortstop position — which likely translates to Griffin having a more realistic chance at making his debut at some point in 2026 — and it’s clear the Pirates are executing a plan to significantly upgrade their position players behind the top pitching staff led by Skenes.

Finally Active

Maybe the Pirates are getting a push from MLB to be active this offseason, similar to the Marlins and Athletics, ahead of next year’s CBA negotiations.

Maybe Ben Cherington is feeling the pressure that this could be his last chance in Pittsburgh, and a passive and inactive approach won’t work.

What’s clear is that the Pirates aren’t just making a token effort to appear like they’re trying. It’s already significant that they’ve upgraded half of their infield with 48 homers from last year. The Pirates, as a team, had 117 home runs last season, which was dead last in the Majors.

It’s also significant that the Pirates have upgraded the left-handed spot in the bullpen, while building depth in the outfield with a few starting options for the third spot.

All of these moves have improved the team depth, to the point that they’re no longer relying on Nick Gonzales, Spencer Horwitz, Nick Yorke, Jared Triolo, or even Jack Suwinski as regular starters. Those players give the Pirates a group where anyone who breaks out with a surprise performance is icing on the cake, rather than a necessary ingredient in the batter.

If they’re able to add a third baseman, this team would start to look like a playoff contender. They already have one of the top pitching staffs in the game. Upgrading four position player spots, while having two top 100 prospects arriving by mid-season in Griffin and Garcia is exactly the support the pitching needs.

The outcome of their third base pursuits should become more clear in the next week.

As of this writing, it’s clear that the Pirates are not only showing far more urgency than they’ve shown over the last decade, but they’re making upgrades that make the 2026 team interesting before the calendar even turns to the new year.

At the very least, I learned a little bit about Ryan O’Hearn. And I like what I’ve seen.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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This is a change from the previous years under General Manager Ben Cherington, when the Pirates took a more passive approach, settling for the remaining scraps at the end of the winter.

Really, it just took one move to indicate they are more serious this time around.

Pirates Acquire Brandon Lowe

Today, the Pirates acquired Brandon Lowe, Mason Montgomery, and Jake Mangum from the Tampa Bay Rays in a three team trade that saw the Pirates send Mike Burrows to the Houston Astros, per The Athletic.

Lowe was one of the best hitters the Pirates could have gotten this offseason. He’s coming off a 31 home run season, and has hit at least 21 homers in four of his last five years. He’s also in a contract year, and could be in line for a final big payday next offseason if he has a good season in 2026. The Pirates will benefit from Lowe’s attempt to showcase himself.

This move was mostly about boosting the offense in 2026, which was a desperate need for the Pirates. The addition of Lowe shouldn’t complete the Pirates’ additions, but it does give one of the worst lineups in 2025 a massive boost. What I like is that Lowe has experience leading a small market offense, so the pressure on him in Pittsburgh will be manageable.

Lowe was joined by left-handed reliever Montgomery and outfielder Mangum.

I’ll admit that my break from regular writing this year has led to a decrease in knowledge of players around the league and even with the Pirates. For example, I had to do some research today to remind myself who Evan Sisk was, and how the Pirates acquired him. I’ve essentially dropped from being one of the foremost experts on the Pirates’ organization to having the knowledge of an average fan, which is a nice perspective change.

In this case, as a fan of the Rays, I recognized the names of Montgomery and Mangum instantly, to the point that I’m still irrationally waiting for an announcement that the Pirates gave up more than just Burrows for this trio.

Montgomery was a top ten prospect for the Rays in previous seasons, and is a left-handed reliever who sits around 98 MPH with an elite fastball, paired with an elite slider. His first full season in the Majors last year saw him put up a 12.3 K/9, fueled by a strong whiff rate and a well-above average ability to get hitters to chase pitches out of the zone. He’s had control issues, but he’s a good reliever with the control problems. If the Pirates can fix the control, they’ve got five years of a guy who could be one of the best lefty relievers in the game, with a chance to potentially return to the rotation.

Mangum was an older rookie last year, debuting in his age 29 season. He had impressive numbers across 428 plate appearances, batting .296/.330/.368 with 27 stolen bases and good outfield defense at all three spots. It’s not high praise, but Mangum would have been a top six hitter for the Pirates last year with those numbers. They have him for five more years, and if he repeats the 2025 results, he’s everything the Pirates were hoping for from Ji-Hwan Bae.

The duo of Montgomery and Mangum gives this trade some long-term potential, while boosting the depth in 2026. Montgomery was the name that stood out to me the most, aside from getting Lowe in the mix.

Burrows has a lot of upside as a starter, with multiple years of control. I’ll get to him in a moment. First, let’s look at how this deal shifts the view of the offseason thus far.

Offseason Recap

The story of the Pirates’ offseason so far has mostly been rumors that they just missed on a few costly free agents.

First, there were rumors that they intended to offer Josh Naylor a contract in the $78 M range, before he signed with Seattle for $90 M. Then, there were rumors they offered Kyle Schwarber four years and $125 M overall, before he signed for 5/$150 with the Phillies.

These offers were framed with hope that the Pirates were actually trying, although those bids were unlikely to get deals done. In order to land a player like Naylor or Schwarber, the Pirates would have needed to exceed the offers those players received. Schwarber likely would have needed a six year deal approaching $180+ M to entice him to leave Philadelphia for Pittsburgh, and Naylor would have needed more than the $90 M Seattle was offering.

I don’t think the Pirates should have gotten credit for their offers to Naylor/Schwarber, as those offers were just enough to claim they were in the market, without realistically having a shot to land either player. The only way to get either player would be for the Pirates to seriously overpay. It felt more like a PR move than realistic offers.

The Pirates also missed out on Jorge Polanco, who signed for 2 years at $20 M per year. This is a player they could have landed easier than Schwarber or Naylor, but I don’t fault them for missing this move. I don’t think Polanco is worth $40 M across two years, as he’d been inconsistent.

With the addition of Lowe, the Pirates got a better option than Polanco at nearly a fourth of the overall guaranteed cost.

Another way to look at it: Polanco would have cost $20 M in 2026. The Pirates have added Lowe and free agent left-handed relief pitcher Gregory Soto for $19.25 M combined. I would rather have Lowe/Soto if you’re spending $20 M. Lowe gives more of a guarantee of production over Polanco, and Soto upgrades the bullpen.

When Soto was signed, I didn’t really like the move. It’s not that Soto isn’t a good pitcher, but a team with budget restrictions and offensive needs adding a lefty reliever didn’t seem like a priority. That move is now viewed in a different light after the Lowe trade.

Aside from the Lowe/Soto vs Polanco financial comparison, the additions of Soto and Montgomery give the Pirates a dangerous lefty relief combo. Soto has been consistent the last few years, with a FIP routinely in the 3.60 range, and a 10.4 K/9 last year. Just like Montgomery, Soto works in the 97-98 MPH range with his fastball.

The third lefty reliever in the mix is Evan Sisk, who the Pirates acquired last year at the trade deadline for Bailey Falter. Sisk had a 3.08 FIP and a 12.7 K/9 in 17.2 innings between the Pirates and Royals in his age 28 season. He doesn’t have an upper-90s fastball like the other two, but he gets a lot of swing and miss from a five-pitch mix.

Pitching has been at a premium this offseason, and the Pirates have managed to lock down two lefty relievers with upper-90s fastballs and advanced strikeout potential. That plays extremely well at PNC Park. Adding Sisk as a third option in Triple-A gives the bullpen good depth, behind a starting rotation that remains strong.

Trading From Strength to Address a Weakness

There was another move the Pirates made earlier this offseason that dealt from their pitching strength. They traded RHP Johan Oviedo to the Boston Red Sox in a deal that brought back top 100 outfield prospect Jhostynxon Garcia, aka “The Password”.

Garcia made his MLB debut with the Red Sox last year at the age of 22, and hit .271/.334/.498 with 18 homers in 351 plate appearances in Triple-A. He could be a candidate to open the 2026 season in Pittsburgh’s outfield, although the addition of Mangum in the Lowe trade lessens that urgency.

Starting pitching has been at a premium this offseason. It’s also a strength for the Pirates. So far, they’ve done a great job of dealing from that strength to address some team needs:

• Garcia gives them long-term position player upside.

• Lowe gives them a short-term power bat that they desperately needed.

• Montgomery boosts the lefty relief depth, and Lowe’s affordable salary allowed them to add Soto for the combined cost of a comparable free agent.

• Mangum boosts the outfield depth with the potential to be an average starter.

You could even go back to the trade deadline when they flipped Falter for Sisk and lower-level first base prospect Callan Moss. The Pirates have been dealing from their pitching depth, and they’ve done a good job to boost the team needs.

Burrows and Oviedo are both great pitchers with long-term value. They’re also two of the riskier pitchers in the rotation.

Oviedo was returning from Tommy John this past season, and enters his age 28 season next year, with two years of control remaining. Burrows reached the Majors in his first full-season back from Tommy John, at the age of 25. He has six years remaining, and showed a lot of promise in his debut, which is probably why the Pirates landed three MLB-ready players for him alone.

The Pirates are still left with one of the best young rotations in the majors. They’re led by the best pitcher in the game in Paul Skenes. They have Bubba Chandler, who is the best pitching prospect in the game. Braxton Ashcraft gives another elite arm who could be a sleeper top of the rotation option in the long-term. Mitch Keller is one of the more reliable innings eaters in the Majors, which is a stability needed for such a young group.

Beyond those four, the depth has been depleted after the Oviedo/Burrows trades. The Pirates still have Hunter Barco and Thomas Harrington in Triple-A, plus Carmen Mlodzinski as a depth option out of the bullpen. Out of that trio, I like the potential of Barco the most.

This is still a rotation that could be one of the best in the league. What’s encouraging is that the Pirates have had success finding inexpensive veteran options under Cherington. If they added a value starter by the end of the offseason, the depth of Barco/Harrington/Mlodzinski would look fine.

Remaining Needs and Reducing Prospect Dependence

I don’t know if the Pirates have more moves up their sleeve. I’m far from being in the reporting mix these days.

What I can say is they still have needs on offense. Lowe is a great addition, but the Pirates had the second worse offense in the game last year. They weren’t Brandon Lowe away from even an average group.

I’ve seen Eugenio Suarez mentioned as a possibility for the team. He seems like he would be a great fit for their needs. A third baseman with ridiculous power, Suarez could easily add 30+ home runs and passable defense at the hot corner. The risk would be his cost in his age 35-36 seasons. The numbers I’ve seen projected have Suarez getting around 3/$45 M total for his age 34-36 seasons. He’d be a huge upgrade to the Pirates’ offense in 2026, but might be a financial risk in 2027 or 2028.

Adding Suarez and Lowe would drastically change the outlook for this offense. For one, that combo would add at least 50 home runs to the mix.

What I really like about the addition of Lowe (and why I think they need one more veteran like Suarez) is that it reduces the dependence on the prospects and young players.

The Pirates have one of the best hitting prospects in the game in Konnor Griffin. He hit .337/.418/.542 in a brief look at Double-A during his age 19 season. There has been talk that Griffin could arrive in Pittsburgh next year, during his age 20 season. His offensive potential — highlighted by 21 homers and 65 stolen bases in his first full minor league season — gives the Pirates a long-term position player to dream upon. I dare say he could be the offensive equivalent to Skenes.

Adding “Password” Garcia to the mix gives the Pirates another top 100 prospect who could help the offense next year.

The addition of Lowe reduces the need for the Pirates to rely on unproven players, which would reduce the pressure on Griffin and Garcia to carry the team right away. This lower pressure situation would increase the chances of those prospects having success in Pittsburgh. Adding someone like Suarez would only improve the path for the young prospects.

You only need to look at Oneil Cruz as an example of this trend. Cruz was one of the top prospects in the game before his debut in 2022. He’s also been looked upon as the potential savior of the offense in each of the last three seasons since his debut. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a young player.

If the Pirates added another hitter to Lowe, it would reduce the pressure on Cruz to be the only impact bat in the lineup. The same benefit could be extended to Henry Davis having less of a need to be one of few power options. If those two improve with less pressure to carry the offense, the trickle down effect helps Griffin/Garcia when they eventually join the ranks.

It’s fine to get excited about the potential of Griffin or the addition of Garcia. It’s a different level of hope when you’re looking at those young players to boost an average offense, versus being young saviors to one of the worst offenses in the league. The excitement shifts from desperate reliance to more realistic expectations that these two could be part of a true contending offense.

Adding someone like Suarez could have a domino effect that would reduce the pressure on Cruz and Davis, which would then reduce the pressure on the next wave of young prospects led by Griffin and Garcia.

When’s the Last Time You Heard It Like This?

I can’t remember a Pirates offseason where there was reason to be optimistic.

It definitely hasn’t happened during any of the Cherington years. The most active offseason was 2021, when they blew up the roster in a rebuild.

I wouldn’t want to compare this to the 2012-13 offseason, when the Pirates added Russell Martin, Francisco Liriano, and Mark Melancon. The Lowe trade alone doesn’t match the scale of that offseason. However, this move is on par with any of those moves. There have been very few offseason moves since that time which have given Pirates fans a reason for excitement so early in the winter.

At the very least, it’s good to see that the Pirates are actually serious about contending in 2026, and not just running cheap PR ploys.

They need one more bat to justify real excitement for 2026. For now, this is the most exciting offseason move the Pirates have made in a long time.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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This involves monitoring levels of support and resistance, along with price targets and momentum.

Let’s use Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) as an example, and I’ll add the disclaimer that this isn’t investment advice.

AMD has been surging in price over the last month.

On July 7th, the stock was priced at $134.80 per share. The price closed last Friday at $172.51, for a return of nearly 28% in just over a month. This surge in pricing has led some analysts to raise their price targets, with some predicting as high as $230. TipRanks shows an average price target of $180.73 when combining the targets of 37 Wall Street analysts.

Over the last two weeks, AMD has touched that average price target a few times. It hit $179.82 on July 29th, and $180.73 on July 31st. The price has also gone down in that timeframe, hitting a low of $160.62 on August 6th.

Will that $180.73 average target be the ceiling for AMD? Will it go higher toward the loftier projections of $230? Or, will it go down to the low-end price targets of $120?

I know what I think, but I’m not here to give you stock advice. This is a post about baseball.

Baseball prospects are given a scouting grade in the 20-80 scale, reflecting their future potential. I like to break this down as follows:

• 20 - Career Minor Leaguer

• 30 - Career Minor Leaguer who can make the upper levels (AA/AAA)

• 35 - Career Minor Leaguer who could get a cup of coffee in the Majors

• 40 - The minimum to stay in the Majors, with the upside of a bench player

• 45 - Long-term Major League potential, with the chance to start

• 50 - Major League starting potential, with average upside

• 55 - Major League starting potential, with above-average upside

• 60 - Major League All-Star potential

• 65 - Major League All-Star potential, with the chance to have elite years

• 70 - Elite Major League upside

• 80 - Hall of Famer

Most prospect projections don’t go beyond a 60-grade, with very few players being projected at 65 or 70. I think that’s fair. Setting the expectation for any individual player to be one of the best in the game, before they’ve even played in the Majors, is a lofty projection. Even if that player becomes an above-average starter, they’re going to underperform the original “price target”.

Bubba Chandler is a right-handed pitcher in the Pittsburgh Pirates’ system.

Chandler was drafted out of high school in July 2021, and given a signing bonus of $3 million. This was above the standard slot price for a third round pick, with Chandler being paid so much due to his perceived upside. He had a commitment to Clemson to play both baseball and football, but the belief at the time was if he got into a Major League Baseball organization and focused only on baseball, he could eventually be a top prospect.

That happened.

Chandler is currently graded a “60” by MLB Pipeline, which means he’s a potential MLB All-Star starting pitcher. I’m sure if I averaged the grades of every prospect evaluator, the “price target” for Chandler would be around 60. He’s the number two prospect in the Pirates’ system, with most outlets projecting a 2025 arrival in the Majors.

That hasn’t happened, yet.

Chandler started the 2025 season in Triple-A, and had good numbers the first two months of the season. He had a 2.03 ERA in 48.2 innings, with 69 strikeouts, 21 walks, and held opponents to a .541 OPS.

Keep in mind, this is largely against players whose current talent level resides in the 30-40 range of the scouting scale. Chandler would face a more difficult task going up against 50-60 level talent on any given night in the Majors. Thus, you can’t take the Triple-A numbers as an indication of what he would do in the Majors. They simply provide evidence to answer the question “Has Chandler’s present grade exceeded minor league levels?”

Over the last two months, Chandler has struggled. He has a 5.52 ERA in 44 innings since the start of June. His strikeout rate isn’t nearly as elite — still averaging a strikeout per inning, but down from the start of the season when he averaged over 1.5 strikeouts per inning. His walk rate has gone up, from 3.9 BB/9 the first two months of the year to 5.1 BB/9 over the last two months.

The “price target” for Chandler’s long-term grade is a 60, and like stocks, this doesn’t mean he’s going to wake up one day and be a 60. That target is just the ceiling projected for his upward momentum.

Baseball doesn’t have a great system for grading the current value of players. Even the 20-80 scale for long-term projections is flawed and archaic.

For Chandler to move up to the Majors, he would need to provide evidence that his current grade exceeds the grade of Triple-A players.

The first two months of the season suggested that Chandler was beyond the 30-40 current grade range of most Triple-A players.

The last two months suggest that Chandler is still within that 30-40 grade range.

Neither of these current grades change his “price target”, though they do impact the perception of how far away he is from hitting that targeted 60-upside.

If Chandler was a stock, his first two months suggested a current grade above 40, possibly into 45-50 range. The last two months would suggest he’s currently dipped into the 35-40 range.

But human beings are a bit more difficult to quantify.

Stocks are largely influenced by the market sentiment, which is determined by actual purchases.

If the market is “bullish” on a stock, with more people anticipating a price increase versus a price decrease, the price will be driven up by those bullish investors buying and holding the stock at a greater rate than the bearish investors selling. This is called support.

If the market is “bearish” on a stock, with more people anticipating the price to go down from a specific level, the price will tend to go down due to more sellers than buyers. This is called resistance.

Let’s go back to the example of AMD, looking at the trends over the last week.

After hitting a high point of $179.68 on August 5th, AMD dropped over the next few days. Within 12 hours on August 5th, the stock had dropped $17 in value, falling to $162.46 by 9 PM that evening.

During a volatile time like this, it’s difficult to establish true support and resistance ranges for a stock. AMD showed that it had strong resistance from that top price of $179.68, near its ~$180 average price target. If AMD was a baseball prospect and that price target represented 50-grade upside, the market essentially said “This is not a 50-grade prospect, yet.”

In the days to follow, AMD rebounded. After dipping below $160 the morning of August 6th, it went up above $166 by 10 PM that evening. The next day, it took a massive jump in price, surging above $170. This was the market saying “Wait, this also isn’t a 40-grade prospect.”

Over the last two days of the most recent trading week, the stock has appeared to stabilize between these two extremes. It reached a low of $171.07 on Thursday afternoon, and hit that low again at $171.15 on Friday afternoon. The high on Thursday was $173.35 at noon, and the stock went higher on Friday, hitting above $176 in the morning, before dropping back down and stabilizing in the $172-173 range.

Right now, the market is trying to figure out the current grade of AMD.

Predicting the current price of a stock is no easier than predicting the current grade of a baseball prospect. The stock price is going to either go up, down, or sideways. The movement is ultimately determined by how many bullish buyers and how many bearish sellers meet on the battle field on any given day.

This week, if there are more bullish investors who view $172.50 as a value, compared to bearish investors who project the price to go below that point, AMD’s stock price will go up. If the bearish investors outnumber the bullish investors, the stock price will go down.

AMD, like every stock, is at the mercy of support and resistance levels.

Baseball prospects don’t benefit from the same marketplace support and resistance.

This phenomena exists, but has no bearing on their current placement in the minors.

After Bubba Chandler put up good numbers during the first two months of the season, there was a lot of marketplace support among fans and analysts wanting to see him in the Majors. That support has faded over the last two months with Chandler’s struggles.

In the case of a baseball prospect, the market sentiment means very little. Only the organization that controls a player’s future can determine the true support and resistance.

The ultimate form of support by the Pirates would have been a promotion to the Majors after those first two months. This would reward Chandler’s performance, and give him a shot to face the potential resistance that a Major League lineup would provide.

Under this scenario, it’s possible that Chandler would fail against the resistance of 50-60 grade MLB starters, showing that his current grade was below 50. However, it would also give him the opportunity to prove that his current grade was 50 or higher, which is an opportunity he will never have in Triple-A.

Technically, the ultimate form of resistance would be demoting Chandler to Double-A. This is extremely unlikely, even with the struggles over the last two months. But let’s look at another form of resistance: Perceived resistance from the lack of a promotion.

If the Pirates don’t promote Chandler after his Triple-A success, which they didn’t, it could be perceived by the player as resistance. Chandler is at a ceiling that he can’t break through. The Pirates want him to be a 50+ grade player, but he has no chance to prove that he is at that level until the team promotes him to the Majors. Until that promotion, Chandler might believe he’s ready, but if the Pirates keep him in the minors, it’s them saying that his current grade isn’t as high as he believes.

The Pirates offer the ultimate support and resistance for their players, and if a player is not promoted after performing well, it could lead to a classic case of “doing too much” — where a player pushes their effort level to try and achieve a higher level of performance to change the minds of the decision makers. By pushing beyond what was leading to success, the player can break the approach which was leading to that success.

You could make an argument that the Pirates should have shown support to Chandler by promoting him after his first two months. The Pirates did show support to a different pitcher around this time, promoting Mike Burrows at the end of May.

Burrows currently has a 4.45 ERA in his first 62.2 innings in the Majors, which is below the MLB average ERA of 4.15. Burrows typically gets 45-50 “price target” grades, and his current MLB performance shows he’s already meeting the low-end of that target range — with some early indications that he could reach the high-end of this projected grade and become an long-tern MLB starter.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing that the Pirates gave a chance to Burrows when both he and Chandler were pitching well in Triple-A. They only had one rotation spot available. Burrows is three years older than Chandler, which means it’s more important to immediately test his current grade in the Majors. While fans want to see evidence that Chandler is progressing to his future 60-grade target, it’s not crucial that he provide that proof during his age-22 season.

If the theory goes that Chandler could struggle from a lack of support via a promotion after good results, that same theory would hold true for Burrows. And Chandler has more time in his career to recover from “resistance” than Burrows.

Chandler did tell the Post-Gazette in May that it was “frustrating” that he hadn’t been promoted after his first two months. He said that he was ready, but the Pirates clearly disagreed. The Post-Gazette was recently in Indianapolis, but Chandler wasn’t made available to media this time around.

I’m not going to go into the recent history of the Pirates making their top prospects unavailable to media when there could be a report that shines negative light on the organization.

Here’s what I know about Bubba Chandler.

Chandler is a player who sets high expectations upon himself, but he’s also got the ability to turn humble, willing to scale those expectations back to more realistic levels in the short-term. When things aren’t working, he regroups and gets back on track. He’s confident to a high degree, but unshakable by the lows.

I’ve had the opportunity to interview Chandler a few times during his pro career, including an extensive sit-down interview while he was pitching in High-A Greensboro in 2023. At the start of that season, Chandler set high expectations for himself. He wanted to be an All-Star in High-A and wanted to earn a promotion to Double-A.

By the start of July 2023, Chandler had a 6.79 ERA in 62.1 innings. He wasn’t an All-Star, and wasn’t in line for a promotion to the next level.

The Pirates gave him a 12-day break between starts. During that time, Chandler went home and sat on a pond fishing for a week, while mentally reviewing what went wrong. He set goals for the second half of the season. Those goals were less about high accolades, and more about his performance over the final two months of the season.

After his return, Chandler put up a 1.85 ERA in 43.2 innings in Greensboro. He was promoted to Double-A at the end of the season, where he made a debut with five shutout innings, allowing one hit and striking out eight.

I’ve since left the reporting scene, in part because I don’t want to deal with the psychological little boys who run the show like children at 115 Federal Street. If the Pirates can make Chandler unavailable to the Post-Gazette, then an independent reporter such as myself has no chance of cracking their propaganda wall.

Since leaving the scene, I’ve seen evidence that Chandler still has high expectations for himself. For example, after Paul Skenes was announced the 2025 Opening Day starter, Chandler sent him a text telling Skenes that Chandler would surpass him as the Opening Day starter in 2026.

Skenes might be the best pitcher in Pirates franchise history. He’s in the conversation as one of the best pitchers in the game today. Paul Skenes is the Nvidia of MLB pitchers. Chandler setting his expectations of being better than Skenes is lofty.

I personally wouldn’t want a pitcher as talented as Chandler to have any other mindset.

If Chandler held the belief that he would never be as good as Skenes, then inevitably he would never be as good as Skenes. Chandler might not end up better than Skenes, but by pushing for that personal ceiling, he’s got a great chance to reach that 60-grade target the industry projects for him.

A valid question is whether Chandler is pushing to be better than Skenes immediately.

While that would be amazing for the Pirates, it’s not necessary for Chandler’s long-term success. Skenes entered the Majors last year with one of the best performances for a rookie in MLB history. That earned him the Opening Day starter role in 2025. Chandler’s text to Skenes was likely a confident joke, with some belief and drive behind it. But Chandler’s success isn’t going to be measured by replicating the success of Skenes, nor is it going to be measured by having an immediate impact.

I have no concerns about Chandler, even with his recent struggles. He’s already shown that when he struggles, he will regroup and get back on track, pitching with results that reflect his talent level.

If he does rebound this year, it would be inexcusable for the Pirates to not give him a shot in the Majors, even for just a brief look to test his current grade against better talent.

There’s also the possibility that Chandler could benefit from the support of a promotion, without needing to show a rebound in the minors. He would just need to have the mindset that he doesn’t need to put up historical results to be successful.

Even if Chandler was promoted tomorrow and put up an ERA of 4.00 for the remainder of the season, that would confirm a current grade of 50+, with the chance for him to improve in the Majors next year.

But that would run into another issue with baseball prospects and market sentiment.

Just like a stock, a baseball prospect shouldn’t be expected to reach their price target overnight.

If you’re bullish on AMD, to the point of the loftiest 70-grade $230 upside, you aren’t looking for the stock to reach $230 in the next week, or even in the next month. You’re looking for a stable level of support, with gradual advances against resistance. If AMD maintained $172-173 support, then increased to a high of $180+ this week, while establishing a higher level of support around $177-178, that would be a positive step toward that eventual $230 ceiling.

Baseball prospects operate in a different system.

Chandler, for example, can’t show his true present grade until the Pirates promote him to the Majors. Even if he repeats his performance from the first two months of the season, it’s still a theory that his current grade is 50+ until he gets an opportunity to prove that grade in the Majors. Keeping Chandler in the minors is a level of resistance.

Stock price movement isn’t just about support and resistance, but momentum over time.

AMD was priced above $200 in March of 2024, and was around $170 in early October 2024. From there, the price dropped steadily, reaching a low below $80 in early April of this year. The momentum was steadily down for a year, and investors don’t easily forget that — especially if they bought at the high points and lost money during the fall.

Since the low point, AMD has been trending up, showing positive momentum to reverse the previous negative momentum. Each jump is typically preceded by a period that tests support and resistance.

• In May of this year, AMD jumped from around $102 to around $118 by the middle of the month. It remained in the $110-118 range from mid-May until about mid-June, when it jumped to $126-129, before soaring to $143.

• From there, it dipped back, testing support after such a big jump. For the first ten days of July, AMD was testing $134-136 support ranges, before eventually returning to that $143 range and breaking above, hitting $160 by July 17th.

• Once again, it dipped to test support, ultimately finding the bottom at around $155 on July 22nd. That was followed by a massive jump that took the stock up to around $180 on July 30th.

Last week’s drop can be seen as one of two things. It could be a continued trend of current momentum — with a temporary dip to test support levels, before blowing past that late-July resistance to a new high point this year. Or, it could be the mark of another downtrend like the stock saw last year from similar highs.

I know what I believe, but again, this isn’t investment advice, or an article about stock movement.

Baseball players operate in the same non-linear manner of improvement as a stock.

Going back to the example of Chandler, he’s had a two month dip in 2025 after an early surge at the start of the season.

Long-term, Chandler has been surging up in value ever since the end of that 2023 season. There were some dips along the way, but long-term he’s continued progressing toward his “price target” of a 60-grade upside. The momentum from Chandler is positive, even if the short-term movement is negative.

I will give investment advice in this case.

I think what we’re seeing from Chandler over the last two months is just a temporary dip. It’s not a reversal that will see him decline in long-term value, with a decline from his 60-grade projection. It’s just a momentary test of support, before he eventually breaks through resistance levels and continues his upward momentum toward above-average or All-Star potential.

Chandler, for me, is a Buy.

If you’re in a fantasy baseball league that deals with prospects, he’d currently be “Undervalued” compared to his long-term value. He might have been “Overbought” in those leagues earlier in the year with his great start to the season. I would buy the dip created by his recent struggles.

The Pirates don’t need to worry about this. They control Chandler’s rights, and they’ve held him rather than trading him. Fantasy baseball reflects the stock market with overall market sentiment driving a player’s value. Real baseball deals with long-term holdings.

The Pirates do need to worry about two things. One is the impact of the momentum and their decision on Chandler. The struggles from Chandler began after he wasn’t promoted. His comments to the Post-Gazette at the time suggest that he was negatively impacted by their decision. That doesn’t just go away.

There is also market sentiment factored in when a player reaches the Majors.

If Chandler reaches the Majors with lofty expectations, and he puts up just average numbers, there can be a drop in support by the fans, media, and analysts.

Oneil Cruz is the best example of this. Cruz hasn’t reached his lofty upside from when he was a prospect. The fan and media expectations on him were high, due to the fact that the Pirates built their team in a way where Cruz needed to reach his lofty upside for the team to contend.

Cruz has performed in a way that could be graded as a 50-55 current grade over the last two years. The problem is that fans want to see his 60-65+ “price target” that his prospect grades promised.

This inevitably has an impact on the player and the team. Fans, and even media, go to Twitter and express disappointment whenever Cruz isn’t performing like an elite MLB player. Media questions to Cruz and the team are based on the desire for him to reach his upside, rather than celebrating the level at which he’s currently performing.

Cruz is a human being, and could react negatively to the sentiment that his performance so far, while being the best on a team with bad overall position player results, is not enough. The Pirates are run by human beings, who could have their own reactions and plans impacted by this market sentiment.

If a prospect like Chandler was promoted to the Majors, it would represent a sign of support by the team. And that might ease the frustrations he had with the resistance from not being promoted. However, Chandler would then enter a field of play where the larger market sentiment plays a factor, with a more difficult form of resistance.

I wrote recently about how Mitch Keller was being highlighted as one of the worst pitchers in the game in 2022 after just 200 innings in the Majors. That was unfair, but it’s what happens when a team like Pittsburgh puts all of their fan hopes on unproven prospects. Since the 2022 season, Keller has been one of the better pitchers in the game, and one of the best innings eaters.

The odds that Chandler will also face adversity over his first 200 innings are higher than the odds that he will replicate what Skenes did in his rookie season. That early career volatility will subject Chandler to the market resistance the fans in Pittsburgh provide. Fans in every market expect every prospect to arrive with consistently great results similar to Skenes. That outcome is imperative for Pirates fans.

Chandler is getting a taste of that market resistance now, with fans and media monitoring every start of his struggles in Triple-A. The Pirates could offer him support with a promotion, but that would be the last big push of support they could offer, and he won’t be free from resistance in the Majors.

If Chandler was promoted to the Majors and struggled, just for a short period of time, the team support would turn to keeping him in the Majors through those struggles, as fans looking for immediate results would offer resistance by calling for him to be sent down to the minors.

And just like when AMD fell from previous highs last year, when Chandler eventually climbed his way back to the Majors under the above scenario, there would be fans who would be hesitant to buy in, after being previously burned by his first impression. This would cause resistance to persist.

Long-term, Chandler has shown positive momentum, and I believe that positive momentum will continue well into his MLB career.

The problem is that once he reaches the Majors, he’s going to be subjected to very short-term reactions, which mostly only offer bearish sentiment.

Fans turn to sports as an outlet for entertainment. They accept positive results as the standard, and quickly sell off negative results out of panic.

One week of good results can turn a fan into a WallStreetsBets poster proclaiming that a player is about to go to the moon.

One bad week of results can produce the same extreme reactive results, with fans shorting the player all the way down to the depths of their career.

And no one cares to think long-term, because sports are a short-term escape from the long-term grind of real life.

Chandler will always have my support, as he’s already ticked my scouting boxes as a player who will reach his “price target” over time.

The reality in Pittsburgh is that players typically only have 4-5 years with the Pirates before they become too expensive — regardless of performance. This increases the short-term demand for immediate results and “to the moon” fantasies.

The other reality is that this team and their lack of spending on established MLB players places a huge emphasis on prospects being the driving force to a competitive team. Like an investor only dealing in penny stocks, the Pirates force a higher demand from their prospects than a normal team’s portfolio would require.

Both of these realities, combined, provide a level of potential resistance for any Pirates prospect. They not only need to contend with the resistance of Major League talent for the first time in their careers, but they need to deal with the fan expectations in Pittsburgh to be better, faster, than prospects in any other market.

The Pirates have created an economic system that requires their prospects to be Advanced MLB Destroyers.

Fortunately, I think Bubba Chandler can live up to those demands.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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I started blogging about the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2009, and my site officially became Pirates Prospects in July 2010. My approach to that site was professional, with the intentions and hopes of turning it into a full-time job. At the time, I lived in an area of Virginia near Charlottesville, which didn’t provide many opportunities for sustainable employment — not considering the recession the country was in at the time.

The Pirates have a long history of giving free tickets to content creators and social media personalities, in order to maintain positive relations. They gave me two club level seats on 8/6/2010, and I used the opportunity to do a live report on my site from a Major League game.

I was in Pittsburgh a day earlier, and James McDonald was set to make his debut with the Pirates. Acquired a week earlier at the trade deadline, McDonald was one of my fantasy baseball sleepers at the time. He got on my radar for his performance out of the Los Angeles Dodgers bullpen in 2009. I’ve mostly followed individual players, regardless of their teams, since about 2006. Getting a chance to see McDonald live was special to me at the time.

McDonald had a great debut that night with the Pirates. He threw six shutout innings, allowing four hits, one walk, and struck out eight.

I’ve written about how I was not a Pirates fan growing up. I don’t have nightmares of the Sid Bream slide, nor do I have memories of the 1997 Freak Show team. I knew of the history of the franchise, but never really felt the pain and frustration of the losing streak.

That pain and frustration can be explained in many ways, and McDonald is a great example.

For the rest of the 2010 season, McDonald pitched at a level that the Pirates had rarely seen. He had a 3.52 ERA in 11 starts, with an 8.6 K/9 in 64 innings after the deadline. That included eight shutout innings on a September 13th start, which followed seven shutout innings on a September 7th start.

To put that performance in perspective, here were the qualified Pirates starters from 1993-2010 who put up a better ERA than McDonald:

1. Oliver Perez, 2004 - 2.98

2. Danny Darwin, 1996 - 3.02

3. Denny Neagle, 1996 - 3.05

4. Zane Smith, 1994 - 3.27

5. Kip Wells, 2003 - 3.28

6. Francisco Cordova, 1998 - 3.31

7. Denny Neagle, 1995 - 3.43

8. Todd Ritchie, 1999 - 3.49

9. Kip Wells, 2002 - 3.58

There were only 20 starters during that time span who put up an ERA better than 4.00, across 110+ innings. None of those seasons happened in 2010, although there was at least one starter each year from 2007-2009 who put up a 3.71-3.92 ERA.

McDonald had a small sample size, but he reflected a hope that seems archaic by today’s standards. Outside of two seasons by Kip Wells, and the one elite season from Oliver Perez, the Pirates hadn’t seen many starting pitching performances like McDonald since the 1990s. That’s especially true if you look at strikeouts from the same group of starters.

As a side note, it was the 2004 season from Perez that got me following the Pirates. Growing up an Orioles fan, I was jumping on my dorm room couch to celebrate the signing of Miguel Tejada ahead of the 2004 season. I even attended Orioles Fan Fest that year. It was the phenomenal season by Perez that led to many trips to PNC Park in the following years.

Perez had a 10.97 K/9 in 2004, putting up strikeout rates that were unprecedented for the Pirates. The next best Pirates starter from 1993-2010 in terms of strikeouts was Ian Snell, who had an 8.18 K/9 in 2006, with a 4.74 ERA.

By the time McDonald made his debut, the combination of high strikeouts and an ERA below 4.00 was uncommon in Pittsburgh. It was a reflection of not only the lack of hope stemming from those losing seasons, but a big reason for the years of losing.

What happened next was typically what happened with the Pirates.

In 2011 and 2012, McDonald put up a 4.21 ERA in 171 innings each season. His strikeout rate dipped to 7.5 K/9 in 2011 and 7.9 K/9 in 2012. He struggled across 29.2 innings in 2013, with a 7.6 K/9 and an elevated walk rate, and that marked the end of his Major League career — after being shut down with a right shoulder injury.

A New Pirates Generation of Pitching

The pitching situation was much different in Pittsburgh by 2013.

Their rotation included A.J. Burnett (3.30 ERA, 191 IP), Francisco Liriano (3.02 ERA, 161 IP), Charlie Morton (3.26 ERA, 116 IP), Jeff Locke (3.52 ERA, 166.1 IP), and a rookie Gerrit Cole (3.22 ERA, 117.1 IP). They also had brief moments of success from guys like Brandon Cumpton (2.05 ERA, 30.2 IP) and Jeanmar Gomez (3.35 ERA, 80.2 IP working mostly in relief). Wandy Rodriguez (3.59 ERA, 62.2 IP) was also acquired at the deadline to round out the rotation.

From 1993-2013, there were 85 pitchers who threw 110+ innings in a season for the Pirates. Four of the top nine ERAs during that span were from that 2013 club.

There were signs that things were improving on the pitching front, even before 2013. Out of those 85 pitchers mentioned above, 29 had an ERA under 4.00. Nine of those came in the 2011-13 seasons.

If we take this a step further, and expand out to 1993-2023, there were 123 pitchers with 110+ innings in a season. Out of that group, 42 had ERAs below 4.00. Over half of those seasons, 22 in total, came from 2011-2023. There was a dip after 2018, with Mitch Keller’s 2022 season being the only one since that qualified for the list with a 3.91 ERA.

Things have been much different over the last two seasons, and that’s fueled by Paul Skenes, who has put up numbers that are among the top 15 seasons in franchise history. Outside of Rich Gossage in 1977 and Ron Kline in 1968, you would need to go back to World War I or earlier to find a Pirates pitcher who has been better than Skenes in each of the last two seasons.

Keller, Luis Ortiz, and Bailey Falter have also put up ERAs below 4.00 in the last two seasons, showing an improvement over the 2018-23 dip in pitching performance.

Hope in the Age of McDonald

Going back to McDonald, the 3.52 ERA he put up in 64 innings in 2010 wasn’t even a small sample of a number one starter. There were 17 pitchers in the Majors that year with an ERA below 3.00, and 39 total who had 110+ innings and an ERA better than McDonald with the Pirates.

What McDonald represented was hope after years of hopelessness surrounding Pirates pitching.

The Pirates went years without a number one starter, and they didn’t even have a number two starter in those years. They barely had number three starters, who could put up average or better results. McDonald was the brief hope as someone who could lead the rotation, but he was a number three starter, at best, in his brief time with the Pirates.

Pirates fans had seen a lot of this during the losing streak. They would see a pitching prospect break into the Majors with a promising small sample of above-average numbers. This was never sustained, with those pitchers having brief runs of success before dipping to below-average numbers.

This repeated in many forms: Kip Wells, Snell, Paul Maholm, Zach Duke, and it even carried into the Neal Huntington years with Ross Ohlendorf and Jeff Karstens.

There was a good decade where Pirates fans were holding out hope that their rotation could be led by a pitcher whose best performance was along the lines of a number three starter in the game, with any struggles leading to their number one starter dipping to below-average results.

McDonald was just another case of a pitcher who stood out in Pittsburgh for simply not being below-average, only to immediately dip to average results, and see his career shortened by an injury.

By the 2013 season, all of that changed. For a brief period of time, at least.

The Analytics Revolution in Pittsburgh

One thing which stood out to me about that success from 2011-2018 was that it overlapped with the Pirates increasing their focus on analytics.

The Pirates hired Dan Fox in 2008, at a time when they lacked any approach to analytics. Fox was tasked with creating a computer database in 2008, then creating proprietary analytics for the Pirates starting in 2009.

In the middle of the 2012 season, the Pirates hired Mike Fitzgerald as a Quantitative Analyst, working under Fox. Fitzgerald had previously worked for ESPN, the Boston Celtics, and an emerging baseball data company called “TrackMan”.

The 2013 marked a shift for the Pirates, not just because it marked the end of their two decades of losing with a playoff appearance. The Pirates got back to winning by implementing radical defensive positioning, using analytics to place their defenders to where the opposing hitter was most likely to hit the ball. These defensive shifts weren’t exclusive to the Pirates, but they implemented them more than almost any other team that year.

Fitzgerald was a big part of that process, along with the analysis which found the offseason acquisitions which turned things around in 2013 — an undervalued Russell Martin, a reclamation project in Francisco Liriano, and a sleeper reliever in Mark Melancon.

After the 2016 season, Fitzgerald was hired away by the Arizona Diamondbacks to be the head of their Research and Development department. The pitching results for Arizona in 2017 and 2018 are their top two seasons over the last 15 years, which may have been due to Fitzgerald’s addition. Meanwhile, the Pirates began a slow and steady decline, as they struggled to replicate the process of finding value starters.

Major League Baseball changed around 2014-16, in large part due to the success that small market teams like the Pirates were having with their analytical approach. Teams with more financial resources began building their own analytics departments, while the Pirates began falling behind due to an inability to keep some of their smartest minds like Fitzgerald.

I touched on this in a recent article, noting how the Pirates went from a club which couldn’t compete financially on the field to a club which also couldn’t compete financially in the front office.

A lot has been written about the increase in spending by current General Manager Ben Cherington in the analytical department. Over the last few seasons, Cherington has made big hires to build up the R&D department of the Pirates. He hired Sarah Gelles from the Houston Astros in 2023 to build that department, and hired Kevin Tenenbaum this past offseason to oversee that department.

Time will tell whether Gelles and Tenenbaum have the same success as Fox and Fitzgerald did a decade earlier. My concern is that the Pirates were ahead of the trend with Fox/Fitzgerald, while they’re playing catch-up with Gelles/Tenenbaum.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing that Cherington is spending so much off the field, as opposed to on the field. The Pirates need to find a way to get back among the analytical leaders in baseball if they’re ever going to make the most of their minuscule budget. Even if owner Bob Nutting spends more on payroll, while sustaining the front office increases, the financial structure of Major League Baseball has the Pirates at a significant disadvantage.

Greater Expectations

The Pirates are a much different team than when James McDonald made his debut with the club 15 years ago today. They’re no longer a stranger to good pitching.

A big part of that for the current team is due to the lottery win that allowed them to draft Skenes in 2023.

The expectations are also higher, with Pittsburgh fans having experience watching good pitchers over the last decade. Pirates fans no longer have to pin their hopes on a number three starter leading their pitching staff.

A big question is whether they can regain the analytical edge they had during the last winning seasons.

To be objectively fair, the early results under Gelles/Tenenbaum haven’t come close to the immediate improved results under Fox/Fitzgerald. This might be due to the fact the Pirates have been surpassed by the rest of the league since Fitzgerald was hired away.

The challenge for the Pirates today isn’t just building an R&D department which can catch up to the rest of the league, but also finding a way to surpass the rest of the league. If they merely make up ground from the last decade, their low payroll will still prevent them from winning.

In a way, the Pirates are mirroring the sense of hopelessness they had in 2010. This time around, it’s not the hopeless feeling that they’ll never find good players. It’s more a feeling that they won’t be able to surround their good players with enough talent to win.

And I’m not sure that Major League Baseball’s economics make this possible for a team in Pittsburgh.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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Professional sports represent an evolving triangle of power.

The three points of this triangle are (A) the franchise, (B) the owner/front office, and (C) the fans.

Reporters stand in the middle of this dynamic like a centroid, trying to present balance between all three points.

And when there’s imbalance stemming from one of the points, it’s the job of the reporters to identify that imbalance and stand on the new center of balance.

Let’s dive deeper into this theory, using the Pittsburgh Pirates as an example.

Point A is the actual franchise.

The Pirates been in existence since 1887, in which time they have won five World Series titles, including two in the 1970s. The franchise exists to offer an entertaining outlet to their fans — most prominently the ones residing in Pittsburgh — from the stress of everyday life.

Point B is the owner and front office combo who manage the franchise.

The line between these first two points requires that the franchise is run in a way that maintains the Pirates existing in Pittsburgh. Bob Nutting, the owner of the Pirates, is a steward in a role that maintains a key point of balance in the triangle. His front office, including President Travis Williams and General Manager Ben Cherington, play important roles in that balance.

Point C is the fans.

It’s the collective power of the supporters who complete the triangle structure. The line between the fans and the franchise is what fuels the financial survival of the team. The line between the fans and ownership is what drives the trust in the franchise. Push the fans further away from the owner with a lack of trust, and you alter the line between the fans and the franchise, which then alters the midpoint of the triangle. And if the fans disappear, the triangle collapses.

As a long-time reporter and writer following the Pirates, I can tell you that it is frustrating trying to maintain that middle point of balance with this team.

The franchise itself is a static entity. The Pirates exist in Pittsburgh, and while the reputation of the team is nothing like it was in the 1970s, it’s still the point of this evolving triangle which changes the least.

The owner can change. The Pirates themselves have had nine different ownership entities. Bob Nutting is the fourth majority owner since the last World Series championship in 1979. The previous are Kevin McClatchy (1996-2007), Pittsburgh Associates (1986-1996), and a group led by John Galbreath (1946-1986).

The fans are a fluctuating mass that is easiest to represent through attendance. The Pirates are averaging 19,258 fans per game in 2025. Outside of the COVID-19 impacted seasons in 2020-22, the only seasons in PNC Park history which have averaged lower attendance were 2018 and 2019. All three were under the stewardship of Nutting.

From a reporter standpoint, you’re mostly dealing as a middleman between fans and decision makers. Reporters wouldn’t have a job if it wasn’t for the fans connecting with the team. Outside of the triangle analogy, if enough fans stop following the team, the budget for coverage of the team is reduced, which impacts the reporters in a negative manner. The job of reporters is to explain the decisions made by the decision makers to the fans.

I’m not going to focus today on that economical impact. Instead, I want to focus on the struggle to strike a balance in the middle of the triangle dynamic of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

There were many years of my career where I was labeled an apologist of the Pirates ownership and front office.

This wasn’t just the fans. There were radio hosts on 93.7 The Fan who went on the air and defamed me with the name “Tim Shilliams” in reaction to the balance I tried to strike with my coverage.

Part of the reason for this was because I gave the benefit of the doubt to the front office in the years leading up to the 2013-15 winning seasons. I felt and argued that the approach the Pirates were taking at that time — one of the first times in years they were actually focusing on spending and developing in the minors — was going to lead to a winner. I didn’t factor in the record-long losing streak at the time, and ultimately, I was correct for the optimism I shared.

Later, after the Pirates had won, I decided to briefly give them the benefit of the doubt that their moves would continue to produce a winner, opting to complain if the results of the 2016 season proved the fan angst to be correct.

A bigger part of the “apologist” label came from the support role that reporters still play in Pittsburgh today.

Reporters almost act as unofficial therapists for the fans.

It’s a mentally exhausting role. You’ve got millions of fans following a team with the purpose of finding a positive escape from life. When they can’t find that positive escape, the fans are left frustrated. They naturally vent those frustrations to the most accessible outlet. And in the triangle construct, the shortest and most accessible point to connect with is that middle point occupied by reporters.

When the Pirates make a trade that fans don’t like, and you’re a reporter who suddenly gets hammered with messages expressing frustration and negativity, it can wear on you.

Actual therapists have therapists they go to, in order to deal with the stress of being an outlet for people who use them as an outlet to unload problems in life. The media industry doesn’t pay enough for reporters to afford therapists, so reporters end up turning to social media to vent their frustrations that everyone else is venting their frustrations to them.

On Thursday, the Pirates traded David Bednar to the New York Yankees in a deal that has been evaluated by a lot of outlets as having an underwhelming return for the Pirates. Fans typically are underwhelmed by any return that sends an established player for hope in the future, and Pirates fans were instantly upset over this trade.

In this case, one of the reporters they unloaded their frustration upon was Jason Mackey of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. And Mackey responded to that frustration with frustration over the frustration. Follow along on a journey:

This first comment was a personal expression that Mackey liked one of the players the Pirates got from Bednar. Expressing any kind of positivity or hope in a situation where fans are upset about the trade in particular is going to lead to fans targeting you with their negativity on the trade. Mackey even showed balance by pointing out the valid reason for criticism of the deal, noting the failed acquisition history of the Pirates.

To be clear, I don’t think there is anything wrong with what Mackey said here, nor the balance he tried to strike. Clearly, others disagreed, taking issue with his personal opinion that he liked one of the players returned for Bednar.

The thing about being a reporter is that it’s not really like being a therapist. When you go to a therapist, you don’t yell at them and turn nasty about how a third party made you feel.

The dynamic that Mackey experienced is more of a town council member being yelled at by the members of the city to regulate their issues with the overall governmental order. When the Pirates make a trade, reporters like Mackey turn into Leslie Knope drawing the ire of Pawnee.

I’ll also add that Mackey displayed a challenge by all reporters to default to industry experts as sources of almost infallible knowledge. This tendency, while aligning with the objectivity a reporter needs to show, can make it difficult to then turn around and question those same experts.

The fans play an important role in adjusting the balance point of reporters, leading them to provide a view independent of industry experts, as Mackey then displayed in his next Tweet.

Mackey’s original reaction wasn’t factually accurate. Rafael Flores had an .874 and .826 OPS in Double-A, and has yet to post the same numbers in Triple-A like the original tweet implied. Reporters and humans, and humans make mistakes.

After enough fans pointed this out, in response to Mackey’s view that Flores was on the cusp of the Majors supported by the inaccurate numbers presented, he corrected those numbers to attempt to calm the fans.

In the end, Mackey provided a balance point on this trade, separate from his own opinion. The final tweet I’ll display addressed potential positives of the Bednar trade, while acknowledging reasons for skepticism and frustration from the fans. The following is why I respect Mackey as a reporter.

I have been exactly where Mackey was in that moment.

There are a lot of times when my past self didn’t handle it as well as he did, and where my response to the frustration expressed by fans was merely a response of frustration to the fans. For example:

If every version of Tim Williams were to meet one day in a Council of Kangs setting, the particular version of Tim Williams above would be made to understand why he was wrong.

Even if past me thought there was potential in the John Jaso signing on December 23, 2015, he was missing the overall point that fans were tired of being asked to put their hope in moves that didn’t instantly provide them with reassurance that the team they were following would offer a positive return on their emotional investment.

That was ten years ago. A lot can change in ten years. I find myself changing every other year.

But honestly, I don’t know if there have been many moves since that point which have given Pirates fans an instant reason to feel better that the team they follow has changed.

Every move made today still requires Pirates fans to rely upon hope that the owner and front office are making the right moves to justify the fans maintaining their place in the triangle.

When I began my sports writing career nearly 20 years ago, my first job was updating and analyzing daily simulations across all professional sports. Part of that job was waking up every morning and reading the news across every city, in order to make the latest depth chart updates to the simulation database.

I already had experience following Pittsburgh sports.

I was born in central Pennsylvania, and spent the first 12 years of my life in the Altoona area. I consider myself from Virginia, because that’s largely where I grew up. But I went to my fair share of Pittsburgh sporting events during those early years.

My father is from the Pittsburgh area, so I know first-hand that much of the communication when Pittsburgh families get together is centered around professional sports. The Pirates and other Pittsburgh sports teams serve an important cultural role in the way people communicate with each other.

During my early role in sports writing, something stood out to me about Pittsburgh, reaffirming what I already knew. The fans of Pittsburgh sports are among the most passionate in the country. That’s displayed by the fact that there are still fans who hold an emotional connection to the Pirates, despite decades of ineptitude. There’s a reason I started Pirates Prospects in 2009. I recognized a hungry market for sports news, which wasn’t being served any information on the minor league system — likely due to the fact that the Pirates hadn’t put much of a focus on drafting and development to that point.

One other thing stood out in my first job in sports writing — particularly one person. Every morning, I knew that I could rely upon Dejan Kovacevic to be one of the best reporters in the country at providing accuracy on the subject he covered.

It’s no secret that I’ve had differences with some of Kovacevic’s opinions over the years, nor is it secret that I’ve had issues with moves he has made to compete with my long-held position in this reporting industry focused on prospect coverage. But I respect the job he does, and I can compartmentalize my mind to not allow any differences of opinion or personal conflicts alter that professional respect.

Following the trade deadline, Kovacevic did not write a column, and stated his intention to reduce his coverage of the Pittsburgh Pirates. As one of the media members maintaining a balance point in the coverage of the Pirates, he has the role of identifying where the imbalance resides. In his reaction to the trade deadline, Kovacevic identified the owner and front office as the imbalance point.

This is an instance where I agree with Kovacevic. Fans are rightfully upset about the state of the franchise, and the role of media is not to default determine that fans have no right to plant themselves on their point in the triangle and demand change from the owner and front office.

The role of media is to determine which point is causing the imbalance, and use their position to influence the triangle from within back to a more healthy point of stability.

My opinion is that Pittsburgh media right now should be acknowledging the power of the fans, expressed through their frustration. The media should be using their powerful platforms to speak to the power the owner and front office have.

The owner and front office possess the power of action, while the fans hold the power of reaction.

I can tell you that it’s more comfortable telling the reactionary power to adjust than it is to use your power as a media member trying to adjust those with actionary power. One of those powers maintain a position of control, while the other is constantly in a state of chaos.

In the case of the reactionary power held by Pirates fans, there is an inordinate amount of chaos in which to react.

There was a time in my younger days where I found it easier to tell the reactionary power of the fans to adjust, rather than speaking to the actionary power of the front office about how they were wrong.

By early 2017, my position had changed.

Every year, Bob Nutting conducts an interview with credentialed members of the media during Spring Training. In 2017, I used my access in that interview to question Nutting in person about the spending methods the Pirates were implementing, and how those methods did not lead to winning in Major League Baseball.

The response was typical corporate speak, explaining that they believed their approach was right. I pushed back with examples to show that the recent World Series winners at the time were teams who decided to take the risk of spending money toward the on-field product when they had a window of opportunity. The collective puckering of anuses among the rest of the credentialed media in the room as I firmly held my position of balance in the center of the triangle was nearly audible.

Years later, the Pirates are still not spending to win.

If there’s any framework of a window to compete, it would exist with Paul Skenes.

One of the best young pitchers in the game, Skenes is likely to command a record-setting arbitration salary following the 2026 season. He will quickly reach a point where he becomes too expensive for the historically cheap Pirates to afford, even if they decide to spend more. Right now, he’s extremely affordable.

This is the time when the Pirates need to be pushing their chips toward the middle of the playing field, surrounding a league-minimum Skenes with the talent to win while he’s in Pittsburgh.

The fans know this. Skenes brought a renewed excitement to the fan base in 2024, which coincided with an increase in attendance over the 2023 season. The totals were short of the 2+ million fans the Pirates drew in 2012-16, but the 2024 season reversed a trend of declining attendance that began in 2016. Again, that doesn’t count the increase in 2023 over the post-COVID years.

What the Pirates did in response was lower their payroll heading into 2015. They didn’t add players who could help win with Skenes. And the result has been a decline in attendance this season, even with Skenes putting up historic numbers.

The Pirates had an opportunity to build upon the first real moment of excitement for their fan base, and they not only fumbled the ball, but kicked it back to their own goal line. No ground was recovered with the moves they made at the recent deadline.

If the Pirates are not going to spend to build an entertaining product on the field when they have one of the best young players in the game, then why would anyone have any hope for the future?

Konnor Griffin is rated by some outlets as the best prospect in baseball. Even if he lives up to that hype and potential, the Pirates are currently showing their fans with Skenes that they won’t spend to surround Griffin with the talent it would take to allow a team to win. And the reality is that by the time Griffin arrives, Skenes will be so expensive that he will either force the Pirates into unprecedented spending, or will be traded to shed his salary, while the Pirates ownership and front office tells the fans to put all of their hope in Griffin and the potential for value in the lower cost players they surround him with.

As the ownership continues this practice of focusing only on their own bottom line, the fans get pushed away. Eventually, the triangle will fall apart.

Nutting could just reconstruct the triangle elsewhere if that happens, moving the franchise to a different city and recruiting a different fan base to support his desire to maintain ownership of an MLB franchise in his family for generations.

Alternatively, Nutting could take on financial risk to reward remaining Pirates fans with a chance at a good product. This involves Nutting taking on the risk that his spending doesn’t work, he would be pushed out of the triangle with a forced sale, replaced with a different owner who maintains the construct in Pittsburgh.

Part of the reason reporters don’t push the owner to spend is the idea that it’s not their money being spent. It’s the idea that Bob Nutting has rights as an owner of a valuable asset to maintain his ownership of that asset above all else. Even if Nutting takes on enough debt to force a sale of the team, he would still have enough gains in franchise value to ensure that no one in his family for generations would ever need to be concerned with money.

So, what right does Nutting actually have as the owner of a franchise valued at over a billion dollars?

Is it the right to maintain his position as a billionaire, long-term, by controlling the asset known as the Pittsburgh Baseball Club?

Or, is his right the ability to ensure his family a healthy financial future? There is no possible way that Nutting can be stripped of this right, even if he sells due to a period of unprofitability.

Following a controversy earlier this season, in which the Pirates angered long-time fans by removing commemorative bricks that held memories and a special connection by those fans to the franchise, Nutting issued an apology. In that apology, he began by accurately describing his role as a stewardship of the franchise.

Bob Nutting is not a fixed point on this triangle. He’s just the person who is currently tasked with maintaining the structure from a single point. His stewardship has led to increasing destabilization of this structure by pushing fans away from the franchise.

It’s not the role of media to tell the fans that Nutting is a fixed point on the triangle, and that the only options of the fans is to maintain their own support or leave the triangle.

It’s the role of media to evaluate the stewardship of Nutting, determining whether he’s making the right moves to maintain structural stability.

I want to conclude today’s writing with an apologist approach.

In my mind, Bob Nutting is not a villain.

Travis Williams is not a villain.

Ben Cherington is not a villain.

None of the members of the Pittsburgh media are villains, even the lowly podcast pawns.

The angry fans aren’t even villains.

None of the above entities have total control, and thus it’s important to identify the chain of power.

The fans don’t have control over the team they support.

Media doesn’t have control over the decision makers, even if they have power to hold them accountable on behalf of the fans.

Cherington, in his role as General Manager, does not have the power to compete on an equal playing field with other General Managers.

In yesterday’s article, I touched on the fact that the Pirates are in a situation where they can’t financially compete in Major League Baseball — not only when it comes to spending on the field, but when it comes to spending on decision makers and technology to power those decisions.

Nutting himself isn’t even in a position to provide the financial support that would even the playing field for the Pirates. Even if he funded the Pirates for a single year to the point of personal bankruptcy, the Pirates would still be among the bottom-half of spenders in the game.

Major League Baseball has an economic structure which has made teams in markets like Pittsburgh gradually irrelevant, which is a big factor in the fans being pushed away.

There are small market owners who take on more risks than Nutting. There are small market GMs who have produced better results with similar financial restrictions as Cherington.

Even if a new owner took over the Pirates, and hired a better General Manager, the economics of the league would still have Pittsburgh at a disadvantage.

Major League Baseball is a power structure that would be difficult for any media to hold accountable.

Because of this power at the league level, there’s a level of hopelessness surrounding any owner of the Pirates, which trickles down to a level of hopelessness surrounding any General Manager of the team, which trickles all the way down to a sense of hopelessness from the fans.

My hope is that Major League Baseball changes for the better of the entire league during the 2026 Collective Bargaining Agreement, and that national reporters use their platforms to provide accountability toward the power structure of the league.

That power structure is controlled by the wealthiest teams in markets like New York and Los Angeles, who would need to give up a large portion of their revenue to ensure stability for the teams in markets like Pittsburgh.

The power structure is controlled by the highest paid players like Bryce Harper, who would need to take a salary cut in order to ensure that the majority of players in the league gets paid a marginally larger league minimum salary for the same sacrifice they put their bodies through.

The change would require that MLB doesn’t award dollars primarily on the basis of performance by the players, but more by the sacrifice every player makes when they put their bodies on the line in order to provide this source of entertainment to the fans.

A change would require that MLB doesn’t allow larger economic markets to use their market size as an inherent right to maintain a perpetual advantage in a game that is meant to represent competitiveness across a level playing field.

When you’re asking billionaires to give up money, it rarely goes well.

If it’s difficult to push Bob Nutting to spend more money on the quality of his product, then it’s going to be difficult for Steve Cohen to give up money for the quality of the overall league product.

Baseball players themselves are historically paid based on their worth, as determined by performance value. This dates back to the early days of free agency ushered in by Curt Flood and Catfish Hunter.

It would be difficult to convince someone like Harper that his performance is adequately financially valued while asking him to take a reduction in the salary that typically coincides with that value.

Major League Baseball has a difficult road ahead. The best way for things to improve for the Pittsburgh Pirates would be an overall restructuring of the league economics to allow for a baseball team in Pittsburgh to have the same competitive opportunities as the football and hockey teams in Pittsburgh.

The reality of the league economics provides some level of an excuse for Bob Nutting’s performance. And Nutting’s performance provides some level of excuse for Ben Cherington’s performance. Even the performance of Cherington provides some level of excuse for the poor performance of the players on the field.

It’s up to the media to determine the level of accountability for all involved, and to use their power to maintain balance.

Because the media is going to hear from the fans when they aren’t entertained by the product which is designed to offer entertainment in exchange for their hard-earned dollars.

And angry fans do not tolerate excuses.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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For the last decade and a half, I’ve been an expert on baseball and specifically the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The human mind is only designed to contain so much active information. As a full-time writer, my mind spent years in a job where I could actively recall information about a revolving door of nearly 200 minor league players and their history with the Pirates, along with the Major League roster in Pittsburgh, the payroll, the depth chart of the team, and the relevant history of the franchise.

That doesn’t leave a lot of room for real life. I have respect for any reporter who is going through the grind right now. They are committing their minds to an area of reality that most people turn to for an entertaining escape from real life — with the escape of most fans depending upon the intense knowledge of those reporters.

My perspective this year has been an attempt to view the game as a normal fan.

Every day, I wake up and go to “work” trading on the stock market.

On Wednesday morning, I woke up, spent a few hours closing out short-term positions, opened one long-term position, and spent a few more hours researching and opening one additional trade. Around 2 PM, I sat down and watched the financial news with Chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell explaining the reasoning for the Fed maintaining rates in their latest meeting.

Around the time I finished work for the day, I logged into X and saw that the Pirates had traded Ke’Bryan Hayes.

When I was a full-time sports writer, I would be on call nearly 24/7 during this time of year, waiting to report the news of the latest trade. People who were turning their attention away from their work lives would check out Pirates Prospects to get my instant analysis on the latest moves, along with the first bits of information gathered on the new players entering the system.

This will not be one of those updates.

I wrote this column on Wednesday night, but like dozens of columns I’ve written this year, I walked away from my computer without publishing. In this case, I decided I was going to wait until the trade deadline had passed to give a complete reaction.

Having said that, the David Bednar trade on Thursday did nothing to change the tone of this column, and only added to the pre-existing critique of what has been happening with the Pirates.

I’m mentioning this because most of this column will be centered around the Hayes trade, with mentions of other trades added in during my Thursday edits.

The Ke’Bryan Hayes Trade

While observing some of the analysis from Pirates reporters on the Hayes deal, and even the Bednar deal, I was reminded of why I used to be called an apologist by some fans.

As a reporter, you need to be objective. You can’t give your opinion on what the team should do, and instead, you base your view on what the team is actually doing. You can’t view yourself as a scout with a competing opinion, and instead need to rely on the scouting reports the industry provides.

It’s a difficult tightrope to walk, though there is value in this approach.

We all need people who get inside the minds of the decision makers and explain the thought process of any move from their perspective. When I was reporting, I would have rather been called an apologist for trying to accurately explain what the Pirates were intending to do, rather than taking a stance on what I thought they should have done. Granted, I also gave my opinions on their moves — both positive and negative — as I can compartmentalize my thought process across different viewpoints at the same time.

From the Hayes trade, what I’ve gathered from Pittsburgh reporters, and social media accounts meant to influence the public thinking, is the following:

• The Pirates felt the contract of Hayes was too much for his lack of hitting. Hayes is owed $7-8 M per year through the 2029 season, with a $12 M club option in 2030.

• Jared Triolo offers a great defensive alternative, even if his offense is the same or worse.

• There was speculation that the Pirates could target an offensive upgrade at third base this offseason with the savings from Hayes.

• The Pirates received A-ball infielder Sammy Stafura and MLB reliever Taylor Rogers. The former was the number nine prospect for the Reds, via MLB Pipeline. The Pirates flipped Rogers to the Cubs for outfield prospect Ivan Brethowr.

As someone who isn’t trying to be a prospect expert and educate you on every detail of this trade, I’m going to give you my opinions.

These opinions come from the perspective of someone who is trying to see the game as an entertainment source, from the limited information level of the average fan.

My disclaimer is that I’m not a fan of the Pirates. I have pulled for this team for two decades to create a great story by winning against the odds in MLB, but it’s very easy for me to ignore this team when it’s not my job to cover them.

At this point, I just feel bad for the fans of the team.

Scouting Ke’Bryan Hayes

I’m a fan of Ke’Bryan Hayes.

Hayes was drafted by the Pirates out of high school, and I interviewed him many times following his selection, and into his career in the Majors. I’ve always had a great deal of respect for his drive and work ethic, especially when battling adversity.

As a prep player, Hayes took it upon himself to create a mountain biking routine, which allowed him to get in better shape, leading to him becoming a first round draft prospect in 2015. My scouting view always looks for people who successfully implement a change to improve the pursuit of their goals. The players who can successfully change themselves with a goal of improvement are the players who make the Majors. It was never a question for me that Hayes would reach the Majors and excel when he did.

The value of Hayes is a touchy subject in Pittsburgh.

A Gold Glove winner in 2023, Hayes is one of the best defenders in the game. His defensive value this year ranks fifth overall among all positions, and he’s by far the best defensive third baseman. Hayes could receive his second Gold Glove this season, as no other third baseman is close to his defensive value.

Offensively, Hayes is one of the worst hitters in the game this year. While he ranks fifth defensively among 156 qualified players across all positions, he ranks last in that same group for his offensive value. His defensive value at third base is more than double the value of the second best defender, Ryan McMahon, but the better offense from McMahon gives him twice the overall value of Hayes.

One of the legitimate concerns from Hayes is a history of back issues, which cost him time and drained his numbers across the board in 2024. His power has dropped significantly since a breakout in 2023, and that power output is currently half of what it was when Pirates fans were hoping for more power in 2021-22.

So, I get the concern surrounding him.

Back issues are no joke, and only get worse as you get older. There are ways you can reverse the negative trend and deal with the pain, but that takes time and is not a guarantee. There is no guarantee that Hayes improves his offense from here, which means he’s likely a defensive specialist, an overall below-average starter, and if the defense ever slips like it did in 2024, he’s got negative value.

I would bet on Hayes, because he’s the type of person who will look for ways to improve, even with radical approaches to get his body in better shape.

Technically, Hayes did improve this year over last year, even if the improvement wasn’t shown in the stat sheet. The back issues hampered his defense in 2024, but he’s returned to being a Gold Glove third baseman. The overall offense is still among the worst in the game, but there are positive signs. His exit velocity, barrel rate, and hard hit rates are all up from last year, even if they’re all down from 2023.

If Hayes continues this recovery and improvement with the Reds — a team that has less of an emergent need for offense and more of a need for the defense Hayes provides (according to Reds reporters I saw reacting to the deal) — then this trade could haunt the Pirates for the rest of the decade. Not only is Hayes a Gold Glove third baseman, but he would be a tremendous value at $7-8 M per year if he starts hitting.

I’m going to point out that the Pirates, last year, added Isiah Kiner-Falefa at the trade deadline, giving him a starting role with a similar salary.

Kiner-Falefa plays a more valuable position, but is largely the same profile as Hayes. His offensive value is better, but his defensive value isn’t as good, ranking 31st among MLB shortstops this year. Hayes is more valuable than Kiner-Falefa, yet the Pirates took on the salary of one, while trying to rid themselves of the other contract.

The Pirates retained Kiner-Falefa through the deadline, despite his pending free agency and $7.5 million salary this season.

The Trade Return

Alright, so maybe I’m not the average fan.

Most fans aren’t default checking Baseball Savant for barrel rates when breaking down a deal. Some habits are hard to break.

What I’m not going to do is give you a detailed prospect report on Sammy Stafura. He was a second rounder in 2023, and is a 20-year-old shortstop in Low-A. That means he will likely be playing for the Bradenton Marauders this year, and if all goes well, he could arrive in the Majors by 2028-29.

My future outlook right now extends no further than options contracts on September 19th and October 17th. By the time Stafura arrives, if he arrives, I don’t even think Paul Skenes will be a member of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Ivan Brethowr, who the Pirates got by flipping the other part of the Hayes return, is a 22-year-old outfielder who was drafted in the seventh round last year, and who is hitting for a .710 OPS in High-A. He should go to the Greensboro Grasshoppers, and if he beats the odds, he’s another player who could arrive in Pittsburgh by the end of the decade.

The Pirates now have a defensive hole at third base for the remainder of the time they have Skenes. Their top pitching prospects in the minors will arrive without the help of Hayes at the hot corner. They could replace Hayes with Triolo, but the defense wouldn’t be as good and the offense would be similar, if not worse. The value Triolo has is that he’s less expensive. Like Kiner-Falefa, he’s more valuable as a utility player with good defense at multiple positions.

At best, the Pirates cut salary long-term, with the promise that they’ll actually focus on adding to the MLB roster with that money this offseason. And to my knowledge, they haven’t even said this will be the case. I’ve only seen Pirates reporters instantly speculating on that.

If you believe the Pirates are going to throw a switch and begin aggressively upgrading the Major League roster this offseason, while spending the money it would take to get an offensive upgrade at third base, then I would like to discuss an up-and-coming stock with you. It’s called Aerotyne International.

The Pirates, though, aren’t even Aerotyne.

The Pirates are not a cutting-edge baseball team in the Midwest, awaiting imminent payroll approval on the next generation of on-the-radar players that have both huge offensive and defensive applications.

They’re just a cheap baseball team in the Midwest, always selling you on prospects that are 3-4 years away, while promising that they’re six months away from spending money.

Build, Not Rebuild

When Ben Cherington was hired as the General Manager at the end of 2019, he inherited a team that was on the verge of a rebuild. His first move, a few months later, saw the trade of Starling Marte for Liover Peguero and Brennan Malone.

One of the things which always stood out to me was Cherington’s comment following the Marte trade that the Pirates were in a “build” and not a “rebuild”. His comments to Jason Mackey of the Post-Gazette in February 2020 make less sense over time.

“We’re not tearing something down to start over,” Cherington told the Post-Gazette. “We are simply taking a team that wasn’t good enough or wasn’t as good as we wanted to be last year, but has a group of players with a chance to be much better, and we’re trying to build on that.”

To make his point, Cherington brought up the Starling Marte trade, pointing out that it’s the only one he’s made to this point involving a major league player. He’s not wrong.

“If we had made four or five other trades involving more established major league players who were on last year’s team, then maybe I’d think about it differently,” Cherington said.

The Pirates didn’t have much of a chance to trade more than Marte. Cherington was hired late in the 2019-20 offseason. COVID-19 shut down the world a month after those comments from Mackey’s article, and the 2020 MLB season was shortened to 60 games. One of the highlights of that shortened season was the September debut of Ke’Bryan Hayes, which Hayes never replicated.

When Cherington took over, he inherited a minor league system that had Hayes on the verge of the Majors and Oneil Cruz in the upper levels. The 2019 season had also just seen the debuts of Bryan Reynolds and Mitch Keller.

The Pirates didn’t build upon that team. They didn’t add anyone of significance for the 2020 season, after immediately trading away their best player in Marte, which came before the above comments. I’ll get to what happened next, but I want to get back to that article from the Post-Gazette, with a credit to Mackey for being a conduit for Cherington, which allows us to go back and see the stated mindset at the time.

Cherington also came across as relatable and sympathetic whenever discussing how his aversion using the term “rebuilding” probably doesn’t sit well with fans.

“This is one where I can understand how honest, reasonable people might see it differently,” Cherington said. “But this is honestly how I see it. This is honestly how I feel. So it’s honestly how I’ve tried to answer the question.

“If I think about the word rebuild, what comes to my mind is a team that has been doing well that you are taking apart to then rebuild it, and you’re in the process of doing that. It feels more like where the Blue Jays were after 2016. We knew we were going to have to rebuild that roster. That’s what happened over the last couple years, and hopefully now they’re getting closer to being more competitive.”

Cherington joined Toronto’s front office in late 2016, and cited that team to Mackey as an example of a roster that qualified for the word “rebuild”. His explanation at the time was that the Pirates in 2020 weren’t coming off the success of Toronto in 2016, and thus weren’t in a similar “rebuild” situation. The problem with the statement is that Toronto didn’t actually rebuild immediately after 2016.

That 2016 Blue Jays team won 89 games and lost the ALCS. They were a contender at the deadline, as evident by the fact they traded promising up-and-coming pitcher Drew Hutchinson to the Pirates in exchange for Francisco Liriano, with the Pirates needing to send a few prospects to soften the blow of Liriano’s contract. I hope you can detect some sarcasm here.

Toronto didn’t exactly rebuild after 2016.

They did allow 33-year-old Edwin Encarnacion to walk as a free agent, but they retained 35-year-old Jose Bautista, 31-year-old Troy Tulowitzki, and 33-year-old Russell Martin each for at least one more season. Bautista was retained as a free agent. They signed 33-year-old Kendrys Morales as a free agent on November 18, 2016 to replace Encarnacion. Rebuilding teams don’t construct a roster of highly paid players in their 30s.

It’s more accurate to say that Toronto got worse after the 2016 season. They won 76 games in 2017, 73 in 2018, 67 in 2019, and returned to the playoffs by 2020.

The closest thing they had to a tear-down and rebuild was when they traded J.A. Happ, Seunghwan Oh, Roberto Osuna, John Axford, Aaron Loup, Josh Donaldson, Curtis Granderson, Aledmys Diaz, and Russell Martin between the trade deadline in 2018 and the start of the 2019 season.

Cherington took over the Pirates four years after their last playoff appearance, while trying to explain that the 2020 Pirates were in a build situation, compared to his misrepresentation of the timeline of the Blue Jays’ rebuild. Toronto might have been better off actually rebuilding following the 2016 season, but they waited two years after their last playoff appearance.

Going back to the Mackey article from 2020:

In Cherington’s mind, the parallel to draw there involves the Pirates’ three consecutive trips to the postseason from 2013-15. The players from those teams, aside from Gregory Polanco, are gone.

“I see a team that certainly had a good stretch from 2013-15, with largely a different cast of players at that point,” Cherington said. “If we look at 2019-20 and beyond, we’re not rebuilding something that was in place in 2019. We are just trying to keep building.

“A good chunk of players who were on the team last year will be on the team this year, and they really do have a chance to be part of that next winning team. We’re just trying to build toward that.”

Here are some of the players who the Pirates had when Cherington took over in late 2019, who he claimed to be building around — as players who had a chance to be part of the next winning team in Pittsburgh:

• Josh Bell - Traded on 12/24/2020 for Wil Crowe and Eddy Yean

• Joe Musgrove - Traded on 1/19/2021 for Hudson Head, David Bednar, Omar Cruz, and Endy Rodriguez

• Jameson Taillon - Traded on 1/24/2021 for Maikol Escotto, Roansy Contreras, Canaan Smith-Njigba, and Miguel Yajure

• Adam Frazier - Traded on 7/26/2021 for Michell Miliano, Tucupita Marcano, and Jack Suwinski

• Clay Holmes - Traded on 7/26/2021 for Diego Castillo and Hoy Park

• Richard Rodriguez - Traded on 7/30/2021 for Ricky DeVito and Bryse Wilson

• Jacob Stallings - Traded on 11/29/2021 for Connor Scott, Kyle Nicolas, and Zach Thompson

Less than a year after Cherington went into detail about how the 2020 Pirates were a team about to enter a build, with the potential to add to the existing roster, he began trading every valuable player away in classic rebuild fashion. That rebuild took nearly a full year, and was completed almost two years after Cherington was hired to get the Pirates back to winning.

The average fan might look at the names returned to the Pirates in those deals and realize that very few made any kind of impact in the majors.

The best of the bunch was Bednar, who was traded to the New York Yankees hours before Thursday’s deadline. I’ll get to that deal later.

Jack Suwinski had a few good seasons, but has spent most of the last two years struggling in Triple-A.

The only players from that group who might be able to help the Pirates going forward are Endy Rodriguez and Kyle Nicolas, who have both seen their values decline due to injuries.

Cherington’s “build” was horrible, to say the least.

Most of the players he traded away still have value in the Majors in 2025-26. The one player who actually had a chance to be part of the next winning team in Pittsburgh was Frazier, who was one of the team’s big free agent signings this past offseason, and has already been traded after a poor season as a utility player. The problem there was the Pirates tried to contend in 2025 with an aging Frazier playing off the bench as one of their big offseason additions.

By the standards of Cherington’s comments in 2020, the Pirates in 2025 can’t even be considered a rebuild situation, as too much time has passed since the last winning season in Pittsburgh.

We are now a decade removed from the last playoff team in Pittsburgh, with Cherington overseeing the team for the majority of that time. The Pirates have had nine losing seasons since 2015, and six have been under Cherington — assuming there’s no miracle turnaround this year.

By Cherington’s own standards set in 2020, the Pirates are arguably in better position right now for a “build” and not a rebuild. The key quote, repeated, from 2020:

“We are simply taking a team that wasn’t good enough or wasn’t as good as we wanted to be last year, but has a group of players with a chance to be much better, and we’re trying to build on that.”

Regardless of the word you want to use, the most accurate thing you can say about this deadline is that Cherington is rebuilding his own rebuild.

This time, he’s not trading players he inherited whose performance got the previous General Manager fired.

This time, he’s trading the prospects he inherited, along with the few good players he got from his last rebuild.

And this time, he’s got the chance to build around the best pitcher in the game, despite continuing to show no urgency to add to the Pirates in the two seasons that Skenes has been in the Majors.

The David Bednar Trade

I want to take a moment to point out something about the David Bednar deal with the Yankees.

The main return of the deal was catcher Rafael Flores, who turns 25 this offseason, and has played ten games in Triple-A. His offensive results in Double-A included an .841 OPS in 370 plate appearances this year, with 15 homers. MLB Pipeline ranks him as the number eight prospect in the Yankees system.

From what I’ve seen, the projected scouting upside isn’t great from Flores. He’s not a top 100 prospect, and it’s disappointing the Pirates couldn’t get that level of return for an elite closer. Flores has struggled in his limited run at Triple-A, and the scouting grades make him sound like he’s got less future value than Henry Davis or Joey Bart.

Flores wasn’t the only catcher in the deal.

The Pirates also added 19-year-old Edgleen Perez, who is hitting for a .604 OPS in Single-A this year, and was MLB Pipeline’s number 14 prospect in the Yankees system. He’s another addition to the 2025 Bradenton Marauders, with hopes that he can beat the odds that are stacked against every minor league player and arrive in the Majors one day. Just like Stafura in the Hayes return, if we see Perez, it won’t be until 2028-29 at the earliest.

Brian Sanchez is the third prospect in the deal, a 21-year-old outfielder who has an .811 OPS in Single-A, and wasn’t in MLB Pipeline’s Yankees top 30. Once again, the Bradenton Marauders get a player this year, and Pirates fans have another prospect to dream upon in hopes the team could win later this decade, after Skenes is gone.

I’m going to point out that Bednar’s value was somewhat limited, due to having only one year of control remaining beyond the 2025 season. The best player acquired from the first Cherington rebuild, Bednar’s legacy with the Pirates was largely being a hometown hero closer across four losing seasons.

The Pirates couldn’t trade him in 2023 to maximize his value, similar to what the Athletics did at this deadline with Mason Miller, because the Pirates were still in the process of selling hope that their first rebuild was heading in the right direction.

What I wanted to point out from this trade is the similarity to that first rebuild: The focus on catchers.

With the first overall pick in the 2021 MLB draft, the Pirates selected Henry Davis as a potential franchise catcher.

Davis was an under-slot pick, which allowed the Pirates to sign Bubba Chandler and other prep players. I would argue they could have had Chandler if they drafted prep shortstop Jordan Lawlar, who was MLB Pipeline’s number 11 prospect in baseball heading into this season, and who is eight games into his MLB career in 2025.

The Pirates don’t have any elite hitting prospects on the doorstep to help the big league club, which is a negative result from their attempts to improve the development system. The first rebuild might have looked different if they had taken Lawlar and had one of the game’s top prospects set to arrive right around now. Instead, they went for Davis, who is one year older than Flores, as the centerpiece of their future winning plans.

Months before drafting Davis, the Pirates added Endy Rodriguez in a trade for one of their most valuable MLB pieces, Joe Musgrove, which is the same deal that brought Bednar. The Pirates had Musgrove to trade, and they had the first overall pick. They used that value to load up on catching prospects.

Now, they’re trading Bednar for multiple catching prospects, because the first group hasn’t worked out.

And if Cherington’s investments in catchers with power, or first baseman Spencer Horwitz, had worked out, the team might not have urgently needed offensive production from their defensive gem of a third baseman.

The worst part about Cherington rebuilding his own rebuild is that he’s rebuilding it in the exact same way the first one was built.

Why will this one turn out any different?

Other Trades and Acts of Complacency

Just before the deadline, the Pirates traded left-handed starter Bailey Falter to the Kansas City Royals. The return for Falter, who had three years of control remaining, was two prospects who weren’t in MLB Pipeline’s top 30 for the Royals.

Immediately after the trade, Noah Hiles of the Post-Gazette reported that a Pirates team source told him Falter was a non-tender candidate this offseason.

Falter was one of the best additions made by Cherington during his rebuild. The Pirates dealt infielder Rodolfo Castro to get Falter at the 2023 deadline. Over the last two seasons, Falter has combined for a 4.12 ERA in 255.2 innings in the Pirates’ rotation. He still has three years of team control remaining, and will be due a raise over his $2.2 million salary this year.

Castro was the type of prospect the Pirates typically pin their hopes on. With average upside at best, a more likely upside of a bench player, and the most likely outcome being Triple-A depth, the fact that the Pirates got a starter who could post league-average numbers for Castro was a clear win.

The two players in return for Falter are first baseman Callan Moss and left-handed pitcher Evan Sisk. Moss is a 21-year-old in High-A, with a .790 OPS and seven homers. He will likely report to the Greensboro Grasshoppers. Sisk is 28-years-old, with 5.1 innings in the Majors and horrible control. He will go to the Indianapolis Indians.

Best case, the Pirates fix the control of Sisk and repeat this process to get a cheap Major League lefty, while adding another name to the A-ball mix for 2028 and beyond. These seem to be the themes — saving money and loading up on long-shot lottery tickets for the future.

What is surprising is the Pirates didn’t trade three players on expiring contracts. Tommy Pham, Kiner-Falefa, and Andrew Heaney all remained with the team through the deadline. They also retained Dennis Santana, who will be arbitration eligible for one more season. If the Pirates tender him a contract, Santana will be due a raise over his $1.4 million salary this year.

That group of players combines to make $16.8 million this year. If the Pirates would have just salary dumped all of them for a live body in the lower levels, they could have saved enough money for nearly a full year of Hayes. Or, at the least, they would have had more than enough to cover any raise for Falter.

A Rebuild That Makes The Pennsylvania Turnpike Construction Look Efficient

What is the hope for the Pirates?

Is it that Cherington might get a better return in his rebuild trades this time around? That might help in 2028.

Is it that after six seasons, Cherington will actually oversee an offseason which brings in quality players that show the team is making a serious effort to contend, rather than only adding bench players and value starters making $5 million or less?

Is it that after six years of picking in the top ten of the MLB draft, the Pirates will start to get more than an average second baseman and a backup catcher? I’m leaving Skenes out of this, as he was a lottery gift for the Pirates, and they are on record as saying they didn’t decide on that pick until 20 minutes before they selected first overall.

One of the few things you can say to hold hope from the last rebuild is that Liover Peguero — the main return from Cherington’s first trade, when he dealt the most valuable player from the 2019 Pirates roster — is only 24 years old and shouldn’t be written off just yet.

Maybe there’s some hope that the Pirates are two games under .500 with Don Kelly as their manager, after Cherington retained Derek Shelton through three last place finishes, two fourth place finishes, two 100-loss seasons, and a 12-26 start to the current season.

That only shows a continuation of the tendency for inaction from Cherington.

He started his tenure by delaying an obviously needed rebuild, finishing that process two years after he was hired. And he went out of his way to explain why the Pirates didn’t need to be immediately rebuilt, without doing anything to build upon that inherited roster.

He’s done nothing over the last two years to add to a team that now has one of the best young pitchers in the game.

Cherington loaded up on catching prospects in 2021, and is now loading up on catching prospects again in 2025 by trading the only positive value player he received in those 2021 trades.

He waited four years and two first overall picks before replacing the amateur scouting director who oversaw the draft.

He waited five years and tens of millions of dollars spent on the international scene before overhauling that scouting and development process which was producing zero results in the years before he arrived.

So if you’re holding out hope for Konnor Griffin — who is the top prospect in the game according to MLB Pipeline, and who was the first pick under the new scouting director — you’d have to ask why that scouting change wasn’t made sooner. And the reality is that Griffin is 19-years-old and in High-A, which means he won’t arrive in the Majors until 2027-2028 at the earliest.

If you’re holding out hope for Griffin, you’re admitting that the Pirates still have years to go before they might return to winning. And I honestly don’t think it’s fair to Griffin to put the team’s hopes of winning in the future on his young shoulders.

Research and Development

The one area where Cherington has made significant additions to the Pirates has been in the analytics department.

In a recent column at Pittsburgh Baseball Now, John Perrotto reported that Pirates owner Bob Nutting authorized $20 million in additional funds this year, which Cherington spent on analytics staff and technology, rather than players. This is not the first report of Cherington boosting the analytics department with his funds.

I wrote a thread about this topic on X last weekend, and you should read through that for my thoughts on Cherington’s choice of how to spend his budget.

Some of the biggest offseason moves the Pirates have made the last few years have been to the analytics and research and development teams. During the 2023-24 offseason, they hired Sarah Gelles from the Houston Astros as Assistant General Manager, tasked with creating an R&D department for the Pirates.

This past offseason, the Pirates hired Kevin Tenenbaum to oversee that department. Noah Hiles wrote about this expansion earlier this year in the Post-Gazette. They also hired Mike Voltmer from the Los Angeles Dodgers as the Vice President of Pro Evaluation and Strategy.

It’s difficult to qualify the impact these roles can have, but it’s easy to see when there’s been no positive impact.

For example, this is a team that signed Tommy Pham as their big free agent over the offseason, and it took them two months of watching him struggle to realize he couldn’t even see. The Pirates clearly aren’t leading a revolution in finding and unlocking value.

Most of what Gelles was hired to do was to build something other teams already had. She’s repeating with the Pirates what she helped build in Houston and what she worked on with Baltimore in the last decade.

Way back in 2013-15, the Pirates were competitive in large part due to their ability to find value catchers. They added Russell Martin and Francisco Cervelli, leading their last winning efforts. This was at a time when Mike Fitzgerald led a small analytics approach.

Fitzgerald was hired away by the Arizona Diamondbacks after the 2016 season, and the Pirates have since struggled to find value at the Major League level. Cherington’s additions are replacing what the Pirates once lost, but he’s largely catching up to what teams were doing when the Pirates lost Fitzgerald, rather than creating something revolutionary.

It’s possible the Pirates are creating something revolutionary, and we just haven’t seen the results yet. You could pin your hopes on the idea that the players they just added are a product of this expanded analytics department. However, this requires a massive benefit of the doubt, with no early results to back it up, and delaying hope for several years.

Trade Deadline

I have to admit, I’m not very good at trading on the stock market.

Part of it is that I don’t have the capital to be successful. At the end of May, I identified an option for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) stock. The option in particular was a $110 Call for August 15th. What this means is that I was predicting the stock price of AMD (around $110 at the time) to go up in price by August 15th. Right now, AMD is trading at $176.31, which would make that option worth over $6600. It was priced around $1000 at the time, but I didn’t have $1000 to put into an individual stock pick. I spent a career writing about the Pirates prospects.

I felt like the Pittsburgh Pirates. No funds to make the obvious good additions.

I have made some money, including a few lower cost AMD options — the equivalent of a $5 million free agent. The month of July is my third month trading, and the first month I’ve shown a positive return. However, it’s not enough to be a career. I’m not a playoff contender, so to speak. And it’s more stress than baseball writing. Even covering the Pirates.

This process, aside from giving me a new perspective from baseball reporting, has also given me more sympathy for the job that Ben Cherington holds, or that any General Manager would have in Pittsburgh. With the limited budget in Pittsburgh — part of that due to Bob Nutting’s risk tolerance and a bigger part due to MLB’s economic structure — I don’t think any General Manager could have success.

Having said that, part of what gave me hope about Cherington in 2019 was that he was an experienced General Manager. There wouldn’t necessarily be a learning curve that would lead to the need for an extended rebuild with risk of the team losing in the year 2025. If the Pirates were traded in options contracts, I would have predicted in 2019 that they would have been playoff contenders by 2025.

The job that Cherington has done has been disappointing by any standards.

His focus on building up the analytics staff makes sense, as MLB teams had been doing this before he was hired by the Pirates. There’s legitimate criticism about Nutting’s spending, but I question whether Nutting can possibly spend enough to compete with the spending of other MLB teams in the front office, along with getting the Pirates out of the bottom-five in MLB payroll.

Major League Baseball has some massive issues that will need to be resolved in the 2026 Collective Bargaining Agreement in order for baseball in Pittsburgh to survive.

Yet, even with that reality, there has been no sign of improvement from Cherington over his six seasons. Even a rookie General Manager learning on the job would be expected to show improvements by this point.

The minor league system is not producing, with even the results from the high valued draft picks of Cherington’s rebuild not working out at a standard rate.

Aside from Aroldis Chapman’s one year, $10.5 million deal, no addition in six years to the Major League team has moved the needle toward contending, without hoping for a massive surprise from a value free agent. Cherington hasn’t even signed an external player to a multi-year deal. It is possible that no one with talent wants to play in Pittsburgh.

There are questions about asset management. Cherington just retained three players who are on expiring contracts, in a losing season that started with the Pirates claiming they lost money in 2024. They did the same thing with Chapman, retaining his salary and failing to get anything in return from his value at last year’s trade deadline. For a team that followed up by claiming they lost money, they had an easy solution this time last year to save some dollars and add hope for the future.

Almost none of the trades made by Cherington have added any tangible future value, and the ones that worked out ended up with declining value in the long run. It was a win to get David Bednar in the Musgrove deal, but Bednar has now been traded for a return led by a catcher who projects to be a below-average starter at best. The addition of Bailey Falter was a shrewd move, but he was flipped for two lottery tickets when it came time to pay him more than $2 million.

The massive amount of spending on baseball development staff, while catching up with the rest of the league, has yet to produce a single player who gives evidence that the spending is bringing in any returns.

Worst of all, there’s been a trend of inaction in making improvements. As an experienced General Manager, with experience in another contending organization’s front office, Cherington should have known what this team needed to change within the first year.

It took two years to rebuild the team, and 4-5 years to rebuild the amateur scouting departments that are essential to small market success. Cherington didn’t even begin adding key pieces to his analytics and R&D initiative until four years into the job.

I don’t want to put all of this focus on Cherington, because Nutting is ultimately the guy in charge. The fact that Cherington was allowed to oversee another draft and another trade deadline, with no signs of improvement in six seasons, is a testament that the owner of the Pirates either doesn’t know what he’s overseeing, or doesn’t care about the on-field results.

The Pirates are a team with a dated organizational structure that has a Team President on the business side with more power than Cherington. The focus of president Travis Williams has been to upgrade the marketing department, while constantly emphasizing that fans really care more about having a good experience at PNC Park, with the insistence that this experience doesn’t include watching a winning team.

Currently, the Pirates are on pace for one of their lowest attendance totals at PNC Park, which no longer benefits from being one of the best new parks in the game, like it did when the Pirates were in the midst of a record losing streak in the early-aughts.

Fans turn to the Pirates for entertainment. The cost of living in America has gone up exponentially over the last five years, to the point that food costs are 25% higher and housing prices are out of control in most cities. If people do have extra money for entertainment, they’re looking for an escape. What the Pirates emphasize as their priority for visitors to PNC Park is basic customer service and business practices. The Pirates are expecting their customers to act like they’re going above and beyond by offering concession products customers might want to buy, and line management that doesn’t drag them away from the game for multiple innings.

My self-created job of writing about the prospects in the Pittsburgh Pirates’ organization is probably one of the most recession-proof jobs in the game, in theory. The Pirates are always going to be a team that relies on their minor league system, and selling hope for the future. If that future never arrives, fans become bitter. It should say something that I’ve opted for the stress of the stock markets over writing about this team daily.

Years ago, Pirates fans began giving up on this team. The attendance at PNC Park dropped below 1.5 million in 2018, which was the same year that I realized I could no longer afford to pay contributors to cover the minor leagues in every city, as Pirates fans were gradually giving up on the team by cancelling spending on any related product.

Last year, the team got a boost above 1.7 million, which might be due to the fact that fans could go to the park and watch one of the best young players in the game. In year two of Paul Skenes, the attendance figures have plummeted back to being on pace for below 1.5 million fans. The Pirates aren’t surrounding Skenes with anyone who would make the team competitive, and spending a few hundred dollars to eat hot dogs in a 25-year-old ballpark while being surrounded by boos directed at a losing team is not an enjoyable experience.

The most successful approach the Pirates have had to bring in fans this year has revolved around bobblehead giveaways with FOMO marketing techniques.

America is at a point right now where a lot of families are relying on credit to an alarming extent in order to deal with the rapidly rising cost of living. Why would people go into debt to support the Pirates when their owner staunchly refuses to take on a single penny of debt to provide an on-field product that would entertain the fans?

I feel bad for Cherington, even if I don’t think he’s doing a good job. Being the General Manager of the Pirates is probably the most challenging GM role in the entire league. If he’s replaced as a scapegoat to direct attention away from Nutting and Williams, I’ll feel bad for the replacement, while hoping for better results and more of an obvious and urgent effort to build a winner.

Ultimately, I feel bad for Pirates fans.

You turn to this team for an escape at the end of a day working for your survival. That escape is not meant to induce rage, nor is it meant to be centered around hoping for a better future three years from now which might be just as disappointing as the last ten times you were told that the future looks bright.

Pirates fans want to experience the joy and excitement of watching a winning team. They want to recapture that magic from the 2013 Wild Card Game, where the city unified to unwind and unleash their energy in support of a winning team — while being rewarded with euphoria and excitement.

That was 12 years ago.

Since that Wild Card Game, there have been very few moments where Pirates fans could pay to visit PNC Park and experience a good time. At best, they get to hold a toy that they were handed as they walked through the gates to watch their team lose.

That’s not just a reflection of Cherington’s performance.

That’s on Travis Williams for patronizing and borderline infantilizing Pirates fans with a gaslit version of what every fan really wants.

And ultimately, it’s on Bob Nutting for caring more about maintaining ownership of the team in his family for as long as possible, without considering the long legacy of fan dissatisfaction and abandonment resulting from his stewardship.

There’s a reason I’ve been quiet this year: Perspective.

My perspective is that Pirates fans deserve better.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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The last one was on July 7th, which I started on July 5th and worked on throughout the weekend.

Most of these drafts are at least 2,000 words, without a conclusion, and cover my observations about the Pittsburgh Pirates this season. A lot of them are geared toward the front office.

Today, I thought I would provide some rankings of my favorite unfinished drafts.

1. Untitled - There are nine of these, out of my 20 drafts, including the post I was working on from last week. The most recent untitled post discussed a lot of topics, including how crazy it is that Ben Cherington began a rebuild by inheriting Mitch Keller, extended Keller as part of the plan to contend, and now could be starting another rebuild by trading away Keller.

2. Social Media Reality - Early in the season, Paul Skenes walked a few people, and the panic and criticism on Twitter — mostly from Pittsburgh radio hosts — made me think that Skenes had an ERA over 4.00. He ranked as one of the best pitchers at the time, and has only gotten better. I’ve only been following the Pirates on social media, as part of an experiment this year to track what fans get from the traditional Pittsburgh media. The panic factory that is Pittsburgh sports radio is intolerable. Someone needs to medicate those whining white boys.

3. Leaders - One of my pet peeves is the modern day concept of leadership. Most people pushing an idea of leadership end up pushing a concept of being a follower in a power position. Most people attempting to be leaders in the days of social media only want to be followed and influence people. Real leaders don’t act in a way that even considers followers, and they’re not trying to get other people to act like they do. Real leaders walk alone, and are called crazy by the follower crowd for the path they take. I wrote this draft around the time Derek Shelton was still manager. Up until that point, the Pirates and their players acted like the follower version of a leader. Every thing they did was with the attitude of winning social points from the crowd. The most encouraging thing I’ve seen under Don Kelly as manager has been a fire from the players, highlighted by Mitch Keller screaming “Fuck You” at an umpire after a costly call. I’ve always felt that Keller could be one of the best pitchers in the game — and he is on a statistical level this season. Part of that belief would require that he unleash a “fuck you” attitude on the mound more often. The followers who proclaim themselves leaders would tell you that you need to act a different way, but that’s why they are the blind leading the blind. Leaders pave their paths with “Fuck You”.

4. Live - At the beginning of June, I started writing about my concept of going Live. If I was a trusting person, I’d do a video podcast to make the writing and publishing part of this newsletter easier. Thus, it would live up to the traditional concept of Live. What I know to be true is that in the age of AI, all I would need to produce is a few episodes in order for anyone to make a copy of my voice and my persona. I have too many enemies in Pittsburgh media, and too much of that crowd lacks ethics. Thus, you only get my written words. Which, I suspect, has already been replicated by some in Pittsburgh’s media scene, in attempts to replace my writing about prospects.

5. Support and Resistance - This society puts athletes up on a pedestal, mostly due to their spot on the screens and their high salaries. Every single person requires some level of support and is fighting some level of resistance. One of the challenges in Pittsburgh is that their young athletes, who are in most need of support, end up facing resistance. This is brought on by the perpetual losing by the Major League team, and the fans and media members who throw any struggling player under the bus after a certain amount of at-bats or innings. The Major Leagues are about succeeding when there isn’t enough support, and in the face of too much resistance. It’s more difficult to be a Major Leaguer in Pittsburgh, as there is less support and more resistance.

6. Draft Rankings - Hey, that’s this one, which would make this unpublished draft number 21. Unless you’re reading this. Then, it’s my first post in months.

This year, my focus has been in two areas.

On a personal level, I’ve been learning and training for a new career on the stock market.

Had I done this back in 2013-14, I might be a millionaire right now. Especially since my number one long-term stock at the time was Netflix. However, I wouldn’t have been able to run Pirates Prospects in a way that allowed me to build confidence in my ability of expression.

Had I done this back in 2022-23, I might still be a millionaire right now. Instead, I was in the middle of my industry plant research, creating what would eventually be Bucs on Deck (I repeat myself about the research), and going through extensive therapy that allowed me to break away from being influenced by anyone’s opinions.

I started trading stock options in April, and like any new trader, I’ve been losing consistently at the outset. If I was a Pittsburgh sports athlete, radio hosts would take to Twitter with demands that I be sent down after most of my June trades.

My trading has improved in recent weeks. This past week was my first week with five green days. This came after I reworked my ranking system last week, along with my approach to buying and selling options.

I often think about all of the rankings I’ve done over the years in baseball. There’s little difference between ranking stocks and ranking prospects. In each case, you’re projecting out individual future results, then comparing those future results against each other. Rankings were one of my favorite things in baseball, even if there’s the discomfort of ranking human beings. There’s a reason I always preferred tiered rankings.

As for my baseball focus, I’ve been using this season to get a fresh perspective on following the game.

The MLB draft is tomorrow, but I couldn’t tell you who the Pirates might pick. I can’t even tell you who I’d rank number one in the draft. I only know that one of Matt Holliday’s children is in this draft. Beyond that, I’ve been both disgusted by the prospect industry, while also feeling free from ranking human beings like stocks.

My perspective this year has been one of an average fan. For the first time in years, I wake up excited to get to work, with my work being tracking the stock market all day. Every single day I have an updated list of the top ten options I’m considering. By the time 5 PM hits, I’m mentally exhausted. I take a few social media breaks during the day, spend some time outside, but mostly I attack my work in the same way I did all of those years with Pirates Prospects. There is no one who works harder or more obsessively than I do when I love what I’m doing.

I haven’t loved baseball in some time. My industry plant research actually began about six years ago. That was before the Pirates made a change to the current front office. I had reasons why I didn’t trust Pittsburgh’s media, and reasons why I didn’t trust the Pirates. The entire scene is toxic, from my standpoint, and I find myself healthier without it.

As an example to that, I can’t remember the last time I’ve used marijuana. I can’t remember the last time I’ve smoked tobacco. I haven’t been drinking alcohol the last few years, though when I was focused on baseball, I needed some external escape from my mind in order to pull me out of the dark place that Pirates baseball talk put me in.

Granted, I drink about six cans of Coca-Cola per day. I read a story about how Warren Buffett drinks five cans of Coke per day, including three before the markets open. I felt a sense of connection reading that article that I’d imagine sports fans feel when their favorite athlete talks about playing a video game they also enjoy playing. I’ve never aspired to be a professional athlete, and have never related to the career path, other than the relentless pursuit of being the best in a competitive field. I’ve always looked at big business figures in the way sports fans look at athletes.

I do enjoy watching sports as an escape. And my business focused mind has always enjoyed the game of baseball due to the fact that this game is the epitome of modern Capitalism. For years, even before starting Pirates Prospects, I would spend my free time studying the market inefficiencies of minor league development and free agent values. I used to post on the MLB.com Pirates message boards, where I could always find a good discussion about small market rebuilding theories. Many of the posters from two decades ago are still posting online today.

I remember what it was like to have a full-time job and spend my free time watching and discussing baseball. That reality hasn’t existed for nearly two decades since I became a sports writer.

This year, I’ve returned to sports as an escape. Knowing what it takes to run a full-time independent site like Pirates Prospects, and regaining the experience of dedicating only free time to sports, I’ve got one single observation: Some of these podcasters and bloggers are being paid with dark money to focus full-time on shaping the discussion surrounding the Pirates.

I’m not talking about the people who post periodically. I’m talking about the ones who do it on a schedule, who know every single thing that’s happening surrounding the Pirates, and who are always online to give their opinions about everything. My belief is there are plants on social media who aim to direct the discourse surrounding the team. Not in a way that is exclusively good or bad, but in a way that controls the framework of discussion for the average fan who is checking in with little knowledge after work.

I’ve actually muted all of the accounts who aren’t credentialed media. I’ve also muted the accounts who are pretending to do what I did on the independent level, while obviously receiving help that I never had, nor would have accepted.

Most of my observations are formed around what the traditional media discusses. It’s no less toxic. It’s no less corrupt. There are three beat writers covering this team who were roommates and Pirates fans when I was entering my second decade covering this team. They work for three different competing outlets. That’s the most improbable thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen the Pirates make the playoffs.

All of this is to say that every time I begin to write about this team, I feel the need to stop. It takes me to a dark place, because I know how fake this is. I wonder how many others can see that it’s fake. Worse, I wonder how many people are being fooled. As someone who was once fooled by all of this — including draining a Roth IRA and investing $30,000 of my own money at the outset to make Pirates Prospects the powerhouse site it eventually became — I can see how people would think any discussion surrounding the Pirates is real.

I am real.

I’ve acted in a way that followers (and those paid to influence the minds of fans) would label crazy, in order to highlight how real I am.

There’s no pursuit of followers here, though I do appreciate anyone who has followed along and supported my path. And while I could pursue being the only real figure in a fake industry, I’ve already dominated that goal. I can’t grow by continuously pursuing being the best baseball analyst in Pittsburgh media. I couldn’t even grow being one of the best minds inside the game of baseball.

This time of year is when I’d shine. This is when the draft takes place, the trade deadline shuffles the finances of this organization, and the business of baseball goes into full effect.

I am sorry if you are looking for actual draft rankings from me this year.

I am enjoying taking a break. The Pirates will draft who they will draft, and they’ll tell Baseball America to hype up that person, and Baseball America will do as they’re told because they’re trying to avoid closing, and the industry plants will complete the cycle by hyping up the same players with a perception of independence from the industry, and the fans will have a new hope to follow for the future. Then, that player will make his way to Pittsburgh, and if he’s not the second coming of Jesus Christ, he will be thrown under the bus by the fans and media who know that the Pirates are banking on young, inexperienced players to immediately become stars and lift the team into contending status.

I felt it was important in 2023 to make a stand that the Pirates couldn’t pass on Paul Skenes. He was a rare person who not only had the talent to win, but had the energy and drive to be the best. If they passed on him, it would be evidence that they didn’t care about winning, or didn’t know how to win. It potentially would have been evidence that Major League Baseball doesn’t even want a team in Pittsburgh to win.

Seeing how the Pirates have surrounded Skenes the last two years with zero offensive upgrades, I can’t say that this organization cares or knows how to win.

Some days, I feel like all of this is just a ruse, aimed at giving people in Pittsburgh something to direct their anger at while remaining in a low vibrational state — instead of providing something to inspire people to achieve difficult goals while raising the vibrations of the city.

As someone who has only followed the Pittsburgh media this year, there are some extremely low vibrations being broadcast out among every sport. And I can’t say those vibrations are a product of the current losing among city teams, because I’ve seen the same low vibrational energy when Pittsburgh has winning teams.

It’s toxic. To me, it’s toxic, as it drags me down from my normal vibrational levels.

The Pirates don’t match my personality as a team I could identify with and take inspiration from.

Any writing I could do would only attempt to bring them up to my level, by suggesting players who have higher vibrational energy, or suggesting moves that would increase the value of the talent base. My writing would only be a futile attempt to raise the vibrations, against an entire industry that hums like literal fucking hell.

I might dust off one of those drafts I’ve been working on, and highlight how ridiculous it is that this team is entering their second rebuild in six years under the same front office. I’d only be attempting to provide a better look at the team for the fans. But I truly do not care if the Pirates remain perpetual losers.

All I care about these days is the future of semiconductors.

This is not investment advice.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

“Ah, so check it out right?
I've tried every approach to living, I've tried it all
I haven't tried everything, but I've tried every approach
Sometimes you have to try everything to get the approach the same, but...
I tried it all, I bought a bunch of stuff and went: "eh, I don't like that"
I kinda came in and out that a couple of times
I thought I would shut myself off
I thought maybe that's cool
Maybe that's what you have to do to be a genius, is you have to be mad
So if you can get mad before the word genius
Then maybe you can make genius appear, right?
That doesn't work either
And I'm in a good place, I've paced myself pretty well
I'm thirty forty, I've seen some cool stuff
I made a lot of stuff happen for myself
I made a lot of stuff happen for myself, right
That's a really cool sentence when you're in your 20's
’I made it happen for myself, man’
But all that means
Is that I've just somehow or another found a way to synthesize love
Or synthesize soothing
Or... You can't get that
And what I'm saying is that I've messed with all the approaches
Except for one and it's gonna sound really corny but that's just love
That's just love
I've done everything in my life that I've want to do
Except just give and feel love for my living
And I don't mean like:
Roman-candle-firework-Hollywood-hot-pink-love
I mean like: I-got-your-back-love!
I don't need to hear I love you
You guys love me, I love you
We got that down
But some of the people who will tell you that they love you
Will be the same people who will be the last to just have your back
So, I'm gonna experiment with this love-thing
Giving love
Feeling love
I know it sounds really corny
But it's the last thing I got to check out before I check out
Take me in the solo one more time
Make it loud!
Thank you!”

-John Mayer

-Tim Williams

Song of the Day

Despite the potential for volatility with these sample sizes, there are performances across the minors to get excited about.

Today, I’m going to be highlighting one player at each level who has stood out to me early in the season, along with realistic expectations for their future development.

Major League Depth: Matt Gorski

In his very first at-bat during his Major League debut, Matt Gorski crushed a home run. The last Pirates prospect to make such a debut was Starling Marte.

Gorski is not Marte. In fact, it’s impossible to say what Gorski is or can be at this point.

Over the last three seasons, Gorski has accumulated 517 at-bats at the Triple-A level. That included a .257/.319/.522 line with 23 homers in 389 at-bats last season. This year, he began the season with a .300/.325/.529 line and three homers, before getting the call to join the Pirates.

Gorski is 27-years-old, so he’s in his theoretical prime. His approach at the plate is confident, often waiting later than most players to lock into a set position. The timing leg kick he follows with has been in place for a few years, and can generate some power. Combined with his shorter set time, Gorski is heavily dependent on timing to maximize a powerful swing against quicker reaction times. This has led to some swing-and-miss issues in the minors.

He might be a three-outcomes hitter, providing power off the MLB bench. How much power he hits for will determine whether Gorski can move into a more regular role. With the ability to play defense at all three outfield positions, along with an ability to play first base, Gorski provides flexible value off the bench.

The Pirates have shown that they are trusting of small sample sizes when it comes to fringe-MLB players they’ve added from the outside. Alexander Canario, for example, had 42 at-bats in the Majors across two seasons with the Cubs, producing promising enough results for the Pirates to take a shot on his 24-year-old potential.

Gorski doesn’t have the younger age to dream that he could develop into more as he gets older. He is what he is, right now. We don’t know what that really is until he gets the same opportunity with the Pirates that a player like Canario received with the Cubs.

I’m not forming any opinions on Gorski after four MLB at-bats. I do like that the Pirates are turning to some of their own internal options for depth. My hope is that Gorski gets an opportunity to show what he can do in the Majors.

The Next Big Prospect: Bubba Chandler

Down in Triple-A, Bubba Chandler is knocking on the door.

After five starts with the Indianapolis Indians, Chandler has a 1.33 ERA and a 27:6 K/BB in 20.1 innings. His velocity has been hitting triple-digits, throwing five 100+ MPH pitches in his most recent start.

That last start saw him throw five shutout innings, allowing one hit and striking out four. It was the first time this season Chandler has gone five complete innings, and the second time he’s pitched into the fifth inning. The minor league season starts later than the MLB season, and Chandler is just now getting fully stretched out.

Aside from the velocity from a fastball with plenty of movement, Chandler has also developed quality secondary stuff, led by a plus slider. He’s also developed a curveball and changeup which could both be above-average pitches.

The eventual adjustment to the Majors might not be as seamless as what the Pirates saw last year with Paul Skenes, but Chandler is a quick learner. He’s the top prospect arrival to watch for in Pittsburgh this year. By the end of the season, he will be a big factor in the Pirates having the most exciting young rotation in the game.

Sleeper in Altoona: Hunter Barco

I had the honor of talking with Hunter Barco last season for a feature in Baseball America. During that conversation, I knew that Barco was going to be a future Major Leaguer.

What I look for when making that projection is a certain balance of confidence. In the case of Barco, he didn’t have to rely on parroting the advice others had given him. He had full awareness of his own game, his strengths, his weaknesses, and a plan in place to counter the latter with new pitches. When he spoke, it was from his original thoughts about his abilities and chosen development plans. That combination of confidence in original expression, along with intention to improve, is the foundation of a Major League player.

The 2022 second rounder is now in Altoona, and he’s looking like the best pitching prospect in this system not named Bubba Chandler.

Barco has made four starts, and he’s showing what his mind can do against upper-level hitters when combined with his arsenal. He’s yet to allow a run in 17.2 innings, while striking out 22 and only walking four. Barco was recovering from Tommy John surgery at the start of his pro career, and only reached a career-high of 66 innings in a single-season last year. This year will likely be more about getting him stretched out across a full season, with his 6’ 4”, 235 pound frame capable of handling the starting routine.

As a left-hander myself, I’m partial to the genii from fellow lefties. Having said that, Barco has objectively shown enough in his limited innings, including the four starts in Altoona, that he’s become one of the top prospects to follow in this system.

His fifth start of the year took place today, in which he struck out eight across three scoreless frames, allowing just one hit.

Power in Greensboro: Javier Rivas

I’m going to avoid the plague of past prospect prognostication by ignoring that Javier Rivas is a six-foot-six shortstop who hits for power.

There has been a dream in baseball development over the last decade, and I’ve fallen trap to this dream, where any talented, athletic, large framed individual with power gets met with one possibility: What if he could be a power hitting shortstop in the Majors?

Rivas is a power hitter, with 12 homers last season in A-ball. Those home runs came with an extremely high strikeout rate, and a low average and on-base percentage. This year, Rivas has six home runs already, which are evenly split between the power-friendly home park in Greensboro and his time on the road.

What’s encouraging to me in his small sample of 76 plate appearances is that Rivas has cut his strikeout rate down to 22.4%, which is the first time he’s been in this range since rookie ball. His previous time in A-ball mixed the raw power from his big frame with a strikeout rate over 30%.

Rivas has spent most of his time at shortstop this season, with third base as his secondary position. His offensive start this season might spark dreams of a future left-side MLB infielder with power. For now, I’m only focusing on the offense from the 22-year-old from Venezuela.

If Rivas can maintain his offensive improvements this year, and learn to consistently tap into his large frame for power without the excess swing-and-miss, then he’ll have a chance to play anywhere on the field in the future, even if shortstop is too tall of an order. The offensive development is the only thing which matters at this stage. His defensive position can be solidified in the upper levels.

First Rounder Heating Up: Konnor Griffin

Konnor Griffin has homered two games in a row heading into Sunday, and four times since April 11th. Last year’s ninth overall pick, Griffin has a ton of tools to work with, showing power, speed, and the ability to play two premium positions.

Aside from the four homers in 70 at-bats, Griffin has shown his speed on the bases, stealing 11 bags this year. This comes after he stole 87 bases during his senior year of high school. He’s got the potential to play up the middle, with 11 games at shortstop and three games in center field.

Just like with Rivas above, I think the offense is all that matters at this point. There were some scouting concerns related to Griffin’s contact abilities, and he’s shown some issues early with strikeouts and a lower average/on-base. He’s also dealing with the same small sample as everyone else, and has shown some early micro improvements.

As an example of those improvements, Griffin’s first six games in Bradenton saw a 43% strikeout rate and a .191 average. Since that April 11th game, he’s lowered the strikeout rate to 22%, while raising the average to .265 and getting his on-base above .300. Griffin also has four multi-hit games during this 11-game stretch, and only three games without a hit.

Griffin isn’t going to arrive in the Majors for a few years. The speed of his arrival will depend on how quickly he can adjust to pro ball. These micro-adjustments are encouraging if they persist over the long-haul, possibly allowing a quicker path to the big leagues.

It’s good to see Griffin showing off some of the tools that got him drafted so high, while also showing quick adjustments in small samples. If you’re a long-term prospect follower, he’s one of the best in the system to watch this year.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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The small sample sizes, and the need to rely on first impressions, leaves every form of analysis dependent on personal projections. A lot of people in Pittsburgh project negativity.

I’m a person who looks for the positives, even in the worst situations. Any writing you’re going to get from me would be reassurance that the bad might get better, while the good might remain. There’s no value in those words, other than momentary comfort from content meant to fill your day.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been taking a step back from writing to put my “Live” work energy into another field. I’ve essentially completed a two-week crash course on trading in the stock market.

This is not my first experience in the stock market. Back in 2013, I had some success, but ultimately was guided by a path to become a sports writer. I needed that path for my own confidence in expression more than I needed the security of money. The money I made in 2013 on the stock market was invested into Pirates Prospects, and the site’s growth from that investment allowed me to eventually reach a point of confident expression on a subject where I am an expert.

I am an expert at the game of baseball, but these days, I need the security of money more than I need to be validated.

I could have short-term security if I put all of my energy into writing about the Pirates, but I honestly would regress from my personal growth if I joined that fray of discussion full-time. The discourse surrounding the Pirates has always trended negative — some of that justifiably brought on by the team — and it’s toxic to me swimming in the same pool where so many are pissing their paranoid projections of future failure with every dark cloud that appears.

There’s also the fact that I’m an enemy of many industries who don’t like when people are independent with the ability to express themselves confidently. It’s a personal point of pride that I’ve pissed off a lot of billionaires in the city of Pittsburgh, even if they send their minions to make my complete life hell. I’m ultimately looking to leave behind this field full of corruption, and if Major League Baseball or the traditional newspaper industries die one day, I will not miss them.

Not that the stock market is any better. But you can’t survive on idealism in this life.

My first two weeks in the stock market was bittersweet. I lost $325 while studying the market movements, getting familiar with volatile trends, and adapting to the speed of live trading. That’s the bitter part. The sweetness is that I would have been up a few thousand dollars if I simply didn’t doubt my research and abilities when it came time to execute.

In that way, I emphasize with the plight of Major League hitters.

Day-trading on the stock market requires you to not only trust yourself and trust your research, but to enter a reactionary mode where you end up needing to adapt your plan on the fly. That can include abandoning everything you know for a unique moment which can’t be anticipated.

I’ve found that I’m trying to hit home runs with each swing, and there have been times I’ve passed up some easy doubles waiting for the homer.

And yet, I’ve also scaled back from a few swings that would have been a home run, aiming to avoid a strikeout.

The frustration of going to bed knowing you missed a home run after planning and receiving your pitch, while trying to shake off the desire of getting a make-up homer the next day, is a masterclass lesson on controlling emotions. I missed a home run last week, but took encouragement from a “single” by the end of the week.

Baseball is my basis of expression. From a young age, I learned how to talk by talking about baseball. My career to this point has been expressing my baseball knowledge and research to strangers who are capable of trolling you online for years if they disagree — and that helps to build confidence in expression. That toxic industry I mentioned above has been something I’ve dealt with behind the scenes for over a decade as I’ve paved my own road in this game.

Every single thing I do in life, and every new thing I learn, is always brought back to the game of baseball. I can synthesize any information into this game, providing a thought experiment that can be matched by very few people in and around the game. There’s also no long-term money in this approach.

The people who run the media want young-minded writers who build confidence with pick-me attitudes on social media. Their reward is being seen by the crowd. I’m beyond that.

The league wants subservient individuals who sacrifice too much of their own individual talent for the energy flow of the greater good. That’s not appealing if the energy flow of an organization is toxic.

At this point in my life, I’m looking for the path which can provide myself and my family with long-term security that none of my grandparents had before they died. My retired parents don’t even have the security I’d want at their age, and I’m far from that security working in the media field. I’m taking my shot this year at a career which might be able to add security that my family hasn’t seen in generations.

In that way, I emphasize with a lot of aspiring Major League players who we commonly call “prospects”.

If I was a “prospect” in stock trading, I’d be getting calls on social media to be sent back down to Triple-A after my first two weeks of trading. People watching the big leagues want instant results that comfort the stress they’re looking to extinguish by watching a game. If the players can’t instantly provide that comfort, they get targeted with negativity online.

That’s a big reason why the Pirates have trouble developing prospects. They put too much pressure on rookies to be the savior for a starving fan base.

Each player is dabbling in their own version of the stock market, investing in themselves and their abilities/knowledge, while facing a steep learning curve in a fast-paced environment. Pirates fans are starved for results, and Pittsburgh uses sports not only as escapism, but as a cultural identifier which represents the city. The demands on prospects to instantly succeed are greater in Pittsburgh than any other market, and it’s not fair to the prospects — or the fans.

Still, those players are required to learn from their mistakes and adjust to the impossible situation in front of them. The future of every single prospect in the Pirates’ system would look more optimistic if they played for an organization who only relied on their performance as a bonus, rather than the building blocks of a future winning team. We’re all faced with the unique challenges of our situation, which means Pirates prospects simply have to make the difficult adjustments.

The biggest adjustment I’ve made is learning how to structure my life routines and my work schedule around a faster-paced career path. As a writer, I created my schedule for years around my own energy flow. You can’t do that in the big leagues of stock trading. That’s the unspoken adjustment that Major Leaguers need to make, learning how to go “Live” on command, at game time, when tens of thousands of people are depending on you to provide them with an emotional escape.

My new schedule has time for daily writing, and baseball is one of my natural forms of expression. I enjoy writing about this game, and at this point, I’m not doing this for followers or money. I’ll still be writing about baseball.

If you’ve followed, I hope my writing will give you the escape you’re seeking. If you’ve supported my writing with money, I’m still at the point where I’m somewhat reliant on revenue from this work. For that reason, I’m going to show my appreciation by providing easier methods for you to discuss baseball with me. Meanwhile, I’ll be selling my possessions and investing that money into the market, hoping to build some long-term security in my life.

It’s impossible to be objective about the Pirates and not discuss negative topics. My goal with my baseball discussion this year will be to identify where the negativity is justified, and where positivity needs to be amplified. This same approach led to me getting trolled for years by many long-time and still active Pittsburgh media members.

What I’ve realized is that very few people in Pittsburgh media have the capacity to discuss this game with my high-vibrational energy. Low-vibrational people typically provide low-vibrational responses when faced with a higher energy. I’m no longer interested in lowering myself into the common fray in Pittsburgh.

Stay tuned for the return of the highest vibrational writing you’ll find on the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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Konnor Griffin, last year’s first round pick, hit his first professional home run on Friday for the Bradenton Marauders. Griffin also added a triple in the same game.

Nick Yorke returned from the injured list, and immediately hit his first homer of the year.

Anthony Solometo pitched five innings with one run allowed for Altoona on Saturday night. He allowed just one hit and one walk.

Termarr Johnson picked up two hits in the same game, and has an .819 OPS early in the Double-A season.

Saturday’s home runs included Omar Alfonzo (3rd homer of the year in Greensboro), Esmerlyn Valdez (2, Greensboro), Jase Bowen (1, Altoona), Jhonny Severino (1, Bradenton), and Malcom Nunez (2, Indianapolis).

Perhaps the best immediate sign was that Henry Davis picked up two doubles on Friday, giving him multiple hits for the third game in a row.

Joey Bart left Friday’s Pirates game against the Reds early with a back injury. They called up Davis on Saturday, adding a third catcher to the roster. This also adds the bat of Davis as he’s heating up.

My last article looked at the depth the Pirates have at the Triple-A level. Aside from Davis, the recently returned Yorke is the best available option.

Today, I’m looking beyond immediate Major League depth to see which Pirates prospects are standing out in the lower levels of the minors.

ALTOONA CURVE

One of the best early signs is that Termarr Johnson is hitting in Double-A. It’s very early, with a sample size of 25 at-bats, but Johnson has a .280/.379/.440 line with a double and a homer this year.

Jase Bowen is also hitting early in the season, going .273/.414/.455 with a double and a homer in 22 at-bats.

The pitching has stood out on this team, led by a pair of lefties.

Hunter Barco, the second round pick in 2022, has combined for eight shutout innings in two starts, along with a team-leading eight strikeouts.

Anthony Solometo, who was a second round pick in 2021, has allowed one run in ten innings, with a 7:4 K/BB.

The Curve are also seeing good early results from Wilber Dotel, a right-hander who can hit triple-digits and who has allowed one run in 8.2 innings.

GREENSBORO GRASSHOPPERS

Stats at this level always need to be taken with a grain of salt, considering the hitting-friendly home park effects.

Omar Alfonzo leads the team with three homers and a 1.082 OPS. What’s encouraging is that two of those homers have come on the road, and Alfonzo has been hitting at home and on the road. He’s got the catching skills necessary to one day play behind the plate in the Majors, which makes his hitting a great story in the lower levels.

Maikol Escotto, Javier Rivas, and Esmerlyn Valdez each have two homers on the season.

Valdez was one of the more promising hitters in Bradenton last year, hitting 22 homers on the season.

Rivas is a tall shortstop who has power, but has struggled to hit. More encouraging than his two homers is his .345 average and .375 OBP early in the season.

Escotto has been at the High-A level since the second-half of the 2022 season. He’s hovered around a low .600 OPS each year, so the hot start at the plate is a positive sign.

The negative sign came this week, when Escotto punched an opponent who was on first base, leading to a suspension.

On the pitching side, the Grasshoppers have a few pitchers who are recording punchouts early in the season.

Antwone Kelly has allowed one run in seven innings, with 12 strikeouts. The 21-year-old right-hander from Aruba is one of the hardest throwers at the level.

Garrett McMillan, drafted in the 14th round in 2023, has allowed one run in 11 innings, with an 11:1 K/BB. McMillan had success last year at both levels of A-ball in relief, and has now moved to the starting rotation.

BRADENTON MARAUDERS

The start to Konnor Griffin’s career has been slow, but is starting to heat up with Friday’s big game. He also has four stolen bases in five attempts. Griffin is a toolsy player who can find success in many ways.

Braylon Bishop is off to a great start this year, going 5-for-16 with a homer and a 7:3 BB/K ratio.

2024 draft picks Will Taylor (outfielder, 5th round) and Derek Berg (catcher, 10th round) are both putting up an OPS over .900 in their start to the season.

Axiel Plaz hit for power at this level last year. He’s just hitting this year, going 11-for-28 to start the season.

Carlos Castillo is a standout on the pitching side. He has a 2.45 ERA in 7.1 innings across his first two starts, after pitching well in the Florida Complex League last year.

SUNDAY’S ACTION

The action in the minor leagues on Sunday is highlighted by top prospect Bubba Chandler on the mound in Indianapolis. Khristian Curtis is a hard-throwing sleeper who is starting for Greensboro.

At the Major League level, the Pirates will look to avoid a sweep against the Cincinnati Reds.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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According to Noah Hiles of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Pirates will be recalling right-handed pitcher Kyle Nicolas.

Harrington picked up a save earlier this week, throwing four innings and allowing three runs to finish out an 8-4 victory over the St. Louis Cardinals. He made a start prior to that, allowing six runs in four innings of work during his Major League debut.

Nicolas has made four appearances so far this season in Triple-A, allowing six runs in 4.2 combined innings. Two of his appearances saw him allow three runs each. Nicolas bounced back each time with a shutout inning. He will now look to give the Pirates added depth in the bullpen, after the Pirates sent down closer David Bednar after a rough start.

My article yesterday about April sample sizes is especially relevant to the minor leagues.

Spring Training doesn’t start in minor league baseball until the middle of March. The Indianapolis Indians have played eight games, with the largest sample sizes of at-bats sitting at 29.

This early in the season, history and ability can play a bigger role over recent results. Nicolas, for example, had a 3.95 ERA in 54.2 innings out of the bullpen last season, and has some of the best stuff in the upper-levels. While his start to the 2025 season has been slow, there’s a longer track record to suggest Nicolas is capable of good results.

With the Pirates off today, I wanted to look at players who could help the team as early-season depth. Nicolas has already been called upon, but who else stands out down in Triple-A during the early part of the season?

STARTING PITCHING

The Pirates have three notable prospects in their Triple-A rotation, led by top prospect Bubba Chandler.

After two starts, Chandler has pitched 6.2 scoreless innings, striking out 12 and walking five.

Braxton Ashcraft and Mike Burrows are the other two prospect starters. Ashcraft has made three starts, combining to allow six runs in 13.1 innings. Burrows has allowed one run in six innings across two starts.

The obvious theme here is that these starters have yet to build up to five innings in a single start. Chandler pitched Tuesday night, throwing four shutout innings and striking out eight, with just one hit allowed.

Chandler is clearly the biggest prospect who will arrive in Pittsburgh this year. For now, he’s of little use to the rotation if he’s not yet stretched out beyond four innings. Harrington got the early call to the rotation after getting stretched out during big league Spring Training.

If Chandler continues his current results while he continues to get stretched out, he would create a call-up discussion by the end of April.

For now, the only way these guys are coming up immediately would be if the Pirates decided to move a Triple-A starter to the bullpen. That seems unlikely at this point in the season, with the need to preserve starting pitching depth, and reliever depth still available.

He’s not a prospect, but Carson Fulmer is an early-season depth option. In his first start, he threw five shutout innings with six strikeouts. The Pirates already turned to Harrington over Fulmer, and they don’t need a starter at the moment. They do have multiple options.

RELIEF PITCHERS

In his first two appearances since being sent down, David Bednar has been perfect. He’s struck out three in two innings, with no walks or hits.

Bednar struggled throughout the 2024 season, and carried those struggles into the current year. This led to his demotion on April 1st, with the Pirates hoping that he can get back on track. Seeing him throwing perfect innings in Triple-A is a good sign that he might be able to rediscover what previously was working for him, allowing him to return to the big league bullpen.

I mentioned above that Nicolas hasn’t had the best early-season results, but his 2024 numbers make him one of the best options right now.

Another standout from the 2024 team is right-handed pitcher Hunter Stratton. In 2024, Stratton had a 3.58 ERA in 37.2 innings, up until rupturing his patella tendon. He’s back on the mound, and has made four appearances this season, combining for one run in 5.2 innings. That’s a great sign, and should put Stratton as a candidate for early-season depth.

One reason the Pirates may have gone with Nicolas over Stratton is the fact that Stratton threw two innings last night, after throwing 1.2 innings on Sunday. It’s unlikely he would be available on Friday. By comparison, Nicolas last threw a single shutout inning on Tuesday, which was his only outing since last Friday.

Isaac Mattson is a sleeper in Triple-A, starting his 2025 season with one unearned run in 2.1 innings. Mattson had a great 2024 season, which resulted in a brief look at the Major League level in September. He’s likely behind Stratton and Nicolas on the depth charts, as both are on the 40-man roster.

Outside of Bednar, and the starters listed above, Nicolas and Stratton are the remaining pitching options on the 40-man roster.

The Pirates have Colin Holderman on the injured list, in addition to Bednar being sent down. Their relief group is thin right now, but has depth — with Nicolas and Stratton as the top options, and the hope for a quick turnaround by Bednar.

POSITION PLAYERS

Tsung-Che Cheng was called up this week to replace Jared Triolo, who went on the injured list with a back issue. Cheng can play the shortstop position, and currently represents the only option beyond starter Isiah Kiner-Falefa.

The Pirates only have three players in Triple-A who are off to a good start at the plate, and one of them is injured.

Nick Yorke, acquired at last year’s trade deadline, began the 2025 season going 5-for-15. He was then placed on the injured list with shoulder soreness, which he had been dealing with since the end of Spring Training.

The move was hopefully more of a precautionary measure, with the expectation that Yorke could return soon. He’s the top hitting prospect at the level, and with versatility to play infield and outfield, Yorke should find his way to the Majors at some point this season.

Matt Gorski is off to a great start after 29 at-bats, hitting .310/.375/.517 with a homer and three doubles. Gorski has played four games in left field, two in right, one in center, and one at first base. His versatility could make him an option if his hitting is maintained. Gorski has been streaky in the past, so a larger sample size would be needed before adding him to the 40-man roster.

Veteran minor league free agent DJ Stewart has two homers to start the year, fueling an .882 OPS that pairs with a .154 average. Stewart has played in the Majors every year since 2018, with a .622 OPS in 158 at-bats last year with the New York Mets. He could be called upon as depth at some point this season.

There are only five Indianapolis hitters on the 40-man roster, with Yorke being one of them. The other four have seen struggles at the beginning of the season.

• Henry Davis is spending more time behind the plate, getting work on his defense and game calling. The offense hasn’t been there, but if you’re looking for a sign of hope, he’s 4-for-8 with a double in his last two games.

• Ji Hwan Bae started the year in the Majors, only to be sent down after going 0-for-4 with three strikeouts. Bae has 445 at-bats in the Majors, and has yet to show any improvements. He has a homer and a double in eight Triple-A at-bats, but would need to show a significant turnaround to outweigh his recurring MLB struggles.

• Liover Peguero saw his numbers decline in Triple-A last year, and has yet to hit in over 211 at-bats in the Majors. His numbers this year have dropped further at the start of the season. A sign of hope is that he has reached base safely in his last seven games, with hits in six of those games. Like Bae, Peguero would need significant results for another opportunity.

• The final player on the 40-man is Billy Cook, who was also acquired at last year’s trade deadline. Cook had a breakout season in 2024, but has started slow in Triple-A this year, going 2-for-22. He’s got the versatility to play first base and the outfield, but would need to hit to crack the roster.

Major League Needs

The starting rotation has depth, and no immediate need for help. Meanwhile, the bullpen has needs, but is already tapping into their depth.

On the hitting side, there’s really no immediate depth, outside of emergency situations like Cheng.

The Pirates do have players who are struggling early in the Majors. A lot of those struggles are in the outfield, with a questionable first base situation. This matches up with the available depth in the minors, though the small sample disclaimer applies.

With anywhere from 14 to 40 at-bats each between the struggling outfielders, the Pirates are still at a point where they should roll the dice with the guys they have.

Free agent Tommy Pham has put up a slow start, with a .400 OPS in 40 at-bats. Pham has been situationally productive, with a walk-off hit and an outfield assist nailing a runner at the plate in two wins over the past week. He’s also stolen three bases.

Adam Frazier was signed as a free agent to fill out the utility spot on the bench. Frazier has a .372 OPS in 38 at-bats, but with Triolo injured in the Majors, Yorke injured in the minors, and other utility options in the minors struggling, Frazier is provided needed depth.

Jack Suwinski lost his spot in the Majors last year, and was sent to Triple-A for most of the season, where he didn’t improve at the plate. Suwinski has a .427 OPS this year in 25 at-bats. His struggles in 2024 could provide a shorter leash than a veteran like Pham.

The Pirates acquired Enmanuel Valdez in a minor trade in December, and he’s played five games at first base this year. He’s got a .575 OPS in 17 at-bats, after a .633 OPS in 201 at-bats last year with Boston.

Outfielder Alexander Canario was added for cash considerations at the start of the season. In five games, he’s gone 1-for-14, after previously going 12-for-42 in his brief appearances with the Cubs across the last two seasons.

While the Pirates barely paid more than a waiver claim for each player, I think they will each get more than 5-to-7 games to prove themselves.

The only player knocking on the door at Triple-A, from a numbers standpoint, is Gorski. As noted above, he also has a track record of streaky hitting. Allowing more time for Gorski to show consistency would also allow more time for the above hitters to turn things around.

The extra time could also allow players like Davis and Cook to heat up, while allowing for Yorke to return from his injury.

At the moment, the Pirates don’t have much immediate depth on the position player side. They have depth on the pitching side, even after tapping into their relief depth.

The team is 5-8 right now, so there’s also no urgent need for a roster overhaul. A larger sample size by the end of the month should allow a more certain picture of their depth.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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Last night, I couldn’t do it.

It’s not that the Pirates were down early on a rare off-night from Paul Skenes.

It was simply too cold.

Saying it’s cold when the temperature drops below 70 degrees shows how much living in Florida for years has impacted my sense of temperature. I’d likely die the first winter living in Pittsburgh, if I ever moved.

How baseball players can handle the weather is beyond me.

The weather was cold in Pittsburgh last night for both teams, though the cold weather was more extreme than what we get down here in this lawless state ruled by theme parks and the remnants of dinosaurs.

I’m not making excuses for the individual game, merely pointing out that this is not baseball weather.

The month of April is my least favorite in baseball. All winter, the focus goes toward baseball returning. Humans love first impressions, and the moment the season begins, we baseball fans look for a season of hope based on those early results.

Such an anticipatory approach leaves room to place too much emphasis on small sample sizes.

During April, those sample sizes are worthless. Aside from the volatility that can over-emphasize a single day, the month is chaos when it comes to barometric pressure shifts. It’s hot ever day in July, and they don’t play baseball when it rains. In April, players need to deal with warm weather one week, cold weather the next, and maintain the consistency we expect every day from this summer sport.

Thinking back to former Pirates first baseman Adam LaRoche, it was nearly automatic that he would start slow in April, only to heat up with the weather. That always made me wonder if certain players are impacted by barometric pressure changes.

Again, I’m not making a point about last night’s game. Skenes, for example, has had success in the cold, and just had an off night. The offense was good on a cold evening the night before, only to struggle the next night.

And I’m not even looking at the stats at this point. You can find more reasonable analysis of baseball during the month of April in the following video than you could in a sample of less than 20 innings or less than 50 at-bats.

FROM KELLER TO Z

As I write this, I’m watching the Pirates take on the Cardinals. Some observations from the game:

• With the rise of the torpedo bats, hitters have more forgiveness when putting the barrel on the ball. This is going to make it especially important for pitchers to attack the edges and corners of the zone. Those areas are difficult for hitters to contort their bodies and get the barrel around to the ball. It’s far from easy for a pitcher to hit those spots. Mitch Keller has always excelled at hitting those edges. That’s why he’s going to be an above-average pitcher in this league for a long time. Today was a great outing, with Keller shutting down the Cardinals for 7.1 innings, before being pulled after allowing two runners to reach to begin the eighth inning. It was the exact start the Pirates needed.

• Tsung-Che “Z” Cheng is smooth at the shortstop position. He’s got the skills to play at the big league level defensively, and could be the best defender at the position on the team right now. Offensively, I’m writing this after one at-bat, and with the above disclaimer of sample sizes. Cheng has some of the best hand-eye coordination in the game, and an advanced ability to judge balls and strikes. He can hit for average, but that comes from more of a defensive approach that plays up his abilities for contact. If the young hitter from Taiwan develops the confidence to attack pitches in the zone more frequently, he will remain in the majors. For now, the defense and speed should give him some opportunities to show what else he can do at the big league level.

• After typing that about Cheng, he reached on an error after taking an outside pitch the other way, with the third baseman playing in and unable to handle the shot. He tried stealing second base, and almost made it. Replay review showed that he brought his arm up from his body as the tag was coming in, which put his arm in the path of the opponent’s glove just before his foot hit the base. If he kept his arm close to his body, he’d be safe. Close play. I thought he made it before the replay.

• One of the best signs I’ve seen early in the season has been the defense from Ke’Bryan Hayes. Last year, Hayes was clearly dealing with a back injury, which affected his defense in a negative way from the start of the season. The fact that the Gold Glove defense has returned this year is a great sign for his health. He had a great barehanded play earlier in the game on a slow roller, completed by a great stretch at first base by Endy Rodriguez to complete the out.

• Literally as I was typing that paragraph, Rodriguez and Hayes were involved in a crazy play at the plate. Rodriguez charged in to field a pop up that was behind the plate, and clearly Joey Bart’s ball, who was settling under the pop-up to make the out. Rodriguez collided with Bart and the ball fell into play. The runner from second tried to score, but Hayes ignored the car crash at the plate, quickly found the ball, and tagged out the runner before he could cross the plate, ending the inning. That was not a good play by Rodriguez, who is a natural catcher and rarely has played first base. It was another example of the Gold Glove approach by Hayes.

• Heading to the 12th inning, this game alone has almost grown into a sample size worth considering legitimate. The Pirates had runners on first and second with a shallow hit to right field by Bart. Alexander Canario was being sent around third to score with a full wave from third base coach Mike Rabelo at the same time the right fielder was fielding the ball in the shallow part of the outfield. Canario was out by a mile. That’s not the aggressive send home you want with one out. To be fair, the Pirates benefitted earlier from a similar play on a ball hit shallow to Tommy Pham.

• Joey Bart wins it with a walk off hit in the bottom of the 13th.

There’s a common theme which was on display today. A lot of fundamental mistakes were made throughout this game. The big one was the play by Rodriguez colliding with Bart.

For a team whose catch phrase this year is “winning in the margins”, the Pirates have room for improvement.

Giving up an out at the plate on an aggressive send, in the same way that you received an out earlier, was an example of throwing away those marginal victories.

The defense did help to win in the margins, and that was even on display with Hayes during the Rodriguez/Bart play.

When the offense was needed in the 12th and 13th innings, they came through.

The Pirates won 2-1 and took the series from the Cardinals. That’s all that really matters.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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Today is a day where I’m catching up on my reading. Here’s what has caught my eye on Tuesday afternoon.

• Noah Hiles at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette wrote about the Pirates’ expanded R&D department last month. Yesterday, I discussed the narrative that has been pushed about the Pirates expanding their baseball operations department. The R&D division is at the forefront of those expenses. This article not only details those expansions and their purpose, but it shows that the Pirates are playing catch-up in building a department that some of the best teams in the league already had. Their own R&D department is led by the hiring of Sarah Gelles from the Houston Astros in late 2023. Aside from banging trash cans in center field, there is a lot of value in replicating what the Astros have done so well.

• Paul Skenes is on the mound tonight for the Pirates. If you want a great look at his arsenal, check out this article by Mike Petriello at MLB.com, which breaks down his seven pitches, which could be expanding to eight. The standout for me is the split in velocity. Skenes has three pitches that sit 93+ MPH and four more with velocity at 88 MPH or slower. Each pitch in each range moves a different way. Most pitchers have a velocity split, but one type of movement in each velocity range. Hitters going up against Skenes not only have to guess between fast and slow, but they also have to guess between multiple movement profiles in each zone. The average pitcher is going to split a hitter’s mind in a minimal way compared to the ridiculous assortment of pitches that Skenes is working with.

• The finances of the Pittsburgh Pirates have been a hot topic. Ethan Hullihen understands MLB payroll figures better than anyone in Pittsburgh, and honestly, better than anyone in baseball. On Monday night, he posted on his X account a detail of the Pirates’ payroll, and why he felt the numbers which led to the reported $2.2 million loss in 2024 may not be represented correctly. The write-up goes into the difference between CBT and LRD payroll figures. An understanding of that difference will allow you to understand how a team could pull accounting tricks to show that they’ve spent more money than they actually spent in a given year.

Finally, if you got here today from PiratesProspects.com, I’m currently in the process of cleaning the database and preparing that site for the next stages. Expect that to return in the next week, at which point I’ll finally be providing my own perspective on the Pirates’ finances.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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It’s not unlike what appears to be happening with the 2025 Pittsburgh Pirates.

After starting their season with a disappointing 2-7 record, the Pirates hit a smooth, steady groove the last two games. Literally, they started hitting.

Monday night’s 8-4 victory over the division rival St. Louis Cardinals saw the Pirates pick up ten hits, with Joey Bart’s first home run leading off the scoring.

Bart, Andrew McCutchen, and Isiah Kiner-Falefa each had two hits and combined for six RBIs. Endy Rodriguez also had a two hit game, while Ke’Bryan Hayes continues to hit the ball hard, with a 100 MPH RBI single in the second inning.

For all of the fan angst directed at the Pirates’ front office, you’d be crazy not to follow where this team leads.

Carmen Mlodzinski gave up one run in five innings in his second start of the year. Thomas Harrington came on to close out the final four innings. He allowed a few runs, but had plenty of run support to work with, and never let the Cardinals get back in the game.

Those two young pitchers were planned depth for a starting pitching group which will lead this team all year.

The offense has been off to a slow start, but tonight showed there is enough talent to compete. In light of my article yesterday about how the Yankees lineup offers more forgiveness to their hitters, Oneil Cruz was robbed of at least one hit on a hard hit ball in his 0-for-3 night. And the Pirates still scored eight runs. It’s nice when forgiveness works in their favor.

While the offense might be streaky at times, and while the bullpen lacks a current shutdown leverage guy, this team isn’t short on the talent needed to win.

The Pirates are now 4-7, with Paul Skenes on the mound tomorrow, giving them a great chance for their first winning streak of the year.

Pirates fans could lament about how everybody leaves, if they get the chance.

I think it’s more constructive to consider that this team may have hit the bottom and escaped.

BASEBALL OPERATIONS EXPANSIONS

There’s been a narrative spreading through Pittsburgh’s media about how the Pirates are spending the limited resources they have.

On Monday, Pirates’ pre-game host Dan Zangrilli went on 93.7 The Fan and mentioned that a “big chunk of the Pirates’ budget” was spent on baseball operations jobs. This was amplified by 93.7 host Andrew Fillipponi as something he had been hearing, and in his opinion, not a good thing.

This isn’t exactly a secret held in the media. It’s become a common public complaint from at least one outlet.

Last September, when the Pirates were watching another season of losing go by, Dejan Kovacevic reported that the “real problem” with this team was that they had too many coaches in the locker room.

Part of that complaint was that the Pirates had 18 non-players inside the visiting clubhouse during a September road game.

From that DK Pittsburgh Sports report:

“And not only were these not players, they weren't even any of Shelton's coaches, all of whom had a separate room. Two were athletic trainers, and that's the norm. One was a strength coach, also the norm. But the other 15, from the best I could tell, were various versions of staffers, exercise assistants, nutritionists, video workers and more, all part of Cherington's years-long hiring spree that's brought the most bloated version of baseball operations anyone can recall.“

I’ve been in a visiting locker room in September where the Pirates had more coaches than players. This happens annually when the minor leagues end, and support staff joins the big league club. What the Pirates are doing now is a bit different.

The Pirates have expanded their baseball operations beyond traditional coaches, and Kovacevic’s report outlines the details. Exercise assistants. Nutritionists. Video analysts. These are all part of a 21st century performance staff. Kovacevic mentioned that these non-players have their own separate room added at PNC Park, so the crowded clubhouse was only an issue on the road.

In his recent special report on the Pirates’ finances, Kovacevic wrote that the Pirates were losing money, reporting the Pirates lost a little over two million dollars in 2024.

In that report, Kovacevic once again pointed out the expanded analytics group. From that article:

“Another angle's not so easy, though still tangible: When Ben Cherington was hired as GM in late 2019, he committed to a sizable expansion of the Pirates' analytics department. So it might mean something that the team's official media for 2024 showed the team employing 138 total people compared to 111 in 2019, Neal Huntington's final year as GM.

Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't share, from personal experience, the absurd amount of these analytics types who are omnipresent in all phases of operations. One morning in Bradenton, Fla., last month, I could count more than 20 of them roaming the fields of Pirate City ... to observe a few pitchers and catchers milling about. And don't get me started on how many of them are routinely in the road clubhouses all the way into the real games. It's like they're revving up for math competitions, not the World Series.”

Let’s do some math for a moment.

The Pirates have expanded this baseball operations staff by 27 people in the last five years. We don’t know those salaries, but if they average $100,000 per person, that’s a little over two million dollars. Coincidentally, that’s the same financial range Kovacevic says the Pirates lost in 2024.

I’m going to mention at this point that the Pirates have a long-standing grievance against them by the MLB Player’s Association, related to how much they are spending on big league payroll. The focus of the MLBPA is exclusively to fight for the players to receive a fair cut of league revenues. There is no MLB Coach’s Association. Nor is there one for nutritionists, video analysts, or the other support staff roles.

If the Pirates are losing around two million dollars, they can’t cut that from player payroll without further inciting the MLBPA.

So, it is curious to me that a certain faction of Pittsburgh sports media is campaigning against this group of staffers, who may or may not compile that estimated two million dollar loss. And I’m not even going to get into the very real possibility that this “two million dollar loss” was likely only on paper, via accounting math, and not actually a stack of cash that was burned in favor of a guy editing clips on an iPad.

While the complaints of staff expansions are focused on “old school” trivial sounding things like nutritionists, the reality is the Pirates have also expanded their actual coaching staff.

One of the best moves this offseason was the hiring of veteran pitching coach Brent Strom to be their assistant pitching coach. Strom is the perfect complement to a staff that is led by one of the best young pitchers in the game. His addition will do more for this team for years than the budget free agent the Pirates could sign if they had 27 fewer staffers.

As a side note, I recommend you check out this interview with Strom, conducted by MLB.com’s Alex Stumpf. There’s a section where Strom discusses the “old school” versus analytics mentality, giving the perfect answer that defines the difference between knowledge and understanding. That’s the type of knowledge the Pirates need to add to this organization.

The Pirates have added more knowledge with these baseball operations expansions.

As a small market franchise with a limited budget, the Pirates need to rely on younger, unproven players more than most teams. The players they rely upon for success are actively learning how to play in the majors, and the Pirates need to do whatever they can to shorten that learning curve.

Just like with any form of education, a higher teacher-to-student ratio is going to lead to better results for more students. Having specialists to do what the generalists can’t do is also going to lead to those better results.

If the Pirates are going to ever win, they need to act like a real organization. That doesn’t entail complaining about the minimal cost of support staff.

EXPANSIONS WITHIN A SMALL MARKET

Do you know what else the Pirates expanded over the last five years? Their marketing department.

One of the first things that team president Travis Williams did when he took over was to refocus the marketing approach. The new marketing team took over the social media accounts — a role previously held by the media relations staff in the press box — and created the novel concept of a social media account to promote their own prospects, called Young Bucs.

No part of Kovacevic’s report on the Pirates’ finances dug deep into what the Pirates were spending on the employees who work on the business side, under Williams. There was hardly a mention of what Williams or the non-baseball operations side has accomplished with their expansions.

On Monday night, the Pirates couldn’t even draw 10,000 fans to PNC Park.

The young pitchers helped lead them to a victory.

The hitters came through.

And the business side was figuring out how to put a Roberto Clemente logo back on the Clemente wall, not realizing that there would be fan outrage when they plastered over it with an advertisement for a sparkling alcoholic beverage.

Look, I get it.

Pirates fans traditionally have a lot of need for alcohol when they’re watching this franchise. The ad sales department had their minds in the right place. They just didn’t put the advertisement in the right place.

The complaints about an expanded support staff are irrelevant. Nothing will prevent this team from being defined honestly during the 2025 season.

The only honesty comes from the Win/Loss column.

If they lose again this year, then every decision made by General Manager Ben Cherington will be picked over by the worms.

And that support staff with zero union support will most likely be on the financial chopping block.

But what if they’re right to expand these operations?

I’m old enough to remember the Pirates’ last winning stretch cratering in 2016, not long after their analytics department was raided. You can focus on their spending, but one of the architects of that 2013-2015 team was Mike Fitzgerald. The Pirates watched him walk away to a bigger and better role with the Arizona Diamondbacks, and they simultaneously lost the analytics edge that helped them in their best years.

It makes you wonder how things might have been different had the Pirates been spending more on baseball operations positions back then — in a year when they had the highest payroll in franchise history.

CAPITAL UPGRADES ARE ALWAYS IN THE BUDGET

We know today that the 2016 Pirates’ MLB payroll was reduced, in order to pay for capital upgrades to Pirate City. This is all thanks to last year’s reporting from Stephen Nesbitt of The Athletic.

There’s never a lack of money when it comes to the need to expand or upgrade a facility owned by Bob Nutting.

One month ago today, plans were started in Bradenton for expansions to LECOM Park. According to The Business Observer in Florida, these expansions will include a third baseball field at the complex, which will match the dimensions of PNC Park. The expansion will also bring more seating to LECOM Park behind home plate, a new batting cage for all-weather practice, and the following additional upgrades:

*VIP parking lot expansion to the intersection of 9th and 17th street

*Grass parking for 550 cars east of the LECOM Park home clubhouse, sized for a future fourth baseball field

*New paved parking lot for 300 cars accessible from 13th Street

*Monument sign at the northwest corner of the site

All of these plans were silently announced two weeks before Kovacevic’s report that the team was losing money.

That financial report and the team’s financial woes were a heavy focus during the team’s broadcast on Opening Day. This article you’re reading right now is probably the first time you’re hearing about the planned LECOM expansions. I promise you, they will be hailed and heavily promoted when they are completed.

Ten games into the season, the narrative of an expanded baseball operations staff has begun to take hold, in concurrence with the minimal reported losses in 2024. Quick math would suggest those 27 extra staffers would probably cost around the estimated figure of what the Pirates claim they lost.

Which member of the media will dig into the cost of this next capital upgrade, while conflating how much money was diverted away from Major League payroll this time around?

How much of the team’s reported new debt taken on over the last five years came from buying the land around LECOM Park for this expansion?

The good news is that Kovacevic claims to have been privy to the team’s complete books during his site’s reporting of the financials. We already know who doesn’t need to do the digging to get these answers.

SONG OF THE DAY

I felt like this was an appropriate way to end today’s article. Lianne La Havas with of the best covers of “Weird Fishes” you’ll find.

Thank you for reading along as this new writing project gets underway. Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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The Pittsburgh Pirates had the resources to acquire him, both in terms of financials and prospect capital. I doubt the cost on both fronts would have been considerably more than what they combined to pay for Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Bryan De La Cruz.

Chisholm was instead acquired by the New York Yankees, and he almost immediately became a star. During the first week of the 2025 season, he hit .292 with four homers and a 1.162 OPS.

Had the Pirates acquired Chisholm, I have serious doubts that he would have achieved the same success. Don’t think the focus of this article is lamenting what could have been.

This weekend against the Yankees displayed the disadvantage the Pirates face.

Chisholm went 1-for-9 in the first two games of the series. The Yankees still won both games, convincingly, by a combined score of 19-8. On Sunday, Chisholm went 1-for-5 with an RBI double and three strikeouts. The Pirates ended up winning 5-4 in extra innings.

If Chisholm had been acquired by the Pirates, he’d be facing much more pressure than he currently has with the Yankees. The Pirates would need him to be a star, in order to have a chance to take more than one narrowly won game against the Yankees. Meanwhile, the Yankees didn’t really need Chisholm this weekend to easily take a series against the Pirates.

The Yankees are benefitting this year from the new torpedo bats. The best description I’ve seen of how those help players is that they take each hit to the next level. A weak hit becomes solid contact. Solid contact becomes more of a barrel. And those who are more prone to finding the barrel of the bat will see an explosion in home runs.

Make no mistake, the Yankees would be good without those bats. Chisholm hit 11 homers with an .825 OPS in 46 games with the Yankees last season. It’s frustrating that a team already so good is getting an easy boost with bigger bats.

The Pirates have almost the opposite problem. Their offense is entirely reliant on — I don’t want to say young players, but inexperience in leading.

Bryan Reynolds is the most consistent hitter on the team. He’s ranked 32nd among all hitters from 2021 to 2025 in offensive run value. Reynolds would be a significant part of any lineup in baseball. He also reflects an issue with the Pirates, in that they don’t have any top-end hitters to make him the complementary star he’d be with a better offense.

This isn’t the fault of Reynolds, but it does put unreasonable expectations on him to be more than his already great level of hitting.

Oneil Cruz faces the same pressure. He has an .850 OPS to start the 2025 season, which is similar to the pace that Chisholm was on with New York last year when he was seen as a huge deadline boost. Yet, Pirates fans need Cruz to be more. Chisholm only needs to be as good as Cruz is now, while the Pirates are dreaming that Cruz can be as good as Aaron Judge.

Cruz could rise to that level, but he also faces the pressure that the Pirates need this result.

On the pitching side, the Pirates got a boost last year from the addition of Paul Skenes. Drafted first overall in 2023, Skenes immediately lived up to his generational pitcher hype. He not only became one of the best pitchers in the league instantly, but he also set the tone for the rest of the starting group.

There’s no pressure on Mitch Keller to be a number one starter. Jared Jones is injured, but when he returns, he can just become another high velocity arm to deal with. The top prospect in the minors, Bubba Chandler, has already issued the friendly promise that he would be coming for the top spot from Skenes.

Unlike the top hitting prospects, the Pirates don’t need Chandler to be the best, instantly. They just need him to complement an already talented rotation.

The pressure that Chandler will face is going to be less than the pressure of any hitting prospect in this organization.

The hitters are trying to fill the void of that elite bat who the rest of the lineup can produce around. The pitchers received that catalyst to stronger group production with the arrival of Skenes.

What can be done about this in 2025? Not much.

The hope that Cruz becomes that elite hitter, or that Reynolds has a career year, or that Ke’Bryan Hayes remains healthy and gets his bat on track, all lead to the same desire that these players need to be more than what they are.

The Pirates don’t have one of the elite hitters in the game. They also don’t have many hitters with consistent track records. Every hitter in the lineup needs to play to their best abilities in order to make up for this. There’s no margin for error and little room for long-term slumps with this offense.

The hope is that new hitting coach Matt Hague won’t take hitters backwards like the trend under former hitting coach Andy Haines, but instead will find a way to get players advancing forward. Collectively, this group could contend behind this pitching staff, but it would take consistency from a group of largely inconsistent career hitters.

Who knows? Maybe some torpedo bats could help.

The Pirates won 5-4 in 11 innings on Sunday, thanks to a walk off hit by offseason free agent outfielder Tommy Pham.

Lost in the extra inning win? Another meltdown by the bullpen.

This time it was Ryan Borucki, who blew a 4-1 lead in the 9th inning, sending the game to extras.

Former closer David Bednar has already been sent to Triple-A this season, after starting with the same struggles he faced last year. The Pirates will hope that Bednar can get back on track. Until then, their bullpen is a big question mark, and only adds to the issue of a weaker offense.

Last year, the Pirates signed Aroldis Chapman, who was able to provide a strong shutdown presence, even when Bednar struggled. There was no support brought in this year, outside of middle relief help from the likes of Justin Lawrence and Caleb Ferguson. The Pirates have done well the last few years finding cheap middle relievers. They haven’t done as well finding shutdown relievers.

David Robertson is a free agent, currently in his age-40 season. Age is just a number, says this 41-year-old writer. Robertson’s numbers last year back that up, with stuff and results that would allow him to lead this bullpen.

Most of the early season discourse on this team has been about the reported financial loss of over $2 million last year. This shouldn’t be seen as a significant amount, and one-year losses shouldn’t be isolated as an entire picture of a franchise’s financial state. Having said that, I doubt the Pirates are going to be adding from the outside while also crying poor about their financial situation.

The bullpen, like the offense, will need internal players to step up to take this team into contender status.

It’s a tall order. The same demands for ceiling production likely led to Chisholm struggling for years with the Marlins — though I don’t think the Pirates have the toxic clubhouse which assisted toward those struggles.

The Pirates are 3-7, with the Cardinals coming to town for the next three days.

Maybe the win on Sunday against the Yankees can provide a spark which they can carry into the second full week of the season.

I’m going to leave you with a programming note. I’ve been working on a feature on the Pirates financials for over a month.

This feature is currently on its fourth and final draft. The previous draft was around 6,000 words, and wasn’t completed when I started a new draft.

My goal is to have this completed in the upcoming week. This feature will run on Pirates Prospects, which will be home to my long-form and more produced work.

What you’re going to get is the most comprehensive look at the Pirates’ situation that anyone could provide. This isn’t going to be a black and white situation, but will have many shades of gray.

Truthfully, I don’t have a conclusion to the article written yet, because there is no conclusion. There is only the situation as it exists.

My goal is to bring a better level of understanding of this situation to Pirates fans, while also maintaining the accountability on the Pirates.

Until then, you can find me here at Pittsburgh Baseball Live, whenever I go live…

-Tim Williams

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That was the year I quit playing fantasy baseball. It was the year I quit following baseball outside of my work covering the Pirates and their minor league system.

My other site, Pirates Prospects, had reached a point where it was the go-to news outlet covering the Pirates. For several years, my reporting helped to lead the coverage in Pittsburgh, leaving other reporters to scramble to catch up with the latest news found daily on Pirates Prospects.

I had no investors. I honestly had no idea how to run a business at that level at the time. Pirates Prospects began as a one-man blog, and grew into the mammoth outlet it became. As the owner/producer/editor/lead writer, I eventually reached an unhealthy workload that burnt me out on the game of baseball.

The last two years, I’ve been taking a break from the game of baseball. My knowledge of the game hasn’t gone anywhere. I’ve shown that with my scouting of the last two drafts, highlighting Paul Skenes and Nick Kurtz as the best players available. Kurtz didn’t fall to the Pirates, but I find myself watching his highlights these days more than any other prospect.

My love of the game has been returning in 2025. For the start of the season, I’ve been watching every team but the Pirates. That has allowed me to get a feel for where the league is at, and how the Pirates compare.

On Sunday afternoon, I watched my first full Pirates game of the season, as they defeated the New York Yankees in extra innings. I’ll have some thoughts on that game later.

The goal of Pittsburgh Baseball Live, and the reason it is hosted on Substack, is to allow me to only focus on writing and publishing. There’s no site to manage. There’s no team to edit and work around. It’s just me and my unproduced thoughts.

When I say “unproduced thoughts”, that means every article will be a straight shot, from my mind to your screen. At Pirates Prospects, I’ll often write the information part of the article, then the conclusion, before finishing by writing the intro. The reader doesn’t know this when they see the produced result.

Here at Pittsburgh Baseball Live, every post will be written in linear fashion, with one light edit before sending. This change in approach will allow this outlet to have a different tone, reflecting more of my natural voice.

I’m also going to be starting a podcast this year, attached to this site, in order to provide unparalleled calm and reasoned analysis of the Pirates.

Pittsburgh Baseball Live will have some prospect discussion, but will not be locked into any single niche theme.

Pirates Prospects will return this season as a long-form project, continuing that produced work for topics that require such a touch.

I’m just one guy, with no desire for investor or venture capitalist money. As the person who revolutionized the Pittsburgh media scene, I’m also not part of the Pittsburgh media cliques. Pirates Prospects was the equivalent of the 90’s grunge scene in music, compared to Pittsburgh media’s pop approach.

Pittsburgh Baseball Live will be just as independent. My combined work between this site and Pirates Prospects will only be possible by the support of Pirates fans.

It has become fashionable in Pittsburgh to sell on the image of providing accountability to the Pirates and their owner. I can promise you that no one has brought more accountability to this organization and their owner than I have. That includes asking the difficult questions to Bob Nutting and his front office, when given the opportunity.

I’m not selling t-shirts here, or farming outrage to funnel money into corporate Pittsburgh. If you want to support a reporter and writer who has and will continue to fight for you, the fan, then this is the place.

Above all, I hope to provide you with an escape this year. That escape will be an authentic voice, allowing you to ride the highs and wait out the lows in company.

The best part of this project is going to be the randomness. There’s no schedule. When I’m ready to go live, you’ll have an article in your inbox not long after, to read on your own time.

I hope that you subscribe and that this project adds to your enjoyment of the 2025 baseball season. Assisting you in that last task has always been my primary goal. Especially this year, as I attempt to get back to enjoying this game myself.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams