I was looking at the Pittsburgh Pirates draft tracker stats recently, ranking all pitchers by ERA.

Out of the 229 drafted pitchers by the Pirates since 2012, the top three pitchers, ranked by ERA, with over 100 innings: Paul Skenes, Braxton Ashcraft, and Mlodzinski.

There’s a big ERA gap until Jared Jones, and another gap until Mitch Keller and Bubba Chandler.

Mlodzinski also ranks 11th overall in MLB strikeouts, despite having the third lowest innings total among that group of 11 Pirates drafted pitchers.

Objectively, Mlodzinski has been a really good pitcher in his young MLB career. That has mostly involved successfully pitching out of the bullpen for his first three years.

I personally think Mlodzinski makes a better reliever than a starter.

His third-time through the order numbers speak to that. He has a .715 OPS against this year in first plate appearances as a starter, along with a .701 OPS against in second plate appearances. The third time through spikes to a 1.019 OPS.

His OPS against also spikes to 1.185 after the 75th pitch of an outing.

The biggest knock on Mlodzinski as a starter is that he gets knocked around when he goes deep into games.

Maybe he’s easy to adjust against. Maybe he has problems adjusting to opposing hitters. Either way, the problem clearly exists.

Even with that disclaimer, it’s difficult to argue the results. His FIP as a starter this season ranks only behind Skenes and Ashcraft among Pirates starters. There’s a big FIP gap between him and Keller/Jones, and another gap until Chandler.

The Pirates asked Mlodzinski to compete as a starting pitcher this Spring, and he did so well that he won a rotation spot.

Then, as noted above, he put up the third best numbers of any starter on the team, continuing his career trend of having numbers that are only beat by Skenes and Ashcraft.

When Jones returned from the injured list, the Pirates moved Mlodzinski to the bullpen.

The move led to controversy.

Mlodzinski didn’t take the move well, making it clear he wanted to be a starter, and eventually landing on the restricted list for not being ready to make the transition to the bullpen.

Once he returned, the Pirates stuck Mlodzinski to a very specific role: Being a long inning reliever only when Jones was on the mound.

On June 4th, Mlodzinski entered the game in the sixth inning, after Jones threw five shutout. It was his first relief appearance since being removed from the rotation.

Mlodzinski gave up a run in the sixth, but pitched the final four frames with only that run allowed, shutting down a 5-1 win. He entered the game with a 94.7% Win Expectancy. It was less of a high-leverage situation, and more of a move to save the bullpen.

On June 10th, the Pirates took a similar approach. Jones started the game, going four innings against the Dodgers. Mlodzinski entered in the fifth inning, with the Pirates having a 36.3% Win Expectancy.

This time, Mlodzinski didn’t have a good outing, allowing four earned runs in 3.2 innings. However, the Pirates had a five run eighth inning, and ended up winning the game.

Then, on June 15th, the same order was repeated. Jones threw four innings as the starter. Mlodzinski came in to pitch in the fifth inning with the Athletics up 5-1. The Pirates had a 7.1% Win Expectancy. Mlodzinski pitched three innings.

In about two weeks of work, Mlodzinski has been limited to only pitching when Jones pitches, and never really knowing the situation he’s going to enter.

There is a massive flaw with this plan.

The Pirates have used Mlodzinski twice so far in situations where he’s merely being used to eat innings and spare the bullpen. Keep in mind that Mlodzinski has been consistently one of their better performing pitchers, relegated to an innings eating role in games that have mostly been out of hand.

Meanwhile, the Pirates constantly lose games from their lack of reliable relievers. Mlodzinski has a history of being a reliable reliever, beyond just a long man who can save the rest of the bullpen. The long relief work seems pointless when the bullpen he’s saving blows leads multiple times every rotation turn.

Wasting Mlodzinski

Mlodzinski would make sense in two roles, and the Pirates are choosing neither.

He’s arguably the best right-handed relief option the Pirates have. He can go more than two innings as a long reliever, but he’d be more valuable as a high-leverage guy when the game is closer to coin-flip odds. Instead, he’s entered when the Pirates have had 94.7%, 36.3%, and 7.1% chances of winning.

The other role would be keeping him as a starter and limiting his ability to go deep in the game.

Mlodzinski has a 2.10 ERA in he first three innings of the game this season, but struggles with a 7.27 ERA in the fourth through sixth innings. When he gets the opportunity to set the pace of the game from inning one, he starts off well.

Mlodzinski would make sense as an extended opener who could pitch 2-3 innings, then hand the ball over to Jones.

Jones is returning from a major injury, and will need his workload limited. He might not technically be starting, but if Mlodzinski only went three innings, Jones would be pitching the same amount of innings he’s throwing now. There would also be the chance that Jones enters with a lead and an easier situation.

Keeping Mlodzinski in a specific long relief role attached to Jones doesn’t look good when less experienced and less successful relievers are thrown into high leverage situations between his outings.

In the time Mlodzinski has been a long reliever behind Jones, the Pirates have lost two big games turning to Wilber Dotel and Brandon Bidois in close outings.

On June 9th, Dotel followed Skenes in the 7th inning, entering with a 50% win expectancy in a 2-2 game. He gave up two runs to the Dodgers, and Bidois entered in the same inning to allow eight more runs to cross the plate.

Mlodzinski was being saved for the next night, when he’d enter with the Pirates needing a multi-run comeback.

The Pirates didn’t need as big of a comeback on June 14th, when Skenes left them down 2-1 after six innings. The Pirates had a 25.8% chance of winning when Bidois entered in the eighth inning, down one run. He allowed two runs, putting the game out of reach.

Mlodzinski was being saved for the next night, when he’d enter with a 7.1% chance of winning in a game that was already out of hand.

The Pirates need to be using Mlodzinski in closer games, which they can’t do if his long-relief appearances are being scheduled.

The practice of scheduling relievers is flawed in general, but it would make more sense for Bidois to enter the games where the Pirates are down 5-1 than it would for Bidois to have priority over Mlodzinski for the 2-1 deficits.

And while Dotel has been one of the more promising relievers, it would make more sense to have Mlodzinski pitching in the 50% Win Probability games, with Dotel pitching the scheduled long relief outings early in his career.

The worst part of this is the Pirates are locked into this piggyback plan with Mlodzinski.

On Monday night, he threw 75 pitches, which is the equivalent of a start. He won’t be available until at least the next start by Jones, who also threw 75 pitches on Monday night.

In order for the Pirates to break this routine, they’ll need to go short-handed in the bullpen for a few games while Mlodzinski rests up, and then they’ll need to get him out of the piggybacking role that is attached to Jones starts.

That’s a short-term, low price cost that would be outweighed by the benefits of freeing up one of the best pitchers on the staff to be used as a reliever in higher leverage situations.

The Pirates didn’t necessarily make a mistake moving Mlodzinski to the bullpen.

They did make a mistake moving him into a meaningless piggyback role.

They should un-do that mistake as soon as they can.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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Yohe is a Pittsburgh Penguins writer, but doesn’t need to cover the game of baseball to see the tendency from Davis. I personally haven’t been watching much baseball over the last year. Live scouting is my strength, which is why I’ve been trying to get a fresh look at the game by focusing on the statistical analysis surrounding the sport.

This means I probably haven’t seen Davis play since 2024.

That said, while I wouldn’t choose the same frustrated words as Yohe’s tweet, it sounds like nothing has changed with Davis’ approach at the plate from what I noticed throughout his minor league career.

The Mentality of a Hitter/Pitcher/Catcher

Hitters need to have a certain mentality to succeed in the Majors.

It’s best described as reactive.

Some hitters do well at being proactive in their reactive state, which is how you get strong selective swings for power. Other hitters get too reactive and have no power to their game, with only defensive swings geared at making contact.

Jared Triolo is an example of a hitter who is too reactive, to the point his swing has no power. This extreme reactive state is the same approach he takes on the field to be an elite defender.

Davis is on the other end of the spectrum, with a swing that is extreme proactive. Just like Triolo, Davis has the same approach on the defensive side of the game, where an aggressive approach works behind the plate.

Pitchers need to have the opposite mentality of hitters. A pitcher needs to be proactive. They control the pace of any at-bat, and they operate with the element of surprise. Pitchers need to throw in a way that aggressively attacks the hitter, forcing discomfort from the reactive state.

When the Pirates drafted Davis first overall in 2021, he was projected to be a power hitter behind the plate who might have questions about his defense. The opposite has come true. His defense is currently his strength, and his offense has struggled.

Defensively, a catcher needs to have the same mentality as a pitcher. The proactive, always aggressive attack approach from Davis is a complement to pitchers behind the plate. If a pitcher gets a bit reactive, and loses his edge, Davis can help keep them on track. He doesn’t seem like a guy who loses that attack mentality easily.

This becomes a problem at the plate.

Proactivity at the Plate

If you’re proactive and attacking aggressively against MLB pitchers, you’re doing those pitchers a favor.

By committing to an aggressive swing, you’re attempting to match power with power. An opposing pitcher only has to scale back their own power to get you out in front. This is why Yohe notices the tendency for Davis to attempt to pull the ball so often.

Looking at the pitch-level stats for MLB batters with more than 100 plate appearances this season, I noticed something interesting.

Davis gets attacked with fastballs at a 55% rate, which places him 26th out of 339 qualified batters. However, the average velocity for most hitters in this range of extreme fastball usage is 94 MPH or above. Davis has a 92.9 MPH average velocity, which is fifth slowest among those 339 hitters.

Among those same hitters, Davis ranks 41st in fast swing rate, and 36th in bat speed. He’s one of the consistently fastest swingers in the league, and opposing pitchers are combating his aggressive attack simply by taking a bit off their fastball and letting him get out in front of the pitch.

Davis has a 7-degree attack direction on the pull side, which is the most extreme pull swing on the Pirates, and the 39th most aggressive pull swing tendency of the previous qualified group. He’s getting out in front consistently.

The problem is that this aggressive approach isn’t easy to change. It’s not a mechanical adjustment. It’s a mindset adjustment.

Davis was able to go his entire career challenging opposing pitchers with an aggressive attack. He did it in college to become a first overall pick, based on scouts mistaking his attack mindset for projectable power potential in the big leagues.

He kept it up in the lower levels of the minors, and was even able to maintain good numbers in the upper levels across small sample sizes. Davis had a .207 average in 136 plate appearances in Double-A in 2022, then put it all together in 187 plate appearances in 2023. That earned him a quick promotion to Indianapolis. His numbers in Triple-A were good, and he didn’t have the issues that would creep up in the big leagues.

That just shows the massive talent gap between Triple-A and the Majors.

A hitter like Davis, who does have legitimate power, can challenge pitchers in Double-A and Triple-A and succeed at a high rate. The talent at the big league level is a different story. There are fewer pitchers who can be shaken off their game, and most pitchers have a higher success rate with controlling their velocity and location.

The pitchers that Davis was crushing in Double-A are guys who hope they might get a cup of coffee in the big leagues one day. The pitchers Davis was crushing in Triple-A are depth options, or at best, back-of-the-rotation starters for a few seasons.

Davis has had success against legitimate big league starters. Who can forget the two home run game against Shohei Ohtani? But those moments tend to be the exception, and not the norm.

The norm tends to be getting out ahead of a pitch with an extremely aggressive uppercut swing that leads to high pull rates and a 15% popup rate.

On the other extreme, Bryan Reynolds sees the highest fastball velocity of all Pirates hitters at an average of 94.7 MPH. He also sees the 20th lowest fastball rate in the game at 39.9%.

Reynolds is a good contact hitter who can get proactive-reactive with a well-timed power swing.

He also is selective on pitches outside of the zone, with the 25th lowest chase rate of all qualified hitters. Opposing pitchers only attack him in the zone 41.5% of the time. Reynolds might not swing on outside pitches, but he’s dangerous inside the zone, with an 89.5% contact rate. His attack direction is more neutral, working the middle of the field for a higher probability outcome of a ball landing in play.

That might be why opposing pitchers dial it up against Reynolds when they need to attack with the fastball. They’re likely trying to overpower him, as working around his selective, high-contact bat is not an option, and a slower pitch could allow Reynolds to turn aggressive and bust out his power.

In a way, Davis was like Reynolds when he was in the minors. He was a hitter that opposing pitchers needed to dial up against in order to attempt to overpower him. That played directly into his game of trying to overpower the power being thrown to him.

MLB pitchers don’t pitch to Davis like they pitch to Reynolds. They attack Davis in the zone 45.5% of the time, which is 10th overall in the above qualified group. He chases around 32.5% of the time, which is around league average. However, his overall contact rate is 78%. He does make contact in the zone at a rate close to Reynolds. But the outcomes aren’t anywhere close to Reynolds.

Major League pitchers aren’t trying to overpower Davis or work around him. They’re attacking him directly, but forcing him to beat them by taking something off his swing.

A Change Could Do You Good?

The problem with changing the mindset for Davis, and this is a problem that also exists with Triolo, is that you risk losing the defensive advantage.

It’s difficult to compartmentalize a mindset for situations that are minutes apart.

Triolo goes from being ultra-reactive on the field to carrying the same ultra-reactive mindset to the plate moments later. If he becomes less reactive at the plate, he might improve with less weak, defensive contact. However, he also might remove the mindset that works so well with his approach on defense.

Davis is on the attack with every pitch behind the plate, helping to keep his pitcher on task with the aggressive approach. Then, he steps to the plate a few moments later and he’s still in attack mode on every pitch.

The difference between the two players is that Triolo has always been good defensively due to his reactive approach on the field. He carries that reactive approach over to the plate, and that approach doesn’t work. Davis generates his aggressive approach from the offensive side, crafted from years of attacking weaker pitchers attempting to overpower him. He’s carried this mentality over to his defense behind the plate, which has improved that side of the ball.

The challenge with any up-the-middle player in baseball is the same.

Catcher. Shortstop. Second Base. Center field.

They’re all expected to switch their mindsets in a moment between what is needed for good defense on the field (an extreme reactive state) and good offense at the plate (a more proactive-reactive approach). Even some of the better players can’t switch between the two on command, and end up carrying the same approach on both sides of the ball.

Brandon Lowe has rare power up the middle, but his defense is traditionally a weakness.

Oneil Cruz has some of the best power in the game, but has shown horrible defense at shortstop and center field.

Both players lack the ability to sit back and react for a long period of time on the field. Their more proactive tendencies play well at the plate, with power good enough to hide traditionally lower averages. They also lead to lapses on the field where they’re not as reactive as they should, causing either player to get caught off guard.

Davis follows a similar trend to Cruz and Lowe, except he’s aggressive to a fault. He also plays the only defensive position on the field where you need to maintain a proactive, aggressive mindset the entire time you’re on the field. That allows his approach to benefit the defensive side.

You could theorize that someone like Cruz benefits from needing to keep his mindset in a more reactive mode in the field. And if that’s the theory, then Lowe’s situation becomes interesting. Lowe is having the best defensive season of his career this year, which is an extreme reversal from the -14 defensive runs saved at second base last season. His best defensive season is also one of his best seasons for power production, and one of his best on-base seasons in years. Perhaps Lowe has found the perfect balance of reactions and aggression on both sides.

Davis has not found the balance. Unless he can compartmentalize his aggression at the plate, any change he makes runs the risk of taking away what is working for him on defense.

A Modern Approach to Scouting Catchers

There’s a reason a two-way catcher is so rare in the big leagues.

It’s a rare ability to go from constant attack to a more reactive state at the plate in a matter of minutes. That has to be the biggest, most extreme mindset flip in the game.

This also might be why Buster Posey went from being one of the rare elite two-way catchers to a President of Baseball Operations. Posey’s ability to instantaneously scale his mind and energy-flow is something that would naturally carry over to an executive position.

Perhaps that’s how catchers should be scouted going forward.

Forget the old dreams of a hard-nosed Crash Davis type who means nothing but old school business behind the plate, while relying on platitudes and catch phrases to represent his knowledge of the game. Catchers need to be future General Managers.

If your catcher can’t run a team one day from behind a desk, how can he run a team from behind the plate?

I haven’t seen a Pirates catcher since Jacob Stallings have that type of mindset potential. It’s no surprise to me that Stallings is now a coach.

Davis, meanwhile, seems like he was scouted with dreams of being more of a Crash Davis.

Ironically enough, that’s what he’s becoming.

A great catcher behind the plate, with the ability to get his pitchers in line and maintain a steady attack against opposing batters.

And power that will only ever lead to records in the minor leagues.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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One week ago, I started this feature on PiratesProspects.com with the daily, weekly, and monthly awards being determined by RE24 results, exclusively. I’ve been incorporating aspects of WPA and fantasy baseball scoring to refine the RE24 results with bonus points.

Hit a solo home run in the 4th inning of a 4-0 game? RE24 gives you 1.0 runs. Hit a solo home run in the bottom of the 9th of a tie game? RE24 gives you the same 1.0 runs. Both plays are valued the same, but the importance of the 9th inning walk-off is a more significant run than the solo homer early in the game to expand a lead.

Throw six shutout innings with two strikeouts? RE24 is going to give a pitcher credit for keeping runs from scoring, and for recording outs, even if the defense played a big role. Throw six shutout innings with ten strikeouts? RE24 doesn’t differentiate the strikeouts from groundouts. The new bonus points give a boost to each strikeout, recognizing the pitcher’s unassisted out.

Likewise, home runs are also receiving a boost, recognizing the batter’s unassisted run. A single that scores runners from second and third can be more valuable than a solo home run. The batter who hit the single benefitted from the situation. The batter who hit the home run had the bigger individual play.

RE24 recognizes how a player performed according to the situation. The new scoring changes are the beginning of blending in the impact of individual performances and situational performances.

I would expect more changes to this system in the future, until I get to a point where I’ve got a blended scoring system that I feel doesn’t need any more tinkering.

For now, here are the Pirates Prospects Players of the Week for the week ending 6/14/2026.

Players of the Week 6/14/26

Khristian Curtis and Nick Cimillo are the Pirates Prospects players of the week for the week ending 6/14.

Curtis, the Pitcher of the Week, threw 5.2 shutout innings in his debut with Indianapolis. He allowed one hit, two walks, and struck out ten batters in the process. The Triple-A debut produced a much better result than any start Curtis saw in Double-A this season.

With one of the highest strikeout totals in the minor league system, Curtis had been hurt by home runs and free passes in Double-A. He’s got one of the best arms in the upper levels, and if he continues handling Triple-A this well, he could emerge as a MLB bullpen option by the end of the season.

Cimillo, the Batter of the Week, went 5-for-15 with a double, home run, five RBIs, and seven walks. The highlight of his week came when he hit a grand slam on Wednesday, to help fuel an 11-1 Indianapolis blowout victory. It was the fifth home run of the season for Cimillo.

This week saw an update to the Draft Pick Tracker on Pirates Prospects, including a sortable career stat column. Cimillo’s 57 career minor league home runs lead all Pirates draft picks post-2019. The 2019 players ahead of him include Matt Gorski, Jase Bowen, and Blake Sabol, who have all reached the Majors. The power from Cimillo could get him a cup of coffee one day.

Individual Level Standouts

Indianapolis swept the overall awards this week. Here’s a look at the best performers from each affiliate.

Altoona Pitcher: Connor Wietgrefe

Stats: 6.0 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 2 BB, 8 K, 0 HR

The 2024 7th round pick has been one of the best pitchers in Altoona this year. Wietgrefe has shown an increase in his strikeout totals in recent starts, picking up eight in six shutout innings this week. That follows a big week last week, where he combined for 13 strikeouts in 10 innings across two starts. He ranks fourth in the minor league system in strikeouts, with a 16 strikeout gap between him and Curtis.

Altoona Batter: Duce Gourson

Stats: 7-for-22, 6 R, 4 2B, 5 RBI, 2 SB, 4 BB

Gourson showed off his extra base hit power this week with four doubles, including two shots to the wall in Altoona on Saturday night. He also drew four walks this week, and has a 17.2% walk rate this season. On top of that, he added two steals, giving him 14 this season. Gourson gets some prospect ranking attention for his combination of power potential, speed, and on-base ability from the infield. He’s split this season between second and third base.

Greensboro Pitcher: Carlson Reed

Stats: 5.0 IP, 5 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 3 BB, 5 K, 1 HR

This is the third time this season that Reed has been the pitcher of the week for Greensboro. His results haven’t been consistent. He has a 5.44 ERA in 49.2 innings on the season, impacted by a 12.2% walk rate. When he’s on, he’s a shutdown starter who strikes out a batter an inning and doesn’t allow many runs to cross the plate. That’s the version that showed up this week, overcoming a home run and walks to hold his opponents to one run in five innings.

Greensboro Batter: Jhonny Severino

Stats: 6-for-19, 2 R, 2B, 2 HR, 5 RBI, SB, 2 BB

Severino hit two home runs this week, extending his season total to 13. He’s now three shy of the career high of 16 that he set in 2024 between the FCL and Low-A. The Pirates added Severino at the 2023 trade deadline for Carlos Santana. He’s shown power potential from a young age since day one, but his hitting and on-base abilities have left that power doing all of the work. His average is improved this season, and he has an OBP above .300 for the first time above rookie ball. Those are encouraging signs to go with the continued power production.

Bradenton Pitcher: Reinold Navarro

Stats: 3.0 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 5 BB, 4 K, 0 HR

Navarro has one of the best arms in the lower levels, and he’s more intriguing as a lefty at age 19. Signed for $270,000 in 2024, he’s made a quick ascent to Low-A, where he has a 2.43 ERA in 33.1 innings this year. His 37.9% strikeout rate trails only top prospect Seth Hernandez. The downside is Navarro’s 25.5% walk rate. His stuff is hard to hit, allowing him to pitch through the walks for now. Navarro sits 96 MPH with his fastball, and has elite swing and miss potential on all three of his pitches, including a slider and a changeup.

Bradenton Batter: Eddie Rynders

Stats: 7-for-18, 4 R, 2B, 3B, HR, 4 RBI, BB

Rynders has a big week at the plate in Bradenton. The 2024 fourth round pick hit his fourth home run of the season on Sunday, while adding a double on a 3-for-3 day. That fueled Bradenton’s 10-3 win, and made Rynders the player of the day. He also added a triple and two RBIs earlier in the week. Drafted out of the prep ranks, Rynders has shown flashes of potential the last two seasons, but has yet to consistently put up numbers like he’s shown this week. He’s in his age 20 season, so right now the flashes of potential are more promising than the overall results.

FCL Pirates Pitcher: Robinson Smith

Stats: 4.0 IP, 3 H, 2 R, 1 ER, 0 BB, 5 K, 0 HR

Smith received the biggest pitcher bonus by the Pirates during the 2025 international signing period. Signed out of Australia, the 6’ 4” right-hander has been gradually increasing his innings in the FCL this season. His last two starts have combined for one earned run in eight innings, with nine strikeouts. This was the second week in a row that he looked shutdown across four innings.

FCL Pirates Batter: Carl Calixte

Stats: 5-for-14, 3 R, 2B, HR, 3 RBI, 2 SB, 4 BB

Signed as an international free agent in 2024 out of Haiti, Calixte has gotten off to a great start in the FCL this season. He’s batting .340/.436/.553 with two home runs and five stolen bases. He added the second home run and two of those stolen bases this past week. Calixte made his debut in the FCL last season, only putting up a .519 OPS with no homers and one steal in 77 plate appearances. The 19-year-old has shown across-the-board improvements in his return to the level.

DSL Pirates Pitcher: Ronaldo Serrano

Stats: 3.0 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 0 BB, 2 K, 0 HR

One of the smaller bonus signings of the recent period, Serrano made his first career start this week. He threw three shutout innings, striking out two and allowing one hit. He signed out of the Dominican Republic at age 19, which is later on the international side. The Pirates must like his arm if he’s getting early looks as a starter.

DSL Pirates Batter: Gilbert Ramirez

Stats: 5-for-9, 4 R, 2 2B, 4 RBI, 2 BB

Last week from Ramirez was led by a three hit day on Tuesday, where he also walked twice. The catcher was signed out of Venezuela during this year’s signing period. He’s got three doubles and a 1.032 OPS in his first six games. He’s also shown positive results in catching base runners in these early games of his career.

One More Report

Derek Diamond was promoted to Triple-A this week, and picked up where he left off in Altoona. The 25-year-old relief prospect threw three shutout innings across two appearances, while striking out four.

Diamond is on the older side for a prospect, but there’s a reason for the higher age. He missed a lot of time with injuries in 2025, and spent his first two full-seasons as a starting pitcher in the lower levels.

The results as a starter weren’t good, and Diamond was moved to the bullpen in 2025. His injuries derailed that move. He had some issues early this season, but finally reached Altoona and didn’t allow a single run across ten innings. That came with a 40.6% strikeout rate and no walks.

Between the top two levels, Diamond hasn’t allowed a run in 13 innings across seven appearances. He’s struck out 17 and hasn’t allowed a walk.

The Pirates need bullpen help in the Majors this season, and if Diamond continues this pace, he could easily emerge as a sleeper option by the end of the season.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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The top 10 minor league plays of the day.

Every night, the site will gather the top ten plays…

…you know what?

It’s probably easier to just show you.

Here are the Plays of the Day from Saturday, June 13th, 2026:

You can also go to PiratesProspects.com every day to find the Player of the Day in the system, including level-by-level breakdowns. Here are the results from yesterday, with Connor Wietgrefe’s six shutout, eight strikeout performance in Altoona leading the way.

You can also check out the Scores page for the daily top performers and Statcast leaders, along with live updates while the games are taking place. I wrote about Carlos Mateo earlier this week in the Players of the Week article. Check out those velocities in his 1.1 shutout innings from the FCL on Saturday morning.

The new Plays of the Day video will appear on the homepage of Pirates Prospects every morning, and will stay up until the night games begin. You can also get alerts when the videos upload by following the Pirates Prospects YouTube channel.

What’s fun for me about this new daily video process — which is mostly automated like everything else on the new site — is that I’ve started to make some adjustments to the Past Results scoring system. The basis is still RE24, but I’m starting to add rules which address some of the weak parts of RE24. Those rules will eventually lead to a unique scoring system on the site, rather than a RE24-exclusive approach.

Every day, I’ll be fine tuning that system further.

Meanwhile, the upcoming week will see another big addition to the site. Hopefully. The data download for this project took six hours, and I might need a week to ensure it’s all calculating correctly before it goes live.

On that note…

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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After taking a year off from prospect reporting and evaluation to improve my education and skills in other areas, I’m not the best person to evaluate prospect rankings at the moment. I don’t have rankings of my own, and I’ve only been following the system from a statistical standpoint for a little over a month as I’ve been building the new PiratesProspects.com.

Despite being out of the ranking game, there were three players who stood out to me as not being rated higher when I was going through the top prospect lists.

Below, I’m going to detail each of those players, what stood out to me, and their positions in the top prospect rankings.

Lonnie White Jr.

Lonnie White Jr. has been one of the best stories in the Pirates’ minor league system so far this season. He entered this week with 13 homers between Greensboro and Altoona, along with a combined .296/.405/.571 line.

Unfortunately, he ends the week on the injured list in Altoona.

Signed out of high school in 2021, away from a commitment to be a two-sport athlete with Penn State, White’s career has been plagued by injuries. He hasn’t had more than 375 plate appearances in a season, and only the last two seasons have seen him go over the 300 PA mark each year.

Missing time at a young age has a negative impact on development. Consistent injuries will chase evaluators away, which might explain why White didn’t receive much consideration in the rankings. The stats from White, as recently as last year’s .220/.329/.394 line in Greensboro, represented his lack of development. He showed flashes of power, but nothing consistent.

This year, White has been showing consistent production, and some of the best power in the system. That started in a more hitter-friendly environment in Greensboro, but has continued in his jump to a more neutral environment in Altoona.

Despite this, White was left out of the prospect rankings. FanGraphs, which extends to a top 50, only had him as an afterthought for his power. Baseball America didn’t have him in their top 30. MLB Pipeline doesn’t update their top 30, but didn’t have him in during the pre-season creation, and he wasn’t added to replace graduations.

White’s omission was the biggest surprise to me. It would make sense if people were chased away by the injury history, which is still impacting him every season. You could justify it by raising concern with his 30.9% strikeout rate with Altoona. That high strikeout rate also comes with a 13.8% walk rate and a high average this season. That’s all in addition to his rare power, which is finally starting to translate consistently to games.

What stands out to me is the development of the overall game, and the more consistent power. Even through the injuries, White is finally developing in a positive direction, which wasn’t happening in the past.

Maybe he’s not a top ten prospect, but White is absolutely one of the top 30 prospects in the system, and arguably inside the top 20 if you discount the injury history.

Bralyn Brazoban

The Pirates paid $2 million to sign Bralyn Brazoban as the headline of their 2024 international signing class. His first two seasons in pro ball have been disappointing, with an OPS of .485 his rookie season, and a .586 OPS between the DSL and FCL last season.

Brazoban is still young, only in his age 19 season this year. He started this year in the FCL, and his numbers have done a complete 180, with a .300/.383/.571 line in 81 plate appearances. That was enough to get him promoted to Bradenton this week.

The most encouraging thing has been the emergence of power. Brazoban didn’t have a single home run the previous two seasons. He has two so far this season, in a league that is known as one of the most pitcher-friendly environments in the minors. Brazoban also has six triples, after putting up four combined over the last two seasons. In limited Statcast data, he’s averaging a 94.8 MPH exit velocity — among the best in the system — with a max velocity of 110.9 MPH.

There are some red flags. His strikeout rate is at 34.6%, which is a problem at the lowest levels. He’s also benefitting from a .463 BABIP, which probably isn’t sustainable.

What stands out to me is the emergence of power in his game at a young age. He’s far from a polished prospect, but Brazoban is starting to show positive development after two years of struggles. At worst, he’s a sleeper in the 30-50 range, and at best, he’s a sleeper inside the top 30.

Hyun Seung Lee

The Pirates signed Hyun Seung Lee out of Korea for $160,000 in 2025. I didn’t even know who he was entering this season, as his signing and career came during my off year. He has stood out to me simply for his performance over the last month while I’ve been following the system. That performance has also earned him a recent promotion to Bradenton.

Lee was batting .321/.426/.625 in the FCL, with three home runs, three triples, and two doubles. That’s a considerable boost in power output over his .776 OPS in the DSL last season. The 18-year-old shortstop has since moved up to A-ball, where he went 3-for-11 with a home run so far this week.

Baseball America actually had Lee as their number 30 prospect, so he did get some recognition. He wasn’t mentioned at all in the FanGraphs top 50, so that recognition isn’t universal. I’m writing about him here because his results in the FCL stood out.

The time spent in Bradenton will give a better indicator of how Lee fares as a top prospect. He’s very young for that level, and in a limited amount of 35 plate appearances there have been some red flags. One is a 37.1% strikeout rate. There’s also a reduction of power, with two extra base hits so far. I wouldn’t expect him to put it all together immediately. If he did at this age, he’d be ranked much higher than sneaking inside a top 30.

What stands out the most is his 92.8 MPH exit velocity and 107.1 MPH max velocity. He’s replicated those results in Bradenton, though his launch angle and contact rates have declined in the jump higher. Lee will be a guy to watch in Bradenton the rest of the season. Even if he goes back down and mashes the rest of the year in the FCL, his anticipated jump to Bradenton full-time next year at the age of 19 will be one of the better lower-level stories.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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The Pittsburgh Pirates have the fifth overall pick, and they also have the largest bonus pool in the draft at $19,130,700.

After failing to sign last year’s 50th overall pick, Angel Cervantes, the Pirates received the 51st pick in this year’s draft as compensation. That pick comes with $1,938,100 added to their bonus pool. They also received the 34th overall pick for their Competitive Balance round A selection, which adds $2,897,400. The fifth overall pick is worth $8,336,500, which would be the second highest bonus in team history if the Pirates went full-slot.

Those three picks alone give the Pirates more spending power than 18 teams in the draft.

You can check out the draft slot values for every pick on the Pirates Prospects Draft Pick Signing Tracker, which will also keep track of the draft and signing period.

I have some thoughts on the upcoming draft, but first, I want to share an update to the signing tracker.

Yesterday, I completed an update to the Draft Pick Signing Tracker. If you go to that page, you will now find career stats for every player the Pirates drafted since 2012, which was the year the current bonus pool system was implemented.

The career stats are filtered down by Batters and Pitchers, and include both Signed and Unsigned players. You can sort by draft year, or see the entire 14-year history in a single chart.

That history isn’t great.

The Pirates have drafted 212 position players since 2012. Only 36 have made the Majors (17%), from the single plate appearance of John Bormann, to the 4346 plate appearances of 2013 sixth round pick Adam Frazier.

The 17% mark seems about league average. However, the success rate of the hitters who made the Majors tells a story of why the Pirates have struggled for so long. Only one hitter in that entire group has an MLB OPS over .800. That hitter is Austin Meadows, who the Pirates traded away in 2018 before his MLB career took off.

Only six other hitters have a career OPS above .700. One of those is current rookie Konnor Griffin. Two others are unsigned picks Paul DeJong (2014, 38th round) and Jake McCarthy (2015, 23rd round). The other three are Jordan Luplow, Connor Joe, and Frazier.

No disrespect to those final three players, but all three had careers as bench players, and at best, role player starters. That’s not a great example of success over a 14-year draft period.

DeJong is the only drafted player with over 100 home runs. Meadows and Frazier join him as the only batters with over 50 home runs.

The pitching side looks a bit better, but not by much.

The best pitcher so far is a guy the Pirates didn’t sign in 2012: Walker Buehler. That year’s 14th round pick leads all Pirates draft picks in strikeouts, and has one of the best ERAs of all drafted pitchers.

Paul Skenes is already high on the list, and will no doubt end up the best. He’s currently fifth overall in strikeouts, despite having by far the lowest inning total in the top five. He also has the highest ERA of any pitcher with over 100 innings. The only pitcher with a better ERA at any inning total is 2012 unsigned first rounder Mark Appel, who only threw 10.1 MLB innings.

There are some encouraging signs from the current pitching staff.

Braxton Ashcraft ranks second in ERA among pitchers with 100+ innings. Carmen Mlodzinski ranks third. Jared Jones ranks seventh. Mitch Keller ranks 12th. Bubba Chandler has under 100 career innings, but he’s in line with Keller around the 4.50 mark, which is slightly below league-average.

There are only five pitchers drafted during this 14-year span with an ERA below 4.00 and 100+ innings in the Majors. Skenes, Ashcraft, and Mlodzinski are three. Unsigned picks Buehler and 2013 40th rounder Bryan Baker are the others.

In terms of strikeouts, only three pitchers have struck out more than 500 batters during this time. Buehler ranks first, with Keller second, and Chad Kuhl third. Unsigned 2016 41st overall pick Nick Lodolo is fourth, Skenes is fifth, and unsigned 2015 32nd rounder Cole Irvin is sixth — rounding out the only others above 400 strikeouts. JT Brubaker, Shane Baz, and Baker are the only others with above 250 strikeouts.

If you feel like wasting some time this weekend taking a trip down draft memory lane, check out the new stats section on the Draft Pick Signing Tracker.

The same feature was added to the International Signing Tracker, which shows the career results of signings since 2021. The majority of these players are minor leaguers, with only Esmerlyn Valdez making his MLB debut. Antwone Kelly is expected to join him this weekend, after leading all Pirates international pitchers during this timeframe in strikeouts. Both were signed in 2021, reflecting the longer path to the Majors for international signings.

But this article is about the draft, and I wanted to bring up the Pirates’ history to highlight a concern with next month’s draft.

The Pirates don’t have a great draft history.

In fact, it was one of the major failings of General Manager Ben Cherington’s rebuild to make zero changes to the drafting process during the entire rebuild period. The scouting department that resided over the drafts since 2012, including scouting director Joe DelliCarri, were kept in place for the 2020-2023 drafts.

That included first overall pick Henry Davis, top ten overall first rounders Nick Gonzales and Termarr Johnson, and a lucky lottery ball that led to Skenes. Even in the Skenes draft, the Pirates didn’t decide until 20 minutes before the pick.

Cherington finally made a change before the 2024 draft, adding Justin Horowitz from the Boston Red Sox as the new scouting director to replace DelliCarri.

Horowitz oversaw two drafts. The first one led to taking Griffin in 2024. The second one led to Seth Hernandez in 2025. Griffin is regarded as one of the most promising young players in the game, after previously being the top prospect in the game. Hernandez is now emerging as one of the best pitching prospects in the game, only in his first full season.

The problem here? Horowitz was signed away this past offseason by the Washington Nationals, becoming their Assistant General Manager.

The bigger problem is that the Pirates chose to go with no replacement.

Assistant General Manager Kevan Graves oversaw Horowitz the last two seasons, and will now oversee the 2026 draft without a scouting director in place. The Pirates plan to search for a permanent solution after the 2026 draft, but they’ll enter this draft with the most money to spend out of any team, and no traditional scouting director.

I have a lot of respect for Graves, who is one of the brightest minds I’ve encountered in the game. The problem here lies with the resources of time and energy.

Graves was overseeing Horowitz the last two seasons, but Horowitz was still putting a lot of energy into overseeing the scouting process. The Pirates are expecting Graves to pick up that entire slack, increasing his time and energy into that one area. Even if Graves dedicated 100% of his time and energy to the draft this year, the Pirates would still have less time and energy spent on the draft without a full-time scouting director added to the mix.

Graves does have people pitching in, from Assistant General Manager Steve Sanders, to DelliCarri, who is still in the organization. However, this isn’t a change from the resources available to Horowitz.

The draft is probably the most important aspect of the game for a small market team like the Pirates. Especially during a rebuild.

During Cherington’s rebuild, he retained a scouting director who had a long track record of poor results. After four drafts inside the top ten picks, Cherington finally made his first move on the draft front, adding Horowitz. That move so far looks like it was a good one, based on the early results from Griffin and Hernandez.

Yet, Cherington didn’t follow up on that move. He didn’t try to retain Horowitz as an Assistant General Manager. He didn’t replace Horowitz with a new scouting director. Graves is being put in a tough position, because he’s overseeing a draft with more money to spend than any previous draft, and fewer resources to dedicate toward how to spend that money.

The decision to go into the upcoming draft with no scouting director is inexplicable. Horowitz joined the Nationals on October 24th, and the Pirates likely had earlier notice that he could be leaving. They had an entire offseason to find a replacement for Graves to oversee, and instead, they just dumped the extra workload onto Graves.

That’s the biggest trend under Cherington as General Manager. Inaction, followed by the expectation for individual players or front office employees to go above and beyond to make up for the inaction.

This trend happened with the draft twice, where Cherington waited four drafts to hire his own scouting director, and is now skipping having a scouting direction in an important year.

It happened with the international period, where Cherington didn’t make a change until five years into his tenure, again despite a horrible international signing track record that existed when he took over.

And the free agency spending this past offseason was Cherington’s first real attempt at putting a winner on the field in seven years as General Manager, despite having Skenes for the previous two offseasons.

It’s too late now to add a scouting director for the upcoming draft. That should have been a priority last October, four months before the high school and college seasons began.

Next month, the Pirates will send Graves to the podium short-handed, operating with the biggest bonus pool in the draft. The Pirates finally had some draft momentum with Griffin and Hernandez, and they could have continued that momentum with the largest bonus pool this year. Instead, they fumbled the momentum away with continued inaction, in the area where depleted resources hurt a small market team the most.

If there’s any bright spot, it would be difficult to do worse than the history before Horowitz.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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The most significant move in the system came on Wednesday, when Oneil Cruz was placed on the 10-day IL with non-displaced fractures of the fourth and fifth metacarpals in his left hand. Billy Cook was promoted to take his spot on the active roster.

Rafael Flores was also promoted to the Majors temporarily, with Henry Davis going on the paternity list. In other big league catcher news, Joey Bart was sent to Bradenton on Wednesday to start a rehab assignment.

Carson Fulmer was also traded to the Seattle Mariners for cash.

The Pirates went on to win 9-8 in dramatic comeback fashion on Wednesday, capped off by home runs from Tyler Callihan and a massive bat flip from Spencer Horwitz.

Below is the breakdown of all of the promotions and injury updates throughout the minor league system this week. You can catch the latest moves on the Transactions page at PiratesProspects.com.

Promoted to Indianapolis

Derek Berg, C - What’s interesting about Berg is that he’s posted the best numbers of his career in Double-A. In 175 plate appearances across the last two seasons, he’s combined to hit .299/.371/.481 with six home runs. The home runs all came this season. It’s unclear right now whether Berg’s promotion is temporary or permanent. The Pirates placed Henry Davis on the paternity list on Wednesday, and called up Rafael Flores from Triple-A. This left Indianapolis short a catcher. Berg made his Triple-A debut on Wednesday afternoon, going 0-for-4 with a run scored.

Khristian Curtis, RHP - He’s got one of the most electric arms in the system, but hasn’t translated that to results. Curtis had a 4.73 ERA in 53.1 innings with Altoona, striking out 67 and walking 25. I’m looking forward to him playing in a league that has Statcast metrics, to track where his fastball is sitting during competition. The Pirates need bullpen help, and it would be a smart move to start moving Curtis to the bullpen, giving him an easier and quicker path to the Majors in the process.

Keiner Delgado, INF - The Pirates added Delgado in 2024 when they traded JT Brubaker to the Yankees. He’s hit mostly around .240 with the Pirates’ affiliates since the trade, but shows a good ability to get on base, along with speed that has led to 59 stolen bases since the start of the 2024 season. He already added his first steal with Indianapolis on Wednesday afternoon, going 1-for-4 with a walk while batting second in the order.

Derek Diamond, RHP - After injuries shortened his playing time over the last season, Diamond made the move to Altoona this year, where he also completed his full-time move to the bullpen. A struggling starter as recently as 2024, the move to the bullpen has completely changed the outlook for the 2022 6th rounder. Diamond didn’t allow a run in ten innings with Altoona, striking out 40.6% of batters, and walking none. He had an .063 average against. If you’re looking for a sleeper who could help the Pirates’ bullpen this season, he’s going to be a fun guy to watch in Triple-A.

Jaden Woods, LHP - Spending his third season in Altoona, Wood finally took a step forward this year. He posted a 3.16 ERA in 25.2 innings, which was led by an increase in his strikeout rate to 36.5%. That was the best mark of his career since his pro debut in A-ball in 2023. Woods has shown some control problems, but he’s a difficult lefty to hit, and the new strikeout ability could help overcome the control. He had a rough start in his debut with Indianapolis on Tuesday night, and based on his history, it might take him some time to get adjusted to the new level.

Promoted to Altoona

Carlos Caro, INF - Caro has been an impressive hitter for most of his career. He had a setback last season in A-ball, but he’s been a .300 hitter with a high OBP and some pop in his bat for most of his minor league career. The 21-year-old hit .324/.410/.566 in 100 plate appearances this year between both A-ball levels, showing a bounce-back from last season’s .422 OPS in Bradenton. He combined for five homers, which ties his season high from 2023 in the DSL. The jump to Double-A will be the biggest test for his hitting and on-base abilities. Caro went 0-for-1 with three walks in his debut on Wednesday.

Shalin Polanco, OF - The top international signing in 2021, and receiver of one of the largest international bonuses in Pirates’ history, Polanco saw his career stall in A-ball the last four seasons. He didn’t exactly hit his way to Altoona, batting .204/.285/.377 in Greensboro. That was similar to his 2025 season at the same level. He did hit 19 homers combined the last two seasons, but power is often discounted in Greensboro. The Pirates are giving Polanco a challenge with the move to Double-A. Polanco went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts on Wednesday in his debut.

Connor Oliver, LHP - Returning to Greensboro for a second season, the 24-year-old Oliver took a huge step forward. In 43.2 innings, the lefty had a 2.27 ERA and a 29.2% strikeout rate. His ERA ranks second in the minor league system among qualified relievers, and he has the fourth most strikeouts. Walks have been an issue in his career, but his stuff looks more electric, and he’s cut down on home runs. With all of the promotions from Altoona to Indianapolis, Oliver should find plenty of innings in Double-A, even if he spends time working out of the bullpen.

Promoted to Greensboro

Dylan Palmer, 2B - Taken in the 11th round last season, Palmer leads the entire Pirates’ organization with 27 stolen bases. He was batting .272/.362/.344 in 215 plate appearances with Bradenton before the promotion, showing good contact and plate patience to go with the elite base running abilities.

Josh Tate, OF - The eighth round pick in 2025 already got off to a good start in Greensboro. In his first game on Tuesday night, Tate hit a two-run homer. In his second game on Wednesday, he hit another homer. That gives him four on the season. He hit .283/.360/.358 in 214 plate appearances with Bradenton this year. Power wasn’t part of his game, but he showed good hitting ability and plate patience in the start of his first full season.

Promoted to Bradenton

Bralyn Brazoban, OF - He’s one of the more interesting players in the lower levels in my book. Brazoban was the top international signing in 2024, but has seen a slow start to his career in rookie ball the last two seasons. That changed this year, when he hit .300/.383/.571 in the FCL. The most encouraging thing was a boost in power, with his first two home runs, and six triples. He got off to a good start in Bradenton on Tuesday night, going 2-for-4 in his debut. The Pirates have moved guys up from the FCL to A-ball for temporary looks, but Brazoban did enough in rookie ball to earn a longer promotion.

Fredderick Ovalle, 2B - Ovalle was promoted to Bradenton for two games earlier this season, then returned to the FCL for six more games. His .345 average in the FCL this season gives him the highest average in the minor league system out of qualified hitters. He went 8-for-19 in his brief return to the FCL, after going 3-for-6 in his two games with Bradenton. The 2025 international free agent is an example of a player who only got a brief look in his promotion to Bradenton, and he’s another example of a player who deserves a longer look at the higher level.

Injury Updates

Jack Brannigan, INF - After playing two games in the FCL, Brannigan had his rehab assignment moved up to Bradenton. The left-side infielder has been limited due to injuries the last two seasons, with only 341 plate appearances at the Double-A level combined. He’s on the 40-man roster, and needs development time with his bat at the higher levels. It’s a good sign that he’s getting closer to a return to Altoona. Brannigan got the start at shortstop on Wednesday, but the game was suspended in the fourth inning.

Jesus Castillo, INF - The Pirates moved Castillo’s rehab assignment to Greensboro, after he spent three games in the FCL. He’s missed a little over a month in Altoona, and that comes after hitting .303/.361/.439 to start the season. Those are the best numbers he’s had since rookie ball in 2022. It will be good to see him getting back to Double-A, to show if he can continue those results in a larger sample. Castillo went 2-for-4 with a double, batting leadoff and playing centerfield for Greensboro on Wednesday night.

Jared Jones, 1B - He hit three home runs last week, bringing his total to ten on the season. With a .322/.429/.525 line in Greensboro, the 2025 ninth rounder was looking like a promotion candidate. Instead, Jones went on the injured list.

Axiel Plaz, C - The Pirates activated Plaz from the injured list on Wednesday after he had missed a lot of time over the last two weeks. Prior to the injury, he was hitting .340/.405/.582 with eight home runs. The power isn’t new, bit this is the best Plaz has hit since his monster numbers in the DSL. He was looking like one of the biggest breakout prospects in the lower levels before he went down, so his return is great to see. Plaz went 0-for-1 with a walk, before being removed for Camden Janik.

Sammy Stafura, SS - Drafted by the Reds in the 2nd round of the 2023 draft, the Pirates got Stafura when they traded Ke’Bryan Hayes. He’s been limited to 108 plate appearances this season, due to an injury suffered in early May. After a few weeks of rehab in Bradenton, he’s back with Greensboro, where he was hitting .222/.283/.352 before going down. Stafura went 0-for-2 with a walk in his return.

International Free Agents

The Pirates signed two international free agents over the last two days. Pitcher Chun Hsi Lin was signed yesterday, and according to Francys Romero, his bonus is $350,000. Also according to Romero, the 17-year-old throws 89-92 MPH.

Today, the Pirates signed outfielder Jean Rodriguez, bringing their total international signing group up to 33 players for the 2026 signing period.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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A bit.

In recent comments with the San Diego media, Machado expressed his lack of appreciation for the new advanced metrics that have taken over the game of baseball during the last decade-plus.

“I just wish we can get the analytics out of the way,” Machado told reporters. “I think there’s too many stats out there.”

Machado didn’t know or understand some of the metrics, including some metrics that have become common enough to be placed on a scoreboard. Two examples brought up were wOBA and FIP. Machado didn’t understand either, and on the spot, didn’t immediately grasp the concept when given the explanations. His comments on analytics begin at the 7:45 mark.

The comments from Machado come from a player who doesn’t understand what the stats mean, versus someone with knowledge of the stats saying they’re worthless. To be fair, Machado’s job isn’t to understand FIP or wOBA. His job is to play baseball. The stats evaluate how well he’s playing baseball.

Once you go down the rabbit hole of stats as an evaluation metric, you eventually reach a crossroads. You’ll eventually get two sets of stats trying to tell the same thing in a different way. At that point, you need to decide which stat is legitimate, and which stat is missing the mark.

That’s when stats can become a problem.

RE24 on Pirates Prospects

I took off from baseball on Saturday.

As usual, my day was spent thinking about baseball.

I gave myself credit that I wasn’t on the computer working on PiratesProspects.com, or checking scores throughout the day.

My thought process was centered around the best approach to evaluate past player performance. I was working on adding a scoring system to Pirates Prospects to evaluate who was the best player in a given day, week, month, or year.

What I ended up settling on was RE24.

Honestly, I almost shared the cluelessness of Machado in the video above.

I’m not embarrassed to say I didn’t know what RE24 was without access to a computer all day. I had heard of the stat before, but I didn’t remember it by heart.

My thought process was that the best approach to evaluate past results would be to use the Run Expectancy matrix as a baseline for expectations in every situation, then to use the player’s results of every play to calculate how much positive or negative expected value he added.

When I went looking for an existing stat that accomplished my ideal evaluation method, RE24 was an easy stat to find, and I felt stupid for a moment that I didn’t remember it existed.

Created by Tom Tango in 2009, RE24 measures a player’s offensive or pitching value by calculating the change in expected runs from the start of each plate appearance or play to the end.

I used this Run Expectancy matrix by Ben Clemens, updated for the 2021-2025 seasons, for my own purposes.

After about eight hours of work on Sunday, I had incorporated RE24 into every box score, play by play, and used it to calculate the Player of the Day, Player of the Week, and Player of the Month for every level in the Pirates’ minor league system.

You can find the Player of the Day every night in the Box Score archive.

The Player of the Week and Player of the Month are stored on the Stats page.

Problems with RE24

If you want to evaluate a player’s results, there are plenty of advanced metrics you can use.

WAR is the most popular value metric. FIP for pitchers and wOBA or wRC+ for hitters also are popular.

A lot of the more popular advanced metrics are designed in a way to be context neutral.

They’re meant to show whether a batter would have value regardless of whether he plays at Coors Field or Petco Park. They’re meant to show the value a pitcher has, regardless of park factors or the infield defense behind him.

Mostly, advanced metrics have grown as evaluation metrics for front office decisions.

RE24 isn’t forward projecting. It is one of the metrics that relies on the averages. If a batter comes to the plate with one out and the bases loaded, there’s a 1.61 run expectancy based on the historical averages of similar situations. That expectancy doesn’t factor the unique situation the batter finds himself in, or the batter’s own history.

In the previously mentioned play, if the batter strikes out, pops out in the infield, or grounds into a fielder’s choice that gets the runner at home for the out, the result is the same. The batter left the situation with the bases loaded and two outs, which drops the RE to 0.96. The result of that play would be -0.65 RE.

There are some flaws with this approach. For one, it doesn’t factor in the game situation. The bases loaded in the 9th inning, down by two runs is a much different situation than the bases loaded in the 6th inning, up by eight runs. If you want to evaluate the value of a player, you would want to factor how that player performs in clutch situations.

Flaws exist with all value-based metrics. The previously mentioned FIP (Fielder Independent Pitching) doesn’t factor in the runs actually given up by a pitcher, instead giving an expected result derived from a historical constant and from other stats the pitcher allowed.

No individual stat is going to be perfect, and widely accepted.

That’s why I’m going to spend the rest of this article explaining why we all need to go back to pitcher wins and batter RBIs as the gold standard for evaluating baseball players.

RE24 Standouts

No, I’m not actually going to do that.

I used to never allow contributors to use RBIs in any articles on Pirates Prospects. I’ve softened my stance. That metric shows up throughout the new site. But I do believe advanced metrics are superior to the old counting stats. In some cases, they replace the eye test, at least for the initial filtering of players.

But there are flaws with every stat, and there are bound to be disagreements.

After spending all day implementing the RE24 metric on Pirates Prospects, I noticed two standout situations immediately.

6/7 Player of the Day

First came the Player of the Day results for the 6/7 games, which was the very first set of games under the new system.

Greensboro had a monster game in the hitter friendly confines in Asheville, winning 16-14. Yordany De Los Santos picked up four hits, including two home runs. Murf Gray added three hits, two of which were home runs. Both batters knocked in four runs, accounting for half of Greensboro’s runs on the day.

You’d think one of them would have been the player of the day.

You’d be wrong.

The player of the day ended up being their teammate, Camden Janik, who had zero RBIs. Janik did go 3-for-4 with a walk, but had a quiet day by comparison to the two multi-home run results.

How did this happen? Let’s take a look at the plays for each player.

Yordany De Los Santos:

• Solo Home Run: +1.00

• Three Run Homer, Runners at 2nd and 3rd, One Out: +1.84

• Single, One Out, None On: +0.23

• Single, One Out, Runner Moves From 1st to 3rd: +0.83

• Strikeout, One Out, Runners at 1st and 2nd: -0.54

• Force Out at Home, Bases Loaded, No Outs: -1.08

• Strikeout, Two Outs, Runners at 1st and 2nd: -0.42

The three run shot was only worth +1.84, due to the RE for that situation (runners at second and third, one out) being 1.41. De Los Santos ended up plating three runs with his homer. He got credit for all three runs, but essentially got a penalty for being in a favorable situation that expected him to plate at least one run by the averages.

De Los Santos executed twice on the home runs, but had other high expectancy situations where the outs he generated lowered the run expectancy enough to wipe one of the home runs off the board.

Murf Gray:

• Two Run Homer, One Out: +1.77

• Single, No On, Two Outs: +0.11

• Two Run Homer, Two Outs: +1.79

• Strikeout, Runner on Third, Two Outs: -0.32

• Groundout, Bases Loaded, Two Outs: -0.96

• Strikeout, Bases Loaded, Two Outs: -0.96

Gray had two homers that added value. He also came up empty on two inning-ending plays with the bases loaded. Combined, those plays worked to wipe out the value added by one of his home runs.

Camden Janik:

• Single, No Outs, Runner Goes From 1st to 3rd: +0.96

• Hit By Pitch, Two Outs, Runners at 1st and 2nd: +0.29

• Single, No On, No Outs: +0.39

• Fly Out, Runner at 1st, Two Outs: -0.21

• Walk, Runners at 1st and 2nd, No Outs: +1.14

• Single, Runner at 1st, One Out: +0.48

The biggest play from Janik came in the eighth, when he walked to load the bases with no outs, increasing the run expectancy by 1.14. While De Los Santos and Gray both had multiple bigger plays, Janik stood out for producing almost exclusively positive value, only failing in a low-upside situation. The other two brought runs across the plate, but Janik kept the train moving on the bases all day.

At the end of the day, Janik had 3.0 RE24. Gray had 1.43. De Los Santos had 1.86. The closest competitor to Janik was Connor Wietgrefe with a 2.4 in Altoona, as a result of five shutout innings with one hit and no walks. That performance helped to make Wietgrefe the Pitcher of the Week.

From a value standpoint, De Los Santos, Gray, and even Wietgrefe would have likely ended up ahead of Janik.

There would be stats that calculate how improbable it would be for Janik to continue picking up three singles per game, and that would discount the game situation he was in when those singles occurred. Likewise, there would be stats that played up the multiple home runs from De Los Santos and Gray, or included the six strikeouts from Wietgrefe.

I picked RE24 because it accounts for the actual game situations, instead of removing the results from the game situations and placing them in a neutral environment of evaluation.

5/31 Pitcher of the Week

The other situation that stood out to me was the 5/31 Pitcher of the Week.

Carlson Reed got a start in Greensboro that week, throwing seven no-hit innings with seven strikeouts as part of a combined effort no-hitter.

However, the Pitcher of the Week went to Adolfo Oviedo, who made two relief appearances for Bradenton, recording two scoreless innings each.

The kicker was the 5/31 appearance. Oviedo entered the game in the fourth inning with no outs and the bases loaded. He recorded a strikeout (+0.63) then ended the inning with a double play (+1.41). In two plate appearances, he sent a 2.69 RE crashing down to zero. Then, he pitched another scoreless frame, adding to his two scoreless innings earlier in the week.

Reed stood out for a rare night where he was dominant across seven innings. Oviedo stood out for being shut down in the toughest situation that exists in the run expectancy matrix. When comparing the two, Reed had three more innings, one less walk, one less hit, and five more strikeouts.

Advanced metrics would favor the strikeouts from Reed, but for RE, a strikeout is no different than a groundout, as long as the runners don’t advance to a more favorable situation to offset the out.

There would be metrics that project Reed with a better future for his results.

Oviedo got credit for the game situation he was thrown into, and for shutting down a massive scoring threat. Reed almost got penalized for never allowing a scoring threat to materialize. A perfect inning only adds 0.48 total RE. That means Reed needed four perfect innings to match the value of Oviedo’s shutdown fourth inning on 5/31.

The Real Problem With Advanced Stats

I outlined those situations above to display a few situations where advanced stats could view the same situation in a different light.

Oviedo vs Reed has two arguments. One is that Reed put up a rare, dominant performance that speaks to his abilities in a projectable way going forward. The other argument is that Oviedo produced a shutdown result in a historically difficult situation to exit without giving up runs.

De Los Santos/Gray vs Janik offers a comparison of consistent value versus big play ability. The big plays are more projectable for the future, and rate positively when you penalize singles for their difficulty to repeat as consistently as Janik produced them. Meanwhile, there could be an argument for the classic “not trying to do too much” line, where a player simply executes in almost every situation he’s in, consistently improving the chances for runs. Janik didn’t have a big RBI day, or even a big day crossing the plate, but he was rarely providing negative value.

There are so many advanced metrics that tell different stories and evaluate different outlooks. The problem comes when you use one for everything, or worse, when you use whatever metric suits your argument.

I still prefer RE24 for a review of past game results when it comes to evaluating the player of the game, week, month, or year. It’s not a great predictive stat, but I was looking for a metric to evaluate what actually happened during the game — not what those plays say about what could happen in the future.

I have yet to decide how I will evaluate players going forward.

Part of me wants to create a new metric.

Part of me thinks I’ll get through that process and realize I’ve only recreated an existing metric. There would be value of affirmation with that result.

Part of me thinks there are already too many stats.

The biggest problem with the advanced metrics doesn’t come from the analysis outside the game, but from the decision making inside the game.

With every organization having their own proprietary evaluation metrics, it can be easy for any organization to justify any move by pointing to the mystery numbers on their spreadsheet. This works to absolve decision making, by putting those decisions on the stats that the organization created or curated.

You can’t question a Manager for a bad outcome, because he was only following the numbers.

You can’t question a General Manager for a bad acquisition, because the numbers saw something positive about the player.

At the end of the day, the people in charge choose the metrics that best aligns with their own ideas of value. Anything the metrics say about the game is only an extension of how the person in charge thinks about the game.

The challenge comes when the person disagrees with the metrics in a situation.

I’ll be honest. If I were picking the 6/7 Player of the Day manually, I probably would have picked De Los Santos for his four hits and two home runs. If I were picking the 5/31 Pitcher of the Week, I would have gone with Reed. My choice of RE24 didn’t reflect how I’d evaluate those two individual situations.

The more important thing is that I’m in agreement with the vast majority of daily, weekly, and monthly decisions that RE24 has made.

No advanced stat is going to get it right 100% of the time. At best, you’re looking for a high correlation to automate your thinking process, so that you only have to spend time digging into the outliers.

Stats should never be the end result. They should merely be a time saver to replicate the thinking process, and save a lot of unnecessary work.

The problem comes when too many bad results emerge, despite the stat verifying the approach was correct. At that point, whether you’re a website owner or a team employee, the answer isn’t to double down that the stat is always correct. It’s to evaluate the thought process that led to thinking the stat would have high accuracy in automating decisions.

That can be a problem when there are so many stats to choose from, each representing a different view of value, and incorporating different metrics to produce a result. It can be easy to pick the wrong stat for a given situation.

End of the day, advanced stats will never replace the analytical power of the human brain.

At best, if you pick the right stat, it just saves brain power.

Speaking of brain power,

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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The feature is based off cumulative RE24 results from the previous week. The top hitter and top pitcher throughout the system are recognized each week, along with the top players at every level.

Since this scoring system is standard from week-to-week, you can find all previous 2026 weekly winners on the Stats page, along with the Player of the Month winners for April and May.

Each week, I want to use the Player of the Week feature to take a deeper look at the prospects who stood out that week.

Players of the Week 6/7/26

Jared Jones and Connor Wietgrefe were the Players of the Week for the week ending June 7th, 2026.

Jones was the Batter of the Week, going 8-for-25 with three homers, a double, nine RBIs, and six walks. The other Jared Jones, taken in the 9th rounder out of LSU in the 2025 draft, now has ten home runs on the season for Greensboro, with a .322/.429/.525 line.

What stands out from Jones so far is his power. The downside to that power is a 30.2% strikeout rate this season, which is paired wit a 15.6% walk rate. That three-outcomes approach is common with power hitters. Jones will face a big test when he moves up to Altoona, which will reveal how much the power is legitimate and how serious the swing and miss issues are against upper level pitchers. For now, he’s looking like a guy making a case to move up this year.

Wietgrefe was the Pitcher of the Week. The 24-year-old lefty made two starts, combining to give up one run on five hits in ten innings, with 13 strikeouts. Both starts were good, but the standout was a five shutout, one-hit outing on Sunday, in which he recorded six strikeouts and didn’t issue a walk.

Drafted in 2024 in the 7th round out of Minnesota, Wietgrefe spent most of the 2025 season in High-A Greensboro. There, he put up a 3.17 ERA in 108 innings, along with a 21.7% strikeout rate and good control to the tune of a 5.8% walk rate. The strikeout rate has been maintained in the jump to Double-A, and the walk rate has jumped a bit to a still respectable 9.4%. As a lefty starter, Wietgrefe could have a path to PNC Park in a bullpen role at least, as long as he maintains the quality K/BB rates.

Individual Level Standouts

Jones and Wietgrefe led the entire system, but each individual level had their own Players of the Week. Follow the links in the player names below to go to their Pirates Prospects player pages.

Indianapolis Batter: Billy Cook

Stats: 6-for-20, R, 2B, 2 RBI, 3 SB, BB

Cook opened the season in the Majors, but couldn’t stick after batting .190 with a .380 OPS in 21 plate appearances. He’s fared better in Triple-A, batting .283/.397/.472 with three home runs. Last week, he added three stolen bases to his production. He remains a depth option should the Pirates face future injuries to their outfield.

Indianapolis Pitcher: Antwone Kelly

Stats: 5.0 IP, 4 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 1 BB, 5 K, 0 HR

Kelly is probably the most significant player on this list when it comes to the big league scope. His numbers in Triple-A have shown promise, with the hope that he could help the MLB club this season. He has a 19.6% strikeout rate and a 10% walk rate in the Triple-A rotation, while throwing 97.4 MPH with the fastball. His secondary stuff looks quality, with a 31.6% whiff rate on 50 recorded cutters, and an impressive 62.5% whiff on 23 recorded changeups. Kelly could be one of the best internal solutions to the Pirates’ bullpen woes, and he’s already on the 40-man roster, making him a simple call-up away.

Altoona Batter: Lonnie White Jr.

Stats: 7-for-21, 5 R, 2 2B, 3B, HR, 5 RBI, 2 SB, 3 BB

White has been one of the players who has stood out the most to me this season. Finally healthy, he’s hitting for the power that was promised when he was drafted out of high school in 2021. White started the season in Greensboro, hitting seven homers in 104 plate appearances. He’s continued that power in a more neutral environment in Altoona, with six homers in 123 PA, along with a .295/.398/.552 line. He’s got some strikeout issues with a 30.9% rate in Double-A, but he also walks at a 13.8% rate. He’s an early leader for Breakout Player of the Year.

Greensboro Pitcher: Kyle Robinson

Stats: 5.0 IP, 8 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 2 BB, 7 K, 0 HR

The Pirates added Robinson when they traded Alika Williams to the Athletics. In three starts for Greensboro, Robinson has recorded a 6.39 ERA, with a 16:5 K/BB ratio. The best start was this past week, which was also his best start of the season. The 22-year-old, who was drafted by the Athletics in the 11th round in 2024, made it to Double-A last year, but has spent most of this season back in High-A as a starter.

Bradenton Batter: Antonio Pimentel

Stats: 8-for-18, 4 R, 3 RBI, 4 SB, BB

I wrote about Pimentel recently when I broke down the Minor League Statcast Leaders. He stands out for his contact abilities and swing decisions, with a low chase rate and above-average contact rates. He also has speed. His 19 stolen bases rank third in the minor league system. The 20-year-old Pimentel added four steals last week, while going 8-for-18 with a walk. Signed out of the Dominican Republic for $250,000 in 2023, Pimentel made an aggressive jump from the DSL to A-ball this year, and has held his own in the process.

Bradenton Pitcher: Jeter Martinez

Stats: 6.0 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 1 BB, 8 K, 0 HR

The Pirates added Martinez in the Caleb Ferguson deal last year at the trade deadline. The 20-year-old is showing massive improvements in his second season at the Low-A level, with fewer hits allowed, and an increase in strikeouts. He sits around 93 MPH with his fastball, while having a 58.8% whiff on 44 recorded sliders, and a 45.5% whiff on 21 recorded changeups. Martinez stood out this week with eight strikeouts in six innings, which was his best start of the season, and tied his career high in strikeouts.

FCL Pirates Batter: Bralyn Brazoban

Stats: 4-for-12, 3 R, 2 3B, 4 RBI, 4 BB

Brazoban is another player I featured in that recent Minor League Statcast Leaders article. He stood out for his power results, which is encouraging, as that tool had been missing from the stat line the last two seasons. One of the biggest international signings in 2024, Brazoban received a $2 million bonus in part for his potential to eventually hit for power. One of the most promising signs in that area this season is his triples total in the spacious FCL parks. He added two last week, bringing his season total up to six. He had four triples across two seasons in the DSL. Brazoban is hitting .308/.395/.600 this season in the FCL, with his first two homers of his pro career.

FCL Pirates Pitcher: Irwin Ramirez

Stats: 5.0 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 3 BB, 2 K, 0 HR

Ramirez is in his second season starting in the FCL. He’s shown improvements with his strikeout rate, while allowing a significant drop in hits. His walk rate is a problem, remaining at the same 17% level as last season. The start last week was a representation of his game this year. He only allowed one hit and no runs, but issued three free passes in five innings. The 19-year-old is still young and developing, with a strong 6’ 3” frame and a sinking fastball that sits 95.9 MPH.

DSL Pirates Batter: Jesus Lizardo

Stats: 5-for-12, 4 R, RBI, 2 SB, 4 BB

The DSL season began this past week, and Lizardo returned for his third season at the level. The 19-year-old catcher improved on his OBP last season, going from .297 to .356. He still had contact issues and lacked power. If he takes a step forward with the contact issues this year, it could be the final season for him in the Dominican. Last week was a good start toward that goal.

DSL Pirates Pitcher: Leudy Reyes

Stats: 2.2 IP, 0 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 3 BB, 4 K, 0 HR

Signed out of the Dominican Republic in 2025, the 18-year-old Reyes is in his second season in the DSL. He struggled with an 8.14 ERA in relief last season, in part due to a 23% walk rate. He opened the season with 2.2 scoreless innings across two appearances, but walks were still an issue. He made up for them with four strikeouts.

One More Report

I want to use this weekly feature to point out a player each week who caught my eye, outside of the Players of the Week.

Carlos Mateo was signed for $800,000 in 2023 out of the Dominican Republic. He’s been at the FCL level since 2024, and has put up double-digit ERAs with a career 30.9% walk rate. Those results aren’t good.

What caught my eye was his fastball velocity, sitting at 99.9 MPH on 28 recorded pitches. Mateo hit 102.5 MPH this past week, while consistently pumping 100+ MPH in two shutout innings on Friday.

The control issues still exist, but are more periodic. Mateo has 10 of 16 walks this season in three of his 11 games. The biggest improvement he’s shown is a drop in his batting average against, down to .182. Amazingly, that’s a byproduct of a .400 BABIP.

The fastball has a 57.1% whiff rate. When he’s in the zone, he’s difficult to hit. Still only 20 years old, Mateo has one of the best arms in the lowest levels of the system. He’s also still very raw, but beginning to show signs of refining his pitching abilities.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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The Updates

FanGraphs - June 3rd

ESPN - June 1st

Baseball America - May 18th

MLB Pipeline - Recurring Updates

The Method

ESPN only lists the top 10 prospects. Baseball America and MLB both list their top 30 prospects. FanGraphs goes all the way to 50.

I have my own opinions on the tendencies from these individual rankings. I’ll start with the league source.

MLB Pipeline does the worst job of updating their lists. They have an update at the start of the season, then keep the same rankings while only removing players who graduate, or adding players who join the system. This shows with the ranking of Termarr Johnson, who was outside of the top 10 in the other three lists, but still holding his pre-season rank of 5 on MLB. That has moved up with the graduations of Konnor Griffin and Bubba Chandler, and ignores the struggles from Johnson in Triple-A.

ESPN has a simple top ten list. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, and their rankings are in line with the other three groups. The biggest place they differed was a higher ranking on Easton Carmichael, who finished 10th on ESPN, along with the highest ranking on Murf Gray. They’re high on recently drafted college guys in A-ball.

FanGraphs tends to have more aggressive rankings than the other three, especially at the lower levels. This was most prominent with Johan De Los Santos, who finished third in the FanGraphs rankings, despite being 24th for BA and 30th for MLB. De Los Santos was actually ranked fifth, but FanGraphs still had Griffin and Chandler at the top, so I adjusted everyone up two spots. Still, that’s aggressive placement for an FCL player.

If Baseball America has favorites, it usually comes from the international pipeline, where they put in a lot of reporting. They had the highest ranking on big bonus prospect Darell Morel, who ranked 7th compared to 15th for FanGraphs and MLB. Their rankings are a bit more conservative than FanGraphs, but they still have a few standouts in the lower levels.

Overall, there’s a lot of group-think that exists between the rankings. They all depend on the Pirates for information, which means there’s not going to be huge variance in the lists. You’ll have outlets with their own personal favorites, but rarely do you get a De Los Santos situation.

Despite the subtle differences, there aren’t any extreme departures in rank across the board. There’s a consensus with Seth Hernandez first overall and Edward Florentino second. Beyond that, there are some differences.

I decided to give a weighted average ranking. I took 35% of FanGraphs and 35% of the BA rankings, then added in 20% for ESPN and 10% for MLB. MLB got the lowest weight, due to the dated process. ESPN was second lowest due to the lack of depth with their simple approach. That left FanGraphs and BA to split 70% of the rankings.

When a player didn’t have a rank in a single list, I gave them the average rank of the other three lists for the fourth spot. For example, anyone who was ranked outside of the top 10 for ESPN usually got an average ranking of the placement in the other three top 30-50 ranks for their ESPN ranking.

Here’s how the consensus turned out.

Consensus Top Prospects

All links go to Pirates Prospects player pages.

1. Seth Hernandez, SP (Consensus)

2. Edward Florentino, OF (Consensus)

3. Wyatt Sanford, SS (High 3, Low 6)

4. Esmerlyn Valdez, OF (High 4, Low 9)

5. Jhostynxon Garcia, OF (High 4, Low 7)

6. Hunter Barco, LHP (High 3, Low 9)

7. Wilber Dotel, RHP (High 5, Low 11)

8. Rafael Flores, C (High 6, Low 13)

9. Murf Gray, 3B (High 6, Low 17)

10. Termarr Johnson, 2B (High 5, Low 12)

11. Antwone Kelly, RHP (High 7, Low 17)

12. Darell Morel, SS (High 7, Low 15)

13. Khristian Curtis, RHP (High 10, Low 21)

14. Axiel Plaz, C (High 14, Low 19)

15. Johan De Los Santos, SS (High 3, Low 30)

16. Easton Carmichael, C (High 10, Low 24)

17. Thomas Harrington, RHP (High 12, Low 21)

18. Reinold Navarro, LHP (High 15, Low 24)

19. Levi Sterling, RHP (High 13, Low 23)

20. Sammy Stafura, SS (High 10, Low 30)

There were some players who had a great deal of variance between the high and low. De Los Santos is probably the most extreme example. Sammy Stafura also had a lot of variance, though his high came from MLB, and their process doesn’t update for his struggles and lack of development time this year due to injuries.

I haven’t been ranking prospects for awhile, and I honestly always hated the process of a numerical rank. I’m not the best opinion to seek when it comes to who looks too high and who looks too low. I’ll limit myself to two players who stood out.

Too High: Rafael Flores. He’s struggled at the plate this year in his age 25 season, and is a poor defensive catcher. His primary value comes from a potential to hit for power, and he only has four home runs in 211 plate appearances this season. He’s getting toward post-prospect age with no guarantee of being more than a limited bench option in the majors, and that doesn’t scream top ten prospect to me.

Too Low: Johan De Los Santos. I wouldn’t go as high as FanGraphs went, but I also wouldn’t have him in the bottom third of a top 30 like BA and MLB. He’d contend for the top 10, likely a few spots higher in my ranking than where he sits in the average above. I’m saying that mostly because he’s one of the players who has stood out to me with increased observations over the last month. De Los Santos is one of the best contact hitters in the system, but he’s also at the lowest level. I’d get aggressive for the contact and plate patience abilities, but more conservative than FanGraphs for the level placement.

I took a year off to focus on other areas of my own development. I don’t know much of anything about Easton Carmichael, but Pirates Prospects now has live updates of every game throughout the system, along with plenty of automated resources to follow the team without needing to worry if I can keep up with the updates. That seems like a fair tradeoff.

Having stated that last disclaimer, here’s my best shot at a tiered ranking system, which is what I prefer over numerical.

Tiered Rankings

Tier One: Seth Hernandez

Hernandez is likely to be one of the top prospects in the game during the mid-season top 100 updates. While the Pirates might have other top 100 options, there’s a clear gap between Hernandez and everyone else.

Tier Two: Edward Florentino, Wyatt Sanford

These are younger prospects with top 100 potential, who each show impressive power at a young age. The stats haven’t shown up for Florentino yet this season, while Sanford is having a great season, with the disclaimer it’s in Greensboro. If you wanted to bump Sanford to Tier 3, I wouldn’t argue. He’s just stood out to me in my limited views.

Tier Three: Esmerlyn Valdez, Jhostynxon Garcia, Hunter Barco, Wilber Dotel

This group is the MLB depth out of Indianapolis. They each have starter upside, but it might not be greater than average. They all look great as depth options, and could eventually become strong bench/bullpen guys, or average starters. I think Dotel is already there for a strong bullpen guy. He won’t have prospect status for long, currently looking like one of the few reliable options in the Pirates’ bullpen.

Tier Four: Darrel Morel, Axiel Plaz, Johan De Los Santos, Easton Carmichael

This is where I’m departing from the rankings above and swapping tiers. I’m moving the lower level, higher upside guys up a tier, due to the potential and greater value they provide. The actual tier four from the rankings above has higher floor options, but I tend to value upside and risk in these spots. This group would compete to round out the top ten spots in the system.

Tier Five: Murf Gray, Termarr Johnson, Antwone Kelly, Khristian Curtis, Thomas Harrington

You could make an argument for Gray to be in Tier Four above, but I personally want to see him carry his results to the upper levels before ranking him too high. The others look like a lesser version of the depth in Tier Three. They might not be ready this season, and at best could provide short-term depth. There’s still bench/bullpen or possibly average starter potential. It’s just riskier than the tier three group.

Tier Six: Reinold Navarro, Levi Sterling, Sammy Stafura, Yordany De Los Santos, Omar Alfonzo, Edgleen Perez

The last three players were left off the top 20 above, but all received at least one top 20 ranking from the four outlets. This group is a riskier upside tier compared to tier four. Sterling is the player I’ve followed the most this season. I’m writing this on a night when he struck out nine and whiffed 12 in five innings of work. This isn’t bad upside depth, but I don’t think any of these guys are a jump away from the top 10.

Overall System Thoughts

The Pirates have been churning out some high upside guys the last few years. They were gifted Paul Skenes in 2023. They made great picks to land Griffin and Hernandez in the last two drafts.

There has been some development beyond those first rounders, with some early international promise from Florentino and Valdez. There are some middle round draft hopefuls in Sanford and Gray. The problem with these guys is that it’s too early to start celebrating that the Pirates may have turned a corner with their drafting, signing, and developing.

I don’t see a system that is strong with depth. It’s more a system continuously fueled by some of the best prospects in the game at the top. That’s not a bad thing. If given the choice between strong depth and a weak top of the system, or the best prospects in the game at the top with weaker depth, I’m taking the latter.

Small market teams definitely need cheap depth from their system. However, they can get that depth elsewhere. There’s no alternative to get a Skenes, or a Griffin, or even a Hernandez outside of the draft/sign/develop process.

The Pirates have done well to stack the top of their system. They have other players with upside that could be developed. Projecting overly positive results would ignore the poor track record the Pirates have of developing their own prospects, outside of the top guys in recent years. There has yet to emerge an example of that track record being broken.

It’s definitely not a bad system, but stronger development could allow the Pirates to turn a serious corner, adding strong depth to their current upside plays.

That might solve their bullpen woes in the future.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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I’ve been busy in the last week adding a few new features to the site, and fixing a few issues that were bound to happen with the launch.

It feels appropriate to give a rundown of everything on the new site again, now that there are new features added.

Pirates Prospects Features

Homepage - The main hub of the site gives a one-stop sample of all the information you need. Here you can find the latest articles at Pittsburgh Baseball Live, the live-updating Daily Top Performers, the line scores for each game in the Pirates’ system, along with system stat leaders, records and standings, and the latest transactions.

Scores - One of the longest running features on the old site was the Pirates Prospect Watch, giving a nightly recap of everything happening in the minor league system. The scores page takes that to the next level, with live updates throughout each game in the system, along with a top performers section and a section for Statcast leaders.

Stats - The stats page shows the system leaders at every level, or throughout the organization. It also has a sortable and filterable 2026 section for batters, pitchers, and Statcast leaders. I’ve personally been using this for research for recent articles on this Substack, and have a few expansion ideas coming for the near future.

Rosters - The organizational depth chart, updated anytime there’s a move made throughout the system. Each player includes a link to their player pages, which I’ll get to next.

Player Pages - Each page includes bio information, including draft/international transactions and available signing bonuses. There’s a contract status section, giving 2026 contract information, service time, options remaining, and eligible Rule 5 and free agency dates. The stats include a summary, the last 10 games, and a full stats table with career numbers, game logs, splits, and Statcast data. Pitchers also have a Statcast section showing their pitch arsenal, while batters feature key Statcast metrics. The link above shows the player page for top prospect Seth Hernandez.

Schedule - The weekly organizational schedule, showing you every game, and available probable starters, all on a single page.

Standings - The divisional standings for every team in the Pirates’ system, from the Majors to the DSL, along with the NL Wild Card race.

Transactions - The full transaction log, sortable by month and level, dating all the way back to the 2007 season. This is updated frequently throughout the day in an attempt to always catch the latest moves.

Resources

This is the area I’ve worked on the most over the last week.

Daily Fantasy Baseball Research - This provides Batter vs Pitcher data for the next Pirates game, bullpen usage pitch totals, and a Hot/Cold section for Pirates hitters. Designed to help with your start/sit decisions for your fantasy teams.

Prospect Hotsheet - A recap of the top performers and Statcast leaders in the minor league system from the previous day, along with a Hotsheet for batters and pitchers, which can each be filtered by 7/14/30 day timeframes, and by individual levels.

Payroll Tracker - The 2026 payroll estimates, along with future payroll commitments. This was one of the first features to ever launch on Pirates Prospects in 2009, and it has returned with daily automated updates.

Draft Pick Signing Tracker - Another day-one feature on the site, this shows every draft pick since 2012 (the first year of the current draft system), along with yearly bonus pool information. There’s an All section to sort information from every draft during the timeframe. When the 2026 draft starts, this will be the place to find the latest updates as they happen.

International Signing Tracker - Full international signing details dating back to 2021 (the first year MLB moved to a January 15th opening), along with available bonus information. There is an All section to sort information from every year in the timeframe. The 2026 signing period is currently ongoing, so this page will receive an update anytime there’s a new addition to the organization.

@pirateprospects on X - The Pirates Prospects Twitter/X account is set up to automatically tweet transactions, home runs, and game results as they happen. Follow for the absolute latest updates

The Goal and Future Updates

The best part about the site is that everything is set to automatically update.

I could be knocked out with a migraine for a week, and you’d still be getting live updates on the scores pages, along with daily updates throughout the site.

This means Pirates Prospects is automatically set to provide more information each day than any single human or group of writers could possibly keep up with.

Pirates Prospects has more information available than any point since it launched in 2009. My only role is to keep upgrading the site with new features, while also observing.

I find myself watching the @pirateprospects feed each night for the latest events. I always have the Scores page open, including as I write this. The Stats page is specifically designed to make my article writing easier.

Since I took a year off last year, and scaled back my writing in 2024, I’m a little rusty on the system. Every day, I learn something new from following the site, and find myself diving into a different player page to get reaclimated.

For example, yesterday I noticed Carlos Mateo was hitting 100 MPH in the FCL. I didn’t know much about the 20-year-old. A quick look at his player page shows he signed out of the Dominican Republic in 2023 for $800,000, has struggled his first three seasons, led by serious control issues, but has a lively arm and the ability to get swing and miss. I doubt he’s going to show up on top prospect lists with the control issues, but he is who I learned about on my own site yesterday.

In a way, the site has become it’s own living entity, and I’m just another observer following along.

That’s why my job becomes simple. What else do I want to see on the site?

I have a few things in mind, beginning with an expansion to the Statcast data. I will also be working throughout the year on a Prospect Ranking system.

Right now, I’m happy that the site has so many informative features. I might be biased as the owner, but as an observer like everyone else, there’s no better site to follow the Pirates.

And that’s before I continue making it better.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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That’s a franchise record for most home runs by a second baseman.

At the rate he’s going, Brandon Lowe might beat that record by the All-Star Break.

Last night, Lowe hit his 15th homer of the season in the eighth inning of a 10-6 victory over the Houston Astros.

The shot gave the Pirates some needed insurance, resulting in what ultimately would be the go-ahead runs.

Lowe has been having one of the best seasons of his career this season. He’s not only hitting for power, but he’s getting on base at a rate similar to his best season in 2021. That year he hit 39 homers in 615 plate appearances, with a .340 OBP. This year he’s on pace for nearly 39 home runs in a 600+ plate appearance season, with a .343 OBP.

What stood out the most about Lowe’s big night was that it came on the same night that the Pirates went up against Mike Burrows.

The Pirates acquired Lowe by trading Burrows in a three-team deal with the Astros and the Tampa Bay Rays. They didn’t just add Lowe in that deal.

Jake Mangum was another piece in that trade. He picked up four singles in last night’s game, including two off Burrows, and one that came before Lowe’s home run.

Mason Montgomery is the other return from the trade. He’s been one of the better relievers in a questionable Pirates bullpen this season, with a 3.91 ERA and a 30.9% strikeout rate.

The results from Lowe and Mangum last night just underscored how good of a trade this was, merely two months into the 2026 season.

Ben Cherington doesn’t have a great trade history with the Pirates.

Most of his trades have been on the opposite end, involving trading veterans for prospects in a long rebuild attempt.

The trade for Lowe was a shift in approach for the Pirates. It was one of few trades where Cherington was dealing to immediately improve the MLB club. Not with potential that could play out in the future, but with players who had already proven themselves in the Majors.

Lowe is a rental. He’s a free agent after the 2026 season. That could be to the Pirates’ benefit. The 31-year-old’s early career-year pacing might be fueled by the drive to get his last big free agent contract this offseason.

Mangum and Montgomery aren’t rentals. The Pirates have both under team control through the 2030 season. Mangum looks like a scrappy fourth outfielder who can help via small ball value. Montgomery was the sleeper of the deal in my view, capable of improving to become a reliable lights-out reliever. He’s only in his age 25 season, and has shown improvements with his control so far, which is a key to his breakout.

There’s value in the trade beyond the numbers. The Lowe pickup was a signal that it wasn’t the same old endless rebuild and passive offseason approach for the Pirates. Who knows if they’re able to sign Ryan O’Hearn without that move? The Lowe trade definitely set the tone.

On the other side of the deal, Burrows has struggled. After last night, he has a 5.66 ERA in 12 starts with Houston. That’s a departure from his 3.94 ERA in 96 innings with the Pirates in his rookie season last year.

Outside of last night’s game, I don’t think the struggles from Burrows should be celebrated. It’s very common for young pitchers to hit bumps along the road early in their MLB careers before figuring it all out. Burrows might get to that point after what has been a rough season so far.

Those struggles have underscored why the change in approach by the Pirates has been somewhat refreshing.

For so long, the Pirates were the team banking on potential, and riding out the struggles of young pitchers. Last night’s starter, Bubba Chandler, is one of those pitchers who is going to be prone to early-career struggles before he figures it all out.

The problem the Pirates faced was they were banking on potential too much, and never investing in more of a sure thing. It can be difficult watching a team going through growing pains, and holding onto hope that they might be better in the future. By comparison, it’s easier to ride through the struggles of a guy like Chandler when knowing that the team’s hopes aren’t riding on him instantly figuring it all out.

In dealing Burrows, the Pirates let another team ride it out through the early-career struggles, in hopes for greater potential in the future. Meanwhile, they stabilized their roster with a legitimate power threat in Lowe, and two long-term serviceable bullpen/bench options in Montgomery and Mangum.

It’s not like the Pirates are missing Burrows. The controversy surrounding the team this week has been about a lack of rotation space. They dealt from a strength, dealing a young pitcher with fewer than 100 MLB innings at a high value, and they added to a weakness by injecting power into the lineup.

Forget second base. The Pirates haven’t had a 30 home run season during Cherington’s going-on seven year tenure as General Manager. Most of the power hopes were placed on the shoulders of Oneil Cruz, again with the Pirates exclusively banking on the potential of a young player figuring out the Majors.

Not only do they have Lowe as a legitimate power threat, but Cruz added his 14th home run last night. He is on pace to exceed 30 home runs for the first time in his career this season. Perhaps the protection provided from Lowe and O’Hearn has allowed Cruz to be more comfortable, knowing that he’s not relied upon to be the sole source of offensive impact on the team.

The Pirates are seeing power production unlike any other season I can remember. The spark was the addition of Lowe.

With the win last night, the Pirates moved into second place in the competitive NL Central.

They’re 5.5 games out of first place, but they are sitting in the second NL Wild Card spot at the moment, just a mere percentage point behind San Diego for the top spot.

A four game winning streak. A 7-3 record over the last ten games. Plus-35 for the run differential on the season. Winning records both home and away.

The standings show that this team has a chance to reach the playoffs for the first time in over a decade.

If that happens, it all started to shift with the Lowe trade.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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I’ve seen multiple reporters complaining that the Pirates went out of their way to control the narrative on the Carmen Mlodzinski story.

Before any credentialed reporter could have access to Mlodzinski to get answers, the team activated him from the restricted list on an off-day, and gave team-writer Jason Mackey an exclusive interview to scoop the media.

Tonight, every other reporter is going to be using their access to chase and replicate Mackey’s story. After 24-hours, the story has little value. But every reporter is still going to feel the need to save face.

None of this is a surprise to me. If you’ve been listening to my “industry plant” rants, this has been a trend with the Pirates.

Perhaps “industry plant” was always the wrong term. But it’s not new that the Pirates go out of their way to try and orchestrate favorable coverage. It’s the exact reason why I stopped covering them.

In 2024, I wanted to interview Termarr Johnson about his hitting development for Baseball America. Johnson was in the middle of a hot streak, after mostly struggling at the plate. I wanted to see if there was a change that was working for him.

I never got an answer as to who made the decision, but Johnson wasn’t made available for an interview. The fact that no one could be straightforward with me about why I was getting my interview declined led me to be finished spending any energy reporting on this organization.

What stood out to me the most from that situation wasn’t being denied the interview. It was the response from Dejan Kovacevic.

Today, I woke up and saw Kovacevic complaining about the Mlodzinski situation. His complaint was framed on behalf of all independent media in the city. He stated that if the Pirates are going to go to these lengths to control the narrative, they’re not worth covering.

However, in 2024, days after I announced I was done covering the organization for their refusal to make Termarr Johnson available, Kovacevic had a different approach.

Kovacevic hired Anthony Murphy in August 2024 to expand his site’s live prospect coverage. In the announcement, Kovacevic specifically mentioned that if Murphy wanted to interview Termarr Johnson, his affiliation with Kovacevic’s site would allow that to happen.

Look at the dates on the announcements:

https://x.com/TimWilliamsP2/status/1823815732146389301

https://www.dkpittsburghsports.com/2024/08/18/pirates-minor-league-coverage-anthony-murphy-site-stuff-dk

It’s not a coincidence that Kovacevic highlighted Johnson in his announcement that hyped up hiring someone who was trying to replace me as the prospect guy in Pittsburgh media.

Murphy is no longer writing for DKPittsburghSports, joining a long list of former contributors who were hyped up so hard at the start. But he always has had ties to the organization, even when he was an unknown writer contributing to my site.

Here’s how I knew: Then-Pirates minor league director John Baker would hype up a player that I didn’t ask about in an interview. If I didn’t write about that player immediately, Murphy would approach me about writing a story about the same player. This happened multiple times, to the point it became predictable.

But this isn’t about Murphy, or his relationship with the organization.

It’s about the continued trend of the Pirates trying to control the media narrative. And, it’s about how Kovacevic’s response to two similar issues has been dependent on whether he’s personally impacted.

When my situation happened two years ago, Kovacevic used that as a moment to prop up his site as being on the inside for access from the team.

Today, Kovacevic is complaining because he realized his site is outside of the inner circle. His complaints aren’t championing independent media. He’s complaining because he realized he doesn’t have the highest priority access.

Don’t get me wrong: His complaints are valid. But he also sounds like a hypocrite wrapping those complaints in a rally cry for supporting independent media. He showed the opposite of support for my situation in 2024.

As for the Pirates, they seem to be getting more bold with their attempts to control the media.

Jason Mackey always used his position to spin the team narrative, even when he was the beat writer for the city’s paper of record. That’s a position that should have full objectivity, and Mackey’s handling was a total disgrace to real media, in my honest opinion.

I’m happy that Mackey got the team writer job, because there’s no longer any ambiguity over who he serves. His writing is no longer disguised as objective, hiding behind the Post-Gazette’s reputation while being a mouthpiece for his team sources. He’s now officially part of the Pirates’ marketing and PR approach, disguised as real journalism.

Spring Training 2024 was the only time I’ve had a conversation with Mackey. It came after I publicly called out his writing for favoring the team, following the “industry plant” trend. My conversation with him did not back down from that sentiment, but detailed my reasoning. The conversation was civil. I gave him the benefit of the doubt that he was a young aspiring reporter who just had a blind spot to the team using him.

There’s no benefit of the doubt. This is who Mackey is as a reporter. He has a need to be the voice delivering the news to the public, and he will sell any shred of journalistic integrity to be in that position. Including working as a team employee posing as a journalist.

That’s the entire “industry plant” trend.

The Pirates try to control the narrative surrounding their organization.

The media landscape is filled with people who are driven by a need to be seen.

There aren’t many people creating content for the true love of journalism, and the integrity the position requires.

So, the Pirates exploit this situation. They align with the people whose main driver is the need to be seen on the field interviewing players and publishing their own words to a crowd of fans.

My younger self was one of those people. There was a point in time when I had a need so strong to be a “legitimate” media member with access that I compromised my own journalistic integrity in the process.

Two funny things about that.

First, I self-evaluated at a certain point in my career, and decided that if I was going to continue doing this, I would do it the right way from a journalistic standpoint. Things have been chaos ever since, but that’s probably how it should be when you’re an objective voice covering a billion-dollar organization.

Second, I made the common mistake of conflating access with real journalism.

Access is just marketing. It’s an easy way to convey that you’re an insider, capable of delivering stories no one else can get. It leads to the idea that you offer real journalism.

As shown with this latest situation with Mlodzinski, access doesn’t equal journalistic integrity. Reporting a story that no one else can get isn’t always a sign of journalistic integrity.

An organization like the Pirates -- owned by a man whose family has controlled a media empire for over 125 years -- can use the allure of access to ensure favorable coverage.

I’ve used the term industry plants. I’ve used the term Astroturfing Network. The most accurate term might be “puppets”.

The Pirates play anyone creating content like puppets.

They know who will say favorable things just to be seen on the media stage. They know who will sell their full integrity to shamelessly push a positive team narrative in the guise of journalism. They know who to avoid: Uncompromising, cold-hearted bastards like myself.

I’m not surprised at the Mlodzinski spin.

I’ve been talking about this trend with the Pirates for years.

Except, when I talked this same subject two years ago, the person championing independent journalism today was doing a bat flip on me and celebrating his own priority access.

Dharma. Karma.

It’s a bitch sometimes.

I feel bad for the honest journalists who feel locked out and minimized with today’s coverage.

That includes Kovacevic, who I also forgive for being late to the realization of how the Pirates operate.

After all, journalism is not merely access and live coverage.

It’s reporting truth.

The edge goes to the person who reaches the pinnacle of truth first.

Today, I’m glad to see others making their way up the mountain to join me.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

Payroll tracking was one of the founding features on Pirates Prospects when it began in 2009. Back then, hardly anyone was tracking payroll, especially not to the depths of minor league salaries. It was usually a single update of the opening 25-man payroll, and maybe a footnote at the end of the season with an official 40-man figure. It’s only fitting to bring that feature back to the site with the latest changes.

It’s also fitting that this update comes as MLB and the MLBPA are exchanging proposals for the upcoming Collective Bargaining Agreement, which expires this offseason.

You could view the early exchanging and negotiating as a positive. I personally view it as early positioning for what will no doubt be a historic and long drawn out battle that could drastically reshape the league’s economics going forward.

The biggest potential change is the addition of a salary cap system, which would only come with a salary floor and revenue sharing to ensure every team could spend to the floor.

Looking at the new payroll tracker, the Pirates would benefit from such a change. Their future payrolls are low, and their roster is built for the future.

The Pirates have potential young star Konnor Griffin locked up through 2034. If a cap/floor system was in place, there would be no concerns about paying him through the most expensive years at the end of that deal. They might even have a chance to keep Paul Skenes, as their low future payroll commitments would allow for a massive amount of spending compared to large market teams who would be instantly maxed out by a cap.

I’m not going to break down the proposals of the MLB/MLBPA today. Truthfully, I have only given them each a passing glance, as I’ve been too busy working on updates to Pirates Prospects.

What I wanted to point out was the inevitable struggle that will take place with these negotiations.

For years, both sides have been negotiating for the top earners, while expecting the people at the bottom to go along with the deal and take whatever they were given.

On the MLBPA side, the focus has been on driving up the highest salaries, versus driving up the league minimum pay. The last CBA agreement in March 2022 made some changes to increase compensation at the bottom, but it was largely insignificant. The league minimum in 2021 was $570,500. Five seasons and one CBA change later, and the minimum has gone up to $780,000. Meanwhile, the top salaries have gone from the $35-40 million per year range to the $60+ million per year range, with more players joining the $40 million range.

On the MLB side, the focus has been maintaining a system where teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers can keep their local media revenues, which are greater than most team payrolls. The Dodgers spend more than every team, while contributing revenue sharing to other teams who can’t even touch their payroll with that added revenue. The Dodgers total payroll is covered by their local deal, before they take a dime from national revenue sources that small market teams rely upon.

Both sides have been geared toward the top earners. The players have been trying to push the highest salaries higher, more than they’ve been trying to raise the floor. The owners have been trying to protect the revenues from the highest earners, more than they’ve been trying to equally distribute those revenues to help the teams at the bottom.

What needs to happen, and what seems to be slowly happening, is a shift in philosophy.

That shift would move the focus toward raising the floor.

For the owners, that involves finding a way where the “small market” teams can spend in the same competitive range as the Dodgers, without going bankrupt. A lot of this involves a massive increase of revenue sharing from teams like the Dodgers to these small market teams. No longer can the Dodgers keep the bulk of their ~$280 million per year local media deal. That money needs to go to a league pool that is more evenly distributed.

For the players, that shift involves finding a way to pay the league minimum players a higher salary, which would be more significant than a $200,000 per year jump over five years like last time around. This would mean fewer players would be receiving $40+ million deals, but every player would be receiving deals over $1 million.

There will be powerful people fighting against such a change.

The Dodgers, for one, will want to maintain their competitive edge and their guaranteed spotlight in the league.

Scott Boras, who tends to represent the best players in the game, will also be against a change that favors the bottom. If the best players are getting their massive contracts effectively capped, this will also result in Boras having his commissions capped.

Major League Baseball, from all sides, has been geared toward negotiating in favor of the teams, players, and agents at the top.

And it has been slowly killing the sport in a majority of markets.

The only way to save the sport would be a shift in focus toward raising the floor. That involves the top teams, the top players, and super agents all agreeing that it’s in the best interest of the sport for the small market teams and the league minimum players to receive the focused benefit this time around.

That’s not going to be easy.

My prediction? It’s going to be a long winter.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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Recently, I did a series of articles that broke down the advanced metrics of Pirates hitters in the big leagues.

The minor league Statcast data on Pirates Prospects doesn’t include bat tracking, but it does include some important stats for scouting a player remotely.

The sample sizes are small, especially in the lower levels, but today I’m going to look at who stands out with some key Statcast metrics.

Plate Discipline

O-Swing% is pretty much my go-to metric when evaluating swing decisions. If a player can avoid expanding his strike zone by consistently laying off pitches outside the zone, that player will have an increased chance of success by forcing pitchers to work over the plate.

I don’t know what the minor league averages are for this metric. The MLB average this season is 32.6%. I also don’t know how a chase rate typically increases as you move up to the higher levels. I would imagine outside pitches in the lower levels are easier to identify, versus the upper levels when pitchers are so precise that their misses end up an inch outside of the zone.

So, I’m not going to just focus on chase rates, but the overall decision-making process. I’m looking for all qualified players who have:

O-Swing% <= 32.6%
O-Contact% >= 63.0%
Z-Contact% >= 86.5%

I left out Z-Swing% from this group. I don’t mind if a player is below-average swinging in the zone, as long as their swing decisions consistently lead to above-average contact rates. You could say the same thing about players who chase with above-average O-contact%, but I feel that is more rare, and the profile of players who reduce chase swings is typically better.

With all of this said, below is the group of players making consistently good swing decisions from a contact standpoint.

Johan De Los Santos, SS - He’s had a great season so far in the FCL, batting .321/.465/.571 with two homers and four triples. De Los Santos chases on 26.2% of pitches outside the zone, but makes contact on 90.5% of those swings. The 2025 international signing also makes contact on 88.6% inside the zone, despite a more patient 74.5% swing rate. The final numbers speak for themselves. De Los Santos has shown early in his career to be a high average hitter who can get on base at a tremendous rate, likely due to his swing selectivity across the board.

Fredderick Ovalle, 2B - The Pirates recently promoted Ovalle from the FCL to Bradenton after 50 plate appearances at the rookie level. The second-year infielder was hitting .308/.420/.385 with seven stolen bases. He only chased 19.5% of the time, with an 87.5% contact rate on chase swings. Ovalle also has a minor league system leading 93.3% contact rate in the zone from a selective 62.5% swing rate. He doesn’t have much power to his game, but paired with some speed, Ovalle’s selectivity and high contact rates provide some value.

Jonathan Rivero, C - Another FCL player, with the difference from the previous two mentions being this is Rivero’s second season at this level. He’s showing improved results, batting .256/.356/.385, up from .180/.314/.250 last season. That could be due to a 20.5% chase rate and a 75% contact rate on chase swings. He also makes contact 92.9% on swings in the zone with a 73.7% swing rate. Rivero joins Ovalle and De Los Santos as the three top contact hitters in the system, though the disclaimer about the statistical reduction during the jump from the FCL to higher levels really plays here.

Dylan Palmer, 2B - What stands out to me about Palmer is that he leads the organization with 23 stolen bases. Last year’s 11th round pick is batting .270/.373/.355 in Low-A Bradenton, showing a good contact profile. He chases on 28.2% of pitches outside the zone, but makes contact on 74.3% of those swings. He also makes contact 88.6% of the time in the zone, with a conservative 68.3% swing rate. Palmer’s base running is a legitimate tool, and his ability to consistently get on base would only add to that standout tool.

Antonio Pimentel, SS - Another speedster on the bases in Bradenton, Pimentel has 15 steals so far this season. His numbers aren’t as good as Palmer, with a .210/.320/.295 line. He does make the cut on swing decisions, with a 27.8% chase rate and a 69.1% contact rate on those swings. He also makes contact 87.3% in the zone, with a 72.7% swing rate. Pimentel hit .385/.492/.606 last year in the DSL, then jumped over the FCL to Bradenton. That’s a difficult adjustment, and he struggled for two seasons in the DSL before he put up those 2025 numbers. The big trend throughout his career is a double-digit walk rate, which is a byproduct of the swing decisions and contact skills.

Power Potential

The next batch of stats will look at the power potential from the minor league hitters. In this section, I’m looking at Average Exit Velocity, HardHit%, and Barrel%.

The MLB averages:

Avg EV: 89.0
HardHit: 39.3%
Barrel: 8.1%

I’m looking for minor league players who cross all three thresholds. There are actually seven qualified players who check all three boxes, but I’m going to include an eighth below, with a disclaimer.

Edward Florentino, OF - One of the top 100 prospects in the game, Florentino leads the Pirates’ minor league system with a 94.5 MPH average exit velocity. He also has a 40.9% hard hit rate and a 13.6% barrel rate. These numbers come from his limited time in Bradenton, where he had 40 plate appearances before moving to the Statcast-free Greensboro. They do explain his eight homers so far this season in 136 combined plate appearances.

Bralyn Brazoban, OF - He was one of the Pirates’ top international signings in 2024, and is in his first full season in the US this year. Brazoban has a 93.5 MPH average exit velocity, along with a 50% hard hit rate and a 16.7% barrel rate. He has his first two homers of his career this season, along with four triples, matching his career total from the last two years. The power tool might be starting to kick in for the 19-year-old outfielder, which makes him one of the more exciting players to follow in the lowest levels.

Hyun Seung Lee, SS - This is the disclaimer I mentioned earlier. Lee has a 0% barrel rate shown, but I’m not entirely sure about the accuracy of that data. The metrics from the FCL aren’t complete, with some missing results in my database that I hope to fill in with future updates. That said, Lee has a 92.8 MPH exit velocity and a 45.5% hard hit rate. The disclaimer is that even the exit velocities and hard hit rates might be flawed at the lower levels. However, Lee has stood out this year with a .320/.435/.600 line in the FCL, with two homers, three triples, and two doubles. The power metrics show those numbers might not be a fluke. The 2025 signing out of Korea is one of the more interesting rookie-level guys in my view.

Shawn Ross, C - This inclusion doesn’t surprise me at all. The entire offensive game for Ross is power, which is negated by a very high strikeout rate. He hit seven homers in 77 plate appearances this season for Altoona, but only batted .211 due to a 37.7% strikeout rate. Altoona doesn’t have Statcast data, but in his 42 Triple-A plate appearances, he has a 91.4 MPH exit velocity, 57.9% hard hit rate, and a 15.8% barrel rate. Ross was always interesting to me in the lower levels for having some of the best power in the system, and he still has some of the best power in the system to this day.

Estuar Suero, OF - Suero was acquired in the Rich Hill trade at the deadline in 2023, and was touted highly as a teenager for his advanced power. That still stands out, with a 91.2 MPH exit velocity, a minor league system leading 58.3% hard hit rate, and a 12.5% barrel rate. Suero is currently on the IL in Bradenton, after batting .234/.265/.362. His downside is a 46.9% strikeout rate, due to one of the worst contact rates among qualified minor leaguers in the system. He struggles with contact, but when he makes contact, he crushes the ball.

Esmerlyn Valdez, OF - The Pirates already gave Valdez a brief look in the Majors, where he showed off his power with two homers. In 203 plate appearances at the Triple-A level, he has a 90 MPH average exit velocity, a 45.5% hard hit rate, and a 14% barrel rate. One of the better breakout stories in the system this year, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Valdez back in the Majors at some point this season.

Billy Cook, OF - The official hoister of the cone almost got an honorable mention in the plate patience section. Cook only missed due to a 79.1% contact rate on swings inside the zone, which is below-average. He makes up for that with power. Cook has an 89.7 MPH exit velocity, a 42.9% hard hit rate, and a 14.3% barrel rate in Triple-A. Those numbers didn’t translate to the Majors, where he had a 76.4 MPH exit velocity, a 15.4% hard hit rate, and a 0% barrel rate. This is an example of how the metrics in the minors don’t fully project a player’s ability at the highest level.

Darell Morel, SS - The final player on the list is another FCL hitter. Morel, signed as an international free agent in 2015, has an 89.4 MPH exit velocity, a 41.7% hard hit rate, and an 8.3% barrel rate. He just makes the cut for this list, but his power has shown up in the box scores. Morel has a homer, four triples, and three doubles in 73 plate appearances in the FCL this season, already matching his triple and home run total from a full season in the DSL at age 17 in 2025. He’s got a lower contact rate, but the power could carry him above rookie ball.

Honorable Mention - Murf Gray just missed the cut, with an exit velocity that was 0.5 MPH below the threshold. His hard hit rate is 45.6% and his barrel rate is 12.3%. This is all based on his data in Bradenton, where he hit eight homers. He’s added five more in Greensboro, giving him a leading 13 homers in the Pirates’ minor league system.

Statistical Scouting Standouts

Here are the players who really caught my eye during this small sample sized look throughout the Pirates’ system.

Edward Florentino, OF - The last time I was writing about the Pirates on a daily basis was in 2024. Florentino was starting his career in the DSL, and showed some promise with five homers and ten doubles at the age of 17. He continued hitting for power last year with 16 combined homers between the FCL and Bradenton. The fact his power metrics are at the top of the minor league system isn’t a surprise. He’s only 19 and in High-A. With his power potential at Greensboro’s park, he shouldn’t have an issue putting up numbers at the level, even at the young age. Florentino didn’t really catch my eye as much as he confirmed what he’s shown since the start of his career.

Bralyn Brazoban, OF - I think it’s encouraging that Brazoban is beginning to add some power to his game. He’s only 19, and in his second run through the FCL. The overall results so far are considerably better than his first two seasons in rookie ball. His power is starting to show up in the stats, backed up by the metrics. He will be one of the more interesting lower level prospects to follow this season.

Hyun Seung Lee, SS - I keep seeing Lee’s name showing up in the leaders column, which might be due to the fact he’s had a few multi-hit games over the last week. His overall line in the FCL is great at the age of 18, and he shows some pop in his bat that has led to two homers and some extra base hits so far this season. Getting hyped over someone like Brazoban, who signed for $2 million, almost seems a bit obvious. Following someone like Lee, who signed for $160,000, dives a bit into sleeper breakout territory. I wouldn’t yet say Lee is breaking out, but he’s on the radar as a sleeper to watch.

Esmerlyn Valdez, OF - This is another confirmation situation, instead of an eye opening revelation. Valdez has already hit well enough to get a call to the Majors, and showed good results in limited time at the level. Going back to when I followed him in 2024, Valdez showed a lot of promising power, hitting 22 homers in Bradenton that season. He’s since kept the power, while improving his contact skills and reducing the swing and miss. This is good development progression that has his bat knocking on the door of the Majors at the age of 22.

Murf Gray, 3B - I’m always skeptical of college hitters until they start to show success at Double-A. Last year’s 73rd overall pick, Gray has shown tremendous power results this year, backed up by some of the best power metrics in the system. I don’t know much about his defense right now, but that power coming from a guy who has the potential to play the infield is eye opening. If he continues hitting this way, I’d expect Gray will get the chance to show what he can do in Altoona across a decent sample by the end of the season.

Johan De Los Santos, SS - This list isn’t really a ranking order, but I wrote De Los Santos lower than the rest due to his contact-over-power profile. He does have one of the best contact profiles in the system, with great swing decisions, and some of the highest contact rates. That’s a profile that becomes more difficult to maintain at higher levels. What I like is that the 17-year-old has shown speed, with 34 steals last season and already 14 this year. Speed and contact from the middle infield is a classic approach that will give him plenty of opportunities as he gets older and moves up the ladder. If his power increases along the way, De Los Santos will be a very interesting guy to follow.

Dylan Palmer, 2B - Speaking of speed and contact, Palmer gets a mention here for his system-leading 23 stolen bases, along with some impressive contact skills and good swing decisions. He’s also a college player in Low-A, so he’s not at a level where he’s being tested in a way that is projectable for the higher levels. The contact and elite base running will definitely give last year’s 11th round pick chances to keep moving up.

My next series will focus on the pitchers, including a breakdown of the MLB results, along with a look at what the minor league data is showing.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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Prospect Hotsheet

The first resource is a Prospect Hotsheet.

Everyday, the Hotsheet shows the previous day’s top performers throughout the Pirates’ minor league system. This includes all home runs hit, hits leaders, strikeout leaders, and Statcast data for pitch velocities, whiffs, exit velocities, and hit distances.

The Hotsheet also shows which batters are hitting above an .800 OPS during 7/14/30 day stretches, which can be filtered by level, with a qualified system leaderboard. The Pitchers Hotsheet shows pitchers with an ERA under 3.50 across 7/14/30 day stretches, again filterable by level with a qualified system leaderboard.

The Prospect Hotsheet gives a quick rundown of who is performing well in the minor league system, with a daily recap and longer-term trends spanning from the last week to the last month.

Daily Fantasy Baseball Tools

The next addition is a page dedicated to Daily Fantasy Baseball Research.

Every day, this page will be updated with three important sections to help with your fantasy decisions on the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Batter vs Pitcher

First, there’s Batter vs Pitcher data, showing the history of the Pirates’ hitters against that night’s starter, and the history of their starter against opposing hitters.

There’s some debate over the value of batter vs pitcher trends. They deal in incredibly small sample sizes, which can be unreliable. There’s also the important rule that past results don’t predict future results.

That said, I do believe there is some psychological value when a player has success against another player. The more success a player has against a specific opponent, the more that player’s confidence grows, which gives some sort of edge for future encounters.

Pitch Count Tracker

The second set of metrics comes from a pitch count tracker. This keeps track of recent pitch counts for the bullpen and starting rotation, showing who could be fresh on a given night.

When I first tested this section on May 29th, Gregory Soto, Evan Sisk, and Wilber Dotel were showing as available. It was then no surprise that all three pitched in relief that night, with Dotel throwing three innings after having zero pitches the previous three days.

The May 30th trends show that the bullpen is a bit taxed, which could mean the bullpen debut of Carmen Mlodzinski to pick up multiple innings after Mitch Keller is finished.

Hot/Cold Streaks

Finally, there’s a Hot/Cold tracker, which measures the hitters and pitchers who are streaking in either direction over the last 7, 14, and 30 day stretches. The thresholds for hitters are <= .600 OPS and >= .800 OPS. For pitchers, it’s >= 5.00 ERA and <= 3.50 ERA. This is similar to the Prospect Hotsheet, only it is limited to MLB results, and includes Cold streaks.

What stands out to me here is that Pirates pitchers are on hot streaks lately, while there are a lot of hitters on cold streaks over the last two weeks.

On the hot streak side for hitters, last night’s hero Bryan Reynolds is one of the standouts. That’s not just for the last week, but for the last month. Reynolds has a 1.503 OPS the last 7 days, 1.032 over the last two weeks, and .951 over the last 30.

Other Updates

The Prospect Hotsheet and the Daily Fantasy Baseball Research can both be found under the Resources tab of the main menu on Pirates Prospects. Or, you can bookmark the links above for direct access to the daily updates.

There are other changes that have been made to the site over the last day. The biggest one is the addition of draft and international signing data to the player pages. Each player now shows when he was drafted, or the year and team that signed him on the international side.

This is part of a larger build to the site, which will eventually result in the addition of contract details (service time, options, salaries), key dates (Rule 5, minor league free agency), and other information that has been a staple on Pirates Prospects since 2009.

There’s also the addition of a Statcast leaderboard on the Stats page, showing the leaders throughout the system for some key advanced metrics. This information is sortable by level, and can be split between the MLB results and the entire minor league system.

Keep checking the new Pirates Prospects every day for the latest updates, and for full information on the Pittsburgh Pirates and their minor league system.

I’ll be taking some breaks over the next week from adding new features to write a few articles here on Pittsburgh Baseball Live.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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A little over a year ago, I took PiratesProspects.com offline.

It was only the second time since January 2009 that Pirates Prospects wasn’t operating.

The first time came in 2020, and lasted exactly one year. My intent at the time was to create a new version of Pirates Prospects during a time when there was no minor league baseball.

I never actually created a new version of the site. I didn’t have the coding knowledge, and AI wasn’t around to advance that coding knowledge with vibe coding. So, the site returned in 2021 with a different spin on the old approach.

Today, I have created the version of Pirates Prospects that I envisioned back in 2020.

EDUCATION UPGRADE

It would have cost me $6000 to keep the old Pirates Prospects database online in 2025. I repurposed that money toward furthering my education.

Part of that education was learning the basics of coding. Part of that was learning how AI worked. A big part of that was learning how the stock market worked. There are no pensions in sports blogging.

By January of this year, I was creating apps with the help of AI. This included an NBA prop betting system that was the foundation for the new Pirates Prospects. I also started on the foundation for the new P2, but I needed the season to be in progress before I could really get to work.

This past week, I reached a point where Pirates Prospects could go live, which is now is over at PiratesProspects.com.

It’s pretty self-explanatory when you check it out, but let me tell you a little about how the new site works.

INFORMATION AND AUTOMATION

Ever since 2020, I wanted Pirates Prospects to be a resource, instead of a blog. I didn’t want the content of the site to be dependent on opinions and live reports, but just objective data.

There’s no written content on the new Pirates Prospects. I’ll still be writing here. I might add some written content in the future to the new P2, but it’s not going to be a blog with constant articles filled with opinions, and I’m definitely not going to be traveling to report on games.

As I type this, I have the Pirates Prospects homepage open on another screen. I know that Wyatt Sanford hit another home run in the afternoon Greensboro game, because the site automatically updated with the result.

One of the main features on the old Pirates Prospects was a daily Prospect Watch that tracked what was happening throughout the system each day. The new Pirates Prospects allows you to see what is happening live.

The live game updates include a top performers section, showing who has homered, the hits leaders, and the strikeout leaders for pitchers.

The Scores page shows Statcast data, including exit velocities, hit distances, whiffs, and pitch velocities. That page also shows the full box scores and play-by-play for each game, again with live updates.

Aside from the live game updates, the entire site is filled with information.

The Stats page shows the leaders of key categories across the entire system, along with a sortable table complete with timeframe splits and IP/PA qualifiers.

The Rosters page shows the depth chart, updated within an hour of any official roster transaction, with links to every player page.

The individual player pages include career stats, game logs, splits, 2026 Statcast data, and career transactions for every player in the system. If you didn’t already click the Sanford link above, you can check out the player page for fellow top prospect Seth Hernandez.

The Schedule page shows the current week schedule throughout the system, with the ability to look at any week of the season, and links to past results.

The Standings page keeps track of the record of every team in the Pirates’ system, along with where they rank in their division, and where the Pirates rank in the NL Wild Card race.

The Transactions page updates throughout the day with the latest official moves, with links to the player pages, and the ability to filter transactions by level.

The abbreviated version of all of these features is available on the home page, giving you a destination to get the latest updates throughout the system with one quick scroll.

FUTURE UPDATES

The best part about the new Pirates Prospects is my workload.

There might be some hiccups with the automated updates in the early days, but today was the first day I woke up and everything was working as it should. This allows me to focus my energy on expanding the site with new features.

Here’s a preview of what’s to come:

• One of the key details currently left out is the tracking of service time, option years, and other contract information. I’m currently working on that expansion. I also need to update the draft and international signing database, which largely involves an import from the old Pirates Prospects archives.

• I’ve been working the last few years on a new approach to scouting prospects. That’s something I hope to implement on the site by the end of this calendar year, which would introduce a unique ranking system not found anywhere else. Right now, I have all of the data I need to proceed. The system I created to evaluate the stock market is going to provide the framework for this system. I don’t want to rush into this yet, so it might be a target for the offseason.

• There are other smaller updates on my list. Advanced play-by-play data. Team specific pages. Links to articles around the internet from trusted sources.

• Finally, I’d like to put together a newsletter that emails the previous day’s results every morning. This might be one of the first updates to hit the site.

My only role now is to think about how Pirates Prospects could be improved with more information, and then to make it happen.

The to-do list I have right now is ten tasks deep, and I add something to the list every time I browse the site. I’m like Tony Stark designing new Iron Man suits.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll check out the new version of Pirates Prospects, and make it a daily destination for information on the Pittsburgh Pirates and their minor league system.

The new site is free, and will remain free. It might eventually include advertisements to pay the bills. Your support on this Pittsburgh Baseball Live writing project and over on Patreon has helped me to get to this point where I could launch the new Pirates Prospects as a free resource. I appreciate everyone who has supported along the way, even if you didn’t know the new site was slowly being developed.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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It may or may not already be online for a silent launch as I test the work.

Feel free to check it out.

Long-time readers know where to check.

Today will be the first time I use that project for an article.

My focus? Pittsburgh Pirates stat leaders who standout at each level after the first two months of the season.

Pittsburgh Pirates

-Brandon Lowe continues to impress with his power, leading the team with 13 home runs, while also leading with a .905 OPS. He has been a great pickup, and the fact the Pirates also got Mason Montgomery and Jake Mangum in the deal was a steal.

-Spencer Horwitz has been on a great run over the last month, batting .300/.400/.500 with three homers. Even better, his walk rate of 13.7% is higher than his strikeout rate of 11.6%.

-Konnor Griffin is also heating up, batting .286/.349/.429 with two homers over the last month. He has also been the most valuable player on the bases this season, adding 12 steals.

-Nick Gonzales continues batting .300 with a high OBP and good fielding results. That’s more than enough to have positive value as a third baseman, though his profile of no-power and all contact could lead to some BABIP-induced slumps.

-Paul Skenes has had a few rough starts lately, which shows he’s human. He has a 3.00 ERA on the season, which only looks bad in comparison to his video game numbers the last two years.

-Braxton Ashcraft has been a huge standout, with a 2.89 ERA and 65 strikeouts in 62.1 innings. Perspective is gained when you notice Ashcraft and Skenes have similar stats, with one player looking like a breakout and the other player looking like he’s in a slump.

-Wilber Dotel and Evan Sisk are two sleeper relievers in a bullpen that needs help. Dotel stands out for being a right-hander in a year where no other Pirates right-handed relievers are performing well.

-Gregory Soto has looked good in the closer role, with five saves and a 2.31 ERA over the last month. This only compounds the bullpen concerns, by placing the only reliable reliever in a limited role.

Indianapolis Indians

-Esmerlyn Valdez was just promoted to Pittsburgh, after destroying Triple-A pitching this year. He had 10 doubles and 10 home runs in 194 PA in Indianapolis, with an .887 OPS.

-Rafael Flores, who was the main return for David Bednar at last year’s trade deadline, has struggled at the plate. He has four home runs and a .649 OPS in 183 plate appearances, which isn’t great for a poor defense catcher whose power is his ticket to the big leagues.

-Antwone Kelly seems like a pitcher who would be better out of the bullpen. He’s a starter in Triple-A with an ERA over 5, but could be an option for the Pirates’ right-handed relief woes.

-Hunter Barco looks like the best rotation depth option in Triple-A. The lefty has a 3.00 ERA in 18 innings since returning to Triple-A, though he has been limited to shorter outings, and might be seen as more of a swingman by the team.

Altoona Curve

-Lonnie White Jr. has been one of the better stories in the Pirates’ minor league system this year. After hitting seven homers with a 1.008 OPS in Greensboro, he was promoted to Altoona, where he has four homers and a .914 OPS.

-Jesus Castillo was batting .300 with an .800 OPS before going on the injured list early this month. He’s currently rehabbing with the Bradenton Marauders.

-Khristian Curtis leads the team with 50 strikeouts, but his 5.82 ERA and 1.6 HR/9 have been a problem. The hard-throwing Curtis seems like he could be a deep sleeper for right-handed relief work in Pittsburgh.

-Matt Ager was promoted from Greensboro, after a 4.67 ERA in 17.1 innings in relief. He has since posted a 2.08 ERA in 13 innings with Altoona, getting work as a starter.

Greensboro Grasshoppers

-Wyatt Sanford is a top prospect in the system, and the 20-year-old shortstop has fared well. He has six homers, 17 stolen bases, and a .910 OPS, though his 35.3% strikeout rate is something to work on.

-Axiel Plaz has been one of the better lower-level sleepers the last few seasons. The 20-year-old catcher is hitting for a .983 OPS with eight homers in 158 plate appearances, and an encouraging 20% strikeout rate compared to a 7% walk rate.

-Seth Hernandez might easily be the top prospect in the system right now. After dominating Bradenton with a 0.96 ERA, the 19-year-old has a 3.52 ERA in his first 7.2 innings with Greensboro. I’ll add that I don’t remember many instances where a top pitching prospect in the Pirates’ system pitched in High-A at such a young age, both physical-age or experience-age.

-Connor Oliver has stood out on the Greensboro pitching staff, ranking second with 41 strikeouts and first with a 1.38 ERA. He’s a 24-year-old lefty, and has some control problems, but could be an interesting relief option in the upper levels.

Bradenton Marauders

-Murf Gray was promoted to Greensboro, after hitting eight homers with a 1.042 OPS in Bradenton. He’s continued bashing the ball in his first five games at the higher level, but Double-A will be the true test for the 22-year-old infielder.

-Dylan Palmer leads the Pirates’ organization with 21 stolen bases, batting .284/.392/.381. The second baseman was drafted in the 11th round last year out of Hofstra.

-Jack Anker has won FSL Pitcher of the Week twice this year. Last year’s sixth round pick out of Fresno State has a 3.48 ERA and a 26:6 K/BB in 31 innings for Bradenton this season.

-Levi Sterling is showing some potential with 38 strikeouts, which ties for the team lead now that Hernandez is gone. The 19-year-old right-hander threw five no-hit innings for the Marauders in a rain-shortened game on Sunday.

FCL Pirates

-Johan De Los Santos has been the standout in the early FCL season. The 17-year-old has been hitting .341/.481/.561 with 11 stolen bases in his debut in the US, while spending two games with Bradenton recently where he went 3-for-10 with a homer and two steals.

-Bralyn Brazoban, one of the top signings from the 2024 international free agent class, is putting up good numbers this year. Brazoban has a .310/.362/.595 line with four triples standing out in his stat line.

-Wifrailyn Jaquez has a 0.93 ERA in 9.2 innings across four starts. The 19-year-old right-hander hasn’t gone more than three innings in a start, but leads the team in ERA.

-Ronaldys Jimenez leads the team in strikeouts with 13 in 9.1 innings, while having an impressive .182 BAA. The 20-year-old lefty was acquired for Martin Perez two years ago, and is in his second FCL season.

System Thoughts

Maybe I’ve changed as I’ve grown older.

Maybe I’m less of a dreamer than I once was.

This system just feels very thin.

Seth Hernandez is one of the few standout elite prospects.

Players like Edward Florentino, Wyatt Sanford, and Levi Sterling show various levels of potential.

Lonnie White might be the best breakout player so far, but he has little competition.

Murf Gray needs to be hitting in Altoona before I’d call him a breakout, at least in the sense of showing future potential for the Majors.

Axiel Plaz might be the only other candidate on the breakout list, but he’s just continuing what he’s quietly been doing the last two seasons.

Granted, the Pirates have already promoted Konnor Griffin and Esmerlyn Valdez. Technically, Bubba Chandler graduated from prospect eligibility this season.

And if a system is going to be thin, I’d rather be thin with elite names at the top of the ranks followed by very little depth.

But this system is thin.

The depth is weak.

The top-heavy approach will hide the weakness, but the lack of depth will prevent the Pirates from having St. Louis Cardinals or Milwaukee Brewers type success, with surprises emerging from their system.

And that will mostly show up with the big league team lacking in areas of depth — such as having a weak bullpen that the system can’t fix internally.

I’ve predicted 78 wins all season, and the Pirates continue staying above .500.

The MLB team follows the same approach as the system, being top-heavy with poor depth.

My below .500 win prediction is due to the concern that, across a long season, the lack of depth could send the Pirates into a slump at some point.

The 2026 season is 33.33% completed.

The next third is a timeframe that has cooled many Pirates hot starts.

We’re entering the most important stretch of the season. The true test of whether the Pirates can contend. And a period where they will need to be active in finding help for their bullpen.

It’s still a long season.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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I had some previous experience with bat speed and swing length data, so that article went into more detail on those metrics for most of the players on the roster.

Prior to this article, I didn’t have much experience looking at the rest of the Bat Tracking data. What better way to get a first look than to break down the 2026 Pirates hitters?

Below are the remaining Bat Tracking stats: Squared-Up rates, Blast rates, swing path, attack angle, attack direction, and attack angle rate. I finished the article with a profile on every hitter, plus an overall look at the 2026 offense.

If you missed part one, check that out before diving into today’s conclusion.

Squared-Up Contact Rate and Swing Rate

“A swing’s squared-up rate tells us how much of the highest possible exit velocity available (based on the physics related to the swing speed and pitch speed) a batter was able to obtain – it is, at its simplest, how much exit velocity did you get as a share of how much exit velocity was possible based on your swing speed and the speed of the pitch.”

MLB Average: 32.8% Contact / 25.0% Swing

These stats are interesting. They demonstrate an efficiency of maximizing the available exit velocity. There are two stats. One tracks the squared-up rate by contact, and the other by overall swings. Each tells a different story.

Oneil Cruz, for example, has an above-average contact rate of 35.7%, but a below-average swing rate of 22.2%. This means Cruz, with all of his swing and miss, doesn’t maximize exit velocity on every swing. When he makes contact, he maximizes that exit velocity at an above-average rate.

Spencer Horwitz excels in this department. He leads the team in both contact and swing rates. He also ranks 10th in the Majors in contact and 12th in swing rate. While Horwitz lacks power production from a slow bat speed, very few barrels, and a low exit velocity, he does square up on the ball. If he ever found the barrel more frequently with this trend, he’d add some valuable power to his game.

Ryan O’Hearn, Jared Triolo, and Nick Yorke are the other players with above-average rates on both sides. Everyone else on the team has below-average rates on both sides.

This feels more like a control stat than a power stat. With the exception of Cruz, the hitters who excel in this area all have below-average bat speeds and below-average fast swing rates. The next set of metrics gets more into the power.

Blast Contact Rate and Swing Rate

“A blast, in Statcast terms, is when a batter squares up a ball and does so with a high bat speed.”

MLB Average: 14.2% Contact / 10.8% Swing

When paired with the last set of metrics, the blast contact rate and swing rate will show who is maximizing their exit velocity with a power swing.

Again, Cruz leads the way here, which isn’t a surprise. His 26.2% contact rate is almost 10 percentage points higher than the second best on the team, which is Yorke. His 16.3% swing rate is first, despite the swing and miss reducing his contact opportunities. Cruz ranks third in the majors in blast contact rate, and 18th in blast swing rate.

Behind Cruz, the Pirates have four hitters with above-average rates on both sides: Yorke (17.6 / 15.0), Brandon Lowe (16.9 / 11.8), Marcell Ozuna (16.0 / 11.5), and Bryan Reynolds (14.9 / 10.9).

O’Hearn, Konnor Griffin, Henry Davis, and Joey Bart are all around average on both sides.

On the low end, Horwitz (12.2%), Triolo (12.1%), Nick Gonzales (9.3%), and Jake Mangum (5.2%) are all well below-average in blast contact.

These stats really separate the power hitters from the contact hitters, especially when compared to the squared-up rates. Horwitz and Triolo were both above-average with squared-up rates, but below-average with blast rates. This continues an observation I made on Thursday about Triolo, which is that he has more of a defensive swing that reacts, versus a more aggressive cut like Davis.

Meanwhile, Davis is one of the worst in the squared-up rates (26.8% contact rate), but average with the blast rates, showing his swing is geared more toward power.

The more I dive into these numbers, the more respect I have for Cruz developing into one of the most dangerous hitters in the game.

Swing Path

“Swing path is a metric that tells you the shape of a hitter’s swing on the way toward contact. The tilt of the swing is defined as the vertical angle formed by the bat path compared to the ground.”

MLB Average: 32

This is actually the stat I was looking forward to the most. It’s also where I might do some future league-wide research.

The swing path tracks the vertical angle of the swing. The zero degree angle starts at the head, with a swing that travels parallel to the ground. The steeper the angle, the more a swing turns into a golf club swing. This is measured during the 40 milliseconds prior to contact.

Almost every Pirates hitter has a tilt of 32 or more. The exceptions are Billy Cook (28) and Davis (27). The extreme cases are Reynolds (39), Triolo (38), and Ozuna (37). I’m surprised that Cruz is only at 34, considering how tall he is and how often he has an almost vertical swing on inside pitches.

I don’t have numbers to back this up, but my theory is that less tilt does better at the top of the zone and on outside pitches, while more tilt does better low and inside. Less tilt would benefit from four-seam fastballs and horizontal breaking pitches, while struggling against sinkers and vertical breaking pitches. More tilt would have the opposite impact, especially benefitting against sinkers.

There is also the angle and direction to consider, which I’ll detail below, before building a full profile for each hitter.

Before I continue, I want to provide a visual guide to each concept from Baseball Savant, using Cruz as an example.

Attack Angle

“Attack angle measures the vertical direction that the sweet spot of the bat is traveling at the moment it hits the baseball.”

MLB Average: 10

The attack angle almost corresponds to the old theory of launch angle and lift. The Pirates have four hitters with above-average attack angles: Ozuna, Lowe, Cook, and O’Hearn. Reynolds is right at average. Cruz is surprisingly below-average, while Triolo (3), Yorke (2), and Mangum (1) are well below-average.

What I find interesting here is the correlation between ground ball rates and attack angle. Mangum has the highest ground ball rate on the team. Yorke is third. Triolo is ninth, but also ninth in line drive and sixth in fly ball rate. Those low attack angles tend to lead to heavy ground ball tendencies.

Meanwhile, out of the higher attack angles, Ozuna stands out with the lowest ground ball rate to pair with his team-leading attack angle. Lowe and O’Hearn are bottom four in ground balls. Cook has a higher ground ball rate, but a 33% line drive rate, which leads the team. Ozuna, Lowe, and O’Hearn are all top-five in line drive rates, which are most likely to fall in for hits.

The higher attack angle is a good thing, as it avoids hitting the ball into the ground, which is horrible for power, and subjects you to BABIP performance.

Attack Direction

“Attack direction measures the horizontal direction that the sweet spot of the bat is moving at the point of contact with the baseball (or the point the bat and ball cross paths on a swing-and-miss).”

MLB Average: 0

The attack direction breaks down whether a hitter is a pull hitter or an opposite field hitter.

The Pirates have three hitters around zero: Griffin, Gonzales, and O’Hearn.

Cruz, Lowe, and Horwitz are left-handed pull hitters, with Cruz having the most extreme result at 6 degrees. That’s great for his power production at PNC Park.

On the right side, Davis, Ozuna, and Cook are extreme pull hitters, which doesn’t work well at PNC Park. Triolo and Yorke are opposite field hitters in the 5-7 degree range.

Reynolds is a switch hitter who works opposite field from both sides, with a more extreme angle from the right side, and only 2 degrees from the left.

Mangum is also a switch hitter who has an extreme 14 degree opposite field angle from the left side, and only 5 degrees opposite field from the right. The left side opposite field approach takes away his advantage of being a lefty hitter in PNC Park.

Ideal Attack Angle Rate

“A hitter’s ideal attack angle rate is the percentage of his competitive swings that fall within the 5-20 degree attack angle range.”

MLB Average: 51.3%

The ideal attack angle metric is interesting, because the results don’t correlate with good performances. Only two Pirates have above-average rates. Those are Davis and Ozuna. They are also in the top four in fly balls, which makes sense considering the metric.

At the low end are Triolo, Yorke, and Mangum, who I identified earlier as players who put the ball on the ground more often.

I don’t think this stat individually points to success, but it does show which hitters consistently attack the ball at an angle that avoids ground balls or weak fly balls. At best, it’s a stat that shows who is avoiding a poor contact approach.

Hitting Profiles

After three days of highlighting the swing decisions and contact, plus the bat speed data and today’s Bat Tracking details, I’ve got a better view on each hitter on this offense. Below is a summarized profile of each player.

Oneil Cruz - Cruz is the best power hitter on the team, and one of the best in the league. He ranks top five in the Majors in bat speed, fast swing rate, and blast contact. He has above-average tilt, below-average attack angle, and a six-degree pull side attack direction that plays well at PNC Park as a lefty. He’s got a below-average ideal attack angle rate, with his average of 7 degrees sitting at the low end of the 5-20 range. There are some swing and miss issues, which might come from swing length or one of the most aggressive fast swing approaches in the game. Cruz still puts up great results with those issues in place.

Brandon Lowe - The power from Lowe has been impressive this season. He ranks second to Cruz on the team in blast contact rate. His attack angle is tied for first on the team at 15, and he ranks fourth with a 49% ideal attack angle rate. His bat has above-average tilt, and he’s got some pull side direction, which helps at PNC Park. His swing is geared toward putting the ball in the air, pull-side, and he’s efficient at maximizing exit velocity with hard swings.

Ryan O’Hearn - One of the most well-rounded hitters on the team, O’Hearn lacks a fast bat, but is one of the best at squaring up on the ball. He has average tilt, an above-average attack angle, and a neutral direction, which should translate to the ideal ability to hit line drives to the middle of the field. His bat speed is slow, and he doesn’t catch a lot of barrels. He does hit for some power, while showing some of the best swing decisions and contact abilities on the team.

Bryan Reynolds - He doesn’t stand out in any single category, but Reynolds is a well-rounded hitter with some power. He’s got the largest bat tilt on the team, along with a league average attack angle. His directional angle is neutral, showing all-fields abilities. While Cruz and Lowe stand out for the power production, O’Hearn and Reynolds stand out for their ability to provide consistent production. This is fueled by swing decisions and contact ability that has some power potential.

Konnor Griffin - The young rookie not only has one of the longest swings on the team, but one of the quickest and most consistently fast bat speeds. He ranks in the bottom half of the team in squared-up and blast swing rates, which is due to some swing and miss issues. Those issues aren’t as extreme as Cruz, but he also doesn’t have the extreme power production to match. Griffin has average bat tilt, around average attack angle, and around neutral directional angle. There’s a lot of potential here, but it’s mostly untapped. Griffin might actually benefit from scaling back from the long, power swing and going for more contact to maximize his speed and natural power. For now, he’s too young and new to be making any changes. He’s still in the early stages of establishing a sample size of what type of hitter he can be.

Nick Gonzales - Gonzales is an interesting case. He’s one of the rare hitters with an above-average swing length and below-average bat speed. He rates in the bottom half for squared-up and blast rates. He has above-average tilt, around average attack angle, and neutral direction. There’s not much here that shows Gonzales being anything more than a good contact hitter. He has shown improvements with his swing speed variance, which has led to reduced swinging strikes and better contact rates. He’s a safe contact hitter who lacks power, but he’s been on a tear lately. That, unfortunately, is fueled by a high BABIP, which means he could be a streaky hitter who is currently in a hot streak.

Spencer Horwitz - It’s a bit of a problem that Horwitz has some of the worst power production numbers on the team in many categories. That includes one of the slowest bat speeds, one of the lowest blast rates, and one of the lowest barrel rates. He does excel at squaring up on pitches, leading the rest of the team by a good range. Horwitz has above-average tilt, around average angle, and some pull to his direction. He looks like a better contact hitter than Gonzales, with the downside being that Horwitz plays a power position.

Henry Davis - There are some issues that stand out with Davis. He’s got one of the fastest swings, but some of the worst squared-up rates. His fast swings don’t translate to good blast rates, showing he’s not making efficient contact when he swings hard. His swing speed sits in a tight, consistent range that could be predictable. His tilt is below-average, with a more horizontal swing. He does hit the ideal attack angle better than anyone on the team. What I find interesting is he’s attacked in the zone more than anyone else on the team. He also sees the highest sinker rate on the team, and one of the lowest four-seam rates. With a swing that is more horizontal and predictable in speed, Davis is a hitter that pitchers can attack with well-timed vertical movement in the zone.

Marcell Ozuna - A lot of the metrics from Ozuna point to an aging power hitter who is starting to slip below-average in every aspect of what leads to power. He does still make good blast contact, but his bat speed has dropped, and his contact rate has been declining, especially out of the zone. Ozuna does have an above-average attack angle with above-average bat tilt. He’s got one of the best attack angle rates on the team. However, the three hitters who are above-average in this stat aren’t putting up good numbers this year, despite their power potential. At best, he’s still got the ability to put the ball in the air, with less force behind it, which will subject him to the lowest BABIP odds.

Jared Triolo - Triolo excels at making contact, but it’s not quality contact. He’s got some of the worst power production on the team, with one of the lowest fast swing rates, and low blast rates. He squares up on the ball better than most on the team, and is one of the more disciplined hitters. However, he’s got a well-below average attack angle, which means he’s prone to putting the ball on the ground more than most. He’s got a defensive swing that is geared toward reactionary contact, versus proactive attack force. That’s his entire game, which works well on the field, but not so much at the plate.

Nick Yorke - I was wondering why Yorke was struggling so much, despite promising plate patience and power metrics. Then, I noticed he had one of the worst attack angles, which leads to one of the highest ground ball rates on the team. He also has one of the lowest barrel rates. It doesn’t matter if Yorke is swinging fast with good swing decisions if he’s just pounding the ball into the ground by missing the sweet spot. He could be a swing adjustment away from locking everything in. That adjustment would likely require a better attack angle that allows him to catch the barrel more often, while putting the ball in the air.

Joey Bart - I didn’t focus on Bart that much during this series. He’s got one of the fastest bat speeds, highest fast swing rates, and he’s above-average with blast rates. His squared up rates are among the worst on the team. He has one of the better barrel rates on the team, but he doesn’t hit the ball consistently hard. He’s average, at-best, when it comes to contact. His attack angle is neutral, and he has right-handed pull tendencies that don’t work for PNC Park. There’s not much that stands out, except for some power potential that is neutralized by inconsistent contact abilities.

Billy Cook - Cook has one of the longest swing lengths on the team, but ranks around middle of the pack in bat speed. He’s got some of the lowest squared-up rates, and some of the lowest blast rates. He also has one of the highest swing and miss rates. It’s a small sample size, but Cook’s swing looks statistically flawed, with a power approach that might have worked in the minors, but won’t work in the majors. He has the second-most horizontal swing on the team, and is one of the leaders in attack angle rate. His pull-side direction is a detriment at PNC Park. He probably would benefit from a shorter, more controlled swing that is less focused on power and more focused on contact.

Jake Mangum - Mangum is one of the weaker hitters on the team in terms of power, but also in terms of contact this year. He’s got the slowest bat speed, lowest fast swing rate, shortest swing, lowest blast rates, lowest squared-up rates, and his attack angle is the lowest on the team. This all results in an extreme 69.2% ground ball rate that leads the Majors. He’s a switch hitter, but has opposite field direction from the left side, which removes his benefit at PNC Park. I liked Mangum with the Rays last year as a defensive outfielder with speed who could make good contact. The biggest change to his game this year is a severe decline in squaring up on the ball, with more tilt added to his swing, and an increase in an already extreme ground ball rate. He still holds the fourth outfield profile, but he has taken a step back this year on a contact-based offensive profile with weaker contact.

The 2026 Pittsburgh Pirates Offense

It has only been a little over a month, but the biggest surprise of the season has been the Pirates ranking as the seventh-best position player group in the Majors. That’s a value that comes with below-average defense and top-ten offense.

The standout performances are the seventh-best on-base percentage and the second highest base running value. They have middle-of-the-pack power, and rank top ten in average, with a top-five BABIP. The latter could be due to the speed and patient contact abilities.

Cruz and Lowe stand out as the power hitters on the team. O’Hearn and Reynolds are the more consistent, well-rounded hitters who can provide power. Griffin is showing potential to add another dynamic bat to the mix. Gonzales has been putting up great contact abilities at times.

The offense does have some holes. The catching position is the weakest spot, with Davis possibly needing a swing overhaul, and Bart lacking contact abilities to maximize his power. The Pirates are hurt by the decline of Ozuna at the DH role, and they’re rolling with a contact-heavy, low-power first base option in Horwitz. When O’Hearn plays first base, he’s replaced with a contact-heavy option in Mangum, or guts like Cook or Yorke who have swing issues to deal with.

The biggest downside is Ozuna. There are a lot of signs that he’s declining at an older age. The $12 million spent on him this offseason already looks like a sunk cost. If the Pirates want to upgrade their offense this season, they’re going to have to commit more resources to his spot as the area with the most potential upside. They could also target a right-fielder, move O’Hearn to first base, and have Horwitz batting off the bench and splitting time at DH.

For now, the offense has made massive leaps from last year’s bottom-five group. A lot of that is due to the additions of Lowe and O’Hearn, with a big boost from Cruz stepping up his power production.

With the quality of the pitching staff, this offense as it stands can get the Pirates in winning position.

I might have to take a similar look at the pitching staff in my next series.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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When MLB first expanded their Statcast data to track swing paths, I knew it was only a matter of time before they released data that breaks down every aspect of a player’s swing.

Back in March of this year, FanGraphs added these new Statcast Bat Tracking metrics to their database.

To get more familiar with the new stats, I recommend this primer.

The new metrics measure bat speed, swing length, fast swing rates, and other contact and bat path metrics. I’ve been waiting to dive into these numbers after a decent sample size emerged from the 2026 season.

Below is a breakdown of each new metric, complete with MLB’s definitions, 2026 league averages, and standout performers from the 2026 Pittsburgh Pirates. This is actually part one of a two-part look, since the first part went longer than an Oneil Cruz home run swing.

Bat Speed

“How fast the sweet spot of the bat is moving, in mph, at the point of contact with the ball (or where the ball and bat would have met, in case of a swing-and-miss).”

MLB Average: 71.9

This is the most important metric when it comes to power. Home runs aren’t generated by raw strength, but by how fast your bat is moving through the zone when it makes contact. This metric shows who has a consistently fast swing.

It’s not a surprise that Oneil Cruz leads the Pirates with a 78.4 MPH bat speed. That’s third fastest in the Majors out of qualified hitters in 2026, behind only Junior Caminero and Jordan Walker.

Henry Davis (75.4), Konnor Griffin (75.2), and Joey Bart (75.0) are all in the top 30 MLB range, though Davis and Bart lack the swings to qualify for the league leaderboards. There’s a difference between the power production from Cruz and the power from each of these hitters. That shows that a consistently fast swing doesn’t guarantee power.

The Pirates have a lot of fast swinging hitters. Marcell Ozuna (73.7), Brandon Lowe (73.1), Bryan Reynolds (72.6), Jared Triolo (72.6), Nick Yorke (72.5), and Billy Cook (72.1) all finish above the league average.

On the other side of that line, Ryan O’Hearn (70.8) has been one of the most well-rounded hitters with a below-average bat speed. Nick Gonzales (70.5) has also been hitting well, albeit mostly with a contact approach that explains his below-average bat speed. Spencer Horwitz (68.4) and Jake Mangum (66.5) both lack power, which can be partially explained by well below average bat speeds.

Swing Length

“Swing length is a metric intended to identify if a batter has a short or long swing. It is calculated in terms of feet the bat traveled during the swing.”

MLB Average: 7.3

The Swing Length metric becomes a great scouting tool when paired with bat speed. If you have two hitters with an identical bat speed, the one with the shorter swing length is going to be less prone to swing and miss. They’ve got more time to react to the pitch, with the capability to match bat speed from a shorter swing.

A good comparison here is Reynolds vs Triolo. Both have a 72.6 MPH bat speed, but Reynolds’ swing is half a foot shorter than Triolo. Reynolds has more time to react and achieve a the same speed. It’s a fraction of a second, but that split-second can make all the difference against Major League pitching. Triolo actually makes more contact than Reynolds, but the quality of contact from Reynolds is considerably better.

Likewise, if two players have the same swing length, and one has a higher bat speed, that marks a demonstration of raw power.

Cruz and Griffin both have a lengthy swing at 7.7 feet, putting them both in the top 40 in the Majors. Cruz, however, has a bat speed that is 3 MPH faster. The difference in power is a .223 ISO and a .473 slugging percentage from Cruz, compared to a .138/.404 from Griffin. Both are among the team-leaders in strikeout rate and swinging strikes, which is a symptom of their long swings. Cruz has more forgiveness for his strikeouts, due to his power production, which stems in part from the greater kinetic energy generated by his bat speed.

Standouts from this metric:

• O’Hearn, Reynolds, and Lowe have some of the shortest swings, and all are below the league average. They’re among the best hitters on the team. Lowe and Reynolds pair short swings with above-average bat speeds.

• Horwitz has a short swing, but it’s also slow. The same can be said for Mangum.

• Gonzales is one of the rare cases of above-average swing length and below-average bat speed.

• Cook has the longest swing on the team, but a bat speed that is just above-average. He also leads the team in strikeout rate, showing he probably should go for a shorter, faster swing.

• Davis and Bart have some of the fastest bat speeds, and their swings are barely above-average length.

Fast-Swing Rate

“Statcast defines a ‘fast swing’ as one that reaches a swing speed of 75 mph. A player’s ‘fast-swing rate’ is simply showing the percentage of all of his swings that did reach 75 mph.”

MLB Average: 25.7%

The obvious standout here is Cruz, who has a 76.3% fast swing rate. That means three out of four swings from Cruz are going to be 75 MPH or higher. By comparison, Davis and Griffin average 75 MPH, but their fast swing rate is only 56.8% for Davis and 53.6% for Griffin.

I wanted to take a closer look at these three, getting a feel for the full swing profiles, so I downloaded their 2026 bat speed charts from Baseball Savant.

First up is Cruz.

Cruz doesn’t have many swings below 70 MPH. He peaks with around 16% of his swings at 80 MPH, while also having 10% or more in the 74-84 MPH range. You’ll notice a difference in the breadth of his chart versus Davis, who is up next.

Davis peaks at 22% around 77 MPH, with a steep decline from there. Using the same 10% range as Cruz, Davis has a 10% rate from 71-80 MPH, versus 74-84 from Cruz. The bat speed from Davis sits below 75 MPH on 43.2% of swings, but his average of 75.4 MPH is due to an almost singular aggressive approach topping out around 77 MPH. This is different from Cruz, who has a fast swing at 76, a faster swing around 80, and an elite swing that can get up to 84 with consistency.

What’s encouraging about Griffin is that he matches the wider range of Cruz.

Griffin lacks the elite level bat speed of Cruz, both on the top end and at his peak, but he has a more balanced swing profile than Davis. Griffin is also about 5 MPH above the league average curve. His breadth zone of 10% or higher ranges from 70-81 MPH, which is similar to Davis. The difference is that Davis has a very consistent fast swing, while Griffin can slow his down and speed it up more often. This is really shown at the 8% level, where Griffin ranges from 68-83 MPH, while Davis ranges from 70-80.

Imagine two pitchers who can both hit 98 MPH. One of those pitchers sits mostly 97-98, while the other ranges from 95-100. If those pitchers only had a fastball, it would be easier to time the more consistent speed. The one with a wider range would force you to make adjustments. The single swing speed from Davis could be a reason why he gets pitched in the zone more often than anyone else on the team (48% vs 44.4% from Triolo at second overall). Davis is also attacked in the zone at a rate that ranks among the highest in the Majors.

On the other end of the fast swing rate, I wanted to see a few hitters who have average-to-below-average swing speeds.

First is O’Hearn, who has an 8.7% fast swing rate. Only Horwitz and Mangum have a lower rate.

O’Hearn is a bit like Davis, only he peaks below the 75 MPH range, with 22% around 72-73. His 10% range goes from about 67-76 MPH, and his 8% isn’t much wider. He does stand out with a wide 4% range, going from 63-77 MPH. O’Hearn is almost the equivalent of a control pitcher at the plate. The bat speed is consistently low, has a wide range at that low level, but his short swing allows him longer to react, which is probably why he still hits for some power, while being one of the best well-rounded hitters on the team.

Next up is Gonzales. I noticed an interesting evolution in his swing over the last few years. Take a look at the blue area from his rookie season in 2023 in the overlay graph below.

Gonzales was a slower version of O’Hearn when he first arrived in the majors. His swing speed was consistently around 68 MPH, which means he not only had a slow swing, but he also was very predictable with how often he swung at that speed. He has since widened his swing breadth, while slowly creeping above 70 MPH at his most frequent swing. The 2026 numbers, isolated:

Gonzales now has a 10% range from around 66-75 MPH. He’s at 15% from 67-74 MPH. He tops out around 19% at 72 MPH, which is much different from his 28% at 68 MPH during his rookie season. He went from a 69.8% contact rate and a 15.8% swinging strike rate in 2023 to 79.4% and 11.5% this year. The swing has below-average bat speed, and above-average length, but he manages to control it well, with increased variance on the speed.

A few quick hits, no pun intended, to wrap this section up:

Reynolds has data from both sides, and an interesting trend with each.

From the right-side, Reynolds has widened his bat speed frequency on the upper end, while seeing an increase in frequency around his 74 MPH peak, which remains consistent from last year. He’s traded swings from the 67-70 MPH range for more swings in the 79-87 MPH range. The left side shows something similar. He’s got fewer swings below 67 MPH, and a wider 12% range. The right-side is faster, while the left side has more variance. His wOBA was .307 L/.337 R in 2025, and is .365/.380 in 2026. The wider range from the left side has helped to better overall results, while the higher speeds from the right side have coincided with a drop from a 29% to 25% strikeout rate.

Lowe has been a successful version of a hitter who swings hard, but I want to view his last four years to see a trend.

This year, Lowe is swinging harder at the most frequent spot, increasing to 22% at 76 MPH, versus 72-74 MPH at that frequency in 2023-24. His swing profile in 2025 was a wider base, with less concentration around 75 MPH, and more breadth with a 10% range covering 68-78 MPH. Lowe is hitting for more power this year than any of those previous years, and the chart above almost shows his bat speed leaning forward.

Finally, I was interested in the progress from Nick Yorke in yesterday’s article, and wanted to dive into his bat speed.

The first thing I noticed was that Yorke had two different swings when he first arrived in 2024. He peaked with a slower swing around 67 MPH, and had a harder swing around 77 MPH. There was a dip in between at 70 MPH. I haven’t seen any other hitter with such a split. The last two years have conjoined the two swings in the middle, with the 2026 rate being almost perfectly unified surrounding the 72-73 MPH range.

Yorke has a 67-77 MPH breadth with a 10% rate, and 68-76 at 14%. He might benefit from a wider range and less frequency around 72-73 MPH. That would require him attempting more of the 2024 approach, without the gap in the middle.

Part Two

So far, I’ve covered the bat speed, swing length, and fast swing rate, which seems like a good start. Tomorrow, I’ll resume with the rest of the Bat Tracking metrics, which are the ones that could tell an interesting story about why players are putting up certain results.

Until the next time I go live…

-Tim Williams

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