James McDonald
Pitching and Analytics and the Pittsburgh Pirates
The last Major League Baseball game I paid to attend was 15 years ago today.
I started blogging about the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2009, and my site officially became Pirates Prospects in July 2010. My approach to that site was professional, with the intentions and hopes of turning it into a full-time job. At the time, I lived in an area of Virginia near Charlottesville, which didn’t provide many opportunities for sustainable employment — not considering the recession the country was in at the time.
The Pirates have a long history of giving free tickets to content creators and social media personalities, in order to maintain positive relations. They gave me two club level seats on 8/6/2010, and I used the opportunity to do a live report on my site from a Major League game.
I was in Pittsburgh a day earlier, and James McDonald was set to make his debut with the Pirates. Acquired a week earlier at the trade deadline, McDonald was one of my fantasy baseball sleepers at the time. He got on my radar for his performance out of the Los Angeles Dodgers bullpen in 2009. I’ve mostly followed individual players, regardless of their teams, since about 2006. Getting a chance to see McDonald live was special to me at the time.
McDonald had a great debut that night with the Pirates. He threw six shutout innings, allowing four hits, one walk, and struck out eight.
I’ve written about how I was not a Pirates fan growing up. I don’t have nightmares of the Sid Bream slide, nor do I have memories of the 1997 Freak Show team. I knew of the history of the franchise, but never really felt the pain and frustration of the losing streak.
That pain and frustration can be explained in many ways, and McDonald is a great example.
For the rest of the 2010 season, McDonald pitched at a level that the Pirates had rarely seen. He had a 3.52 ERA in 11 starts, with an 8.6 K/9 in 64 innings after the deadline. That included eight shutout innings on a September 13th start, which followed seven shutout innings on a September 7th start.
To put that performance in perspective, here were the qualified Pirates starters from 1993-2010 who put up a better ERA than McDonald:
Oliver Perez, 2004 - 2.98
Danny Darwin, 1996 - 3.02
Denny Neagle, 1996 - 3.05
Zane Smith, 1994 - 3.27
Kip Wells, 2003 - 3.28
Francisco Cordova, 1998 - 3.31
Denny Neagle, 1995 - 3.43
Todd Ritchie, 1999 - 3.49
Kip Wells, 2002 - 3.58
There were only 20 starters during that time span who put up an ERA better than 4.00, across 110+ innings. None of those seasons happened in 2010, although there was at least one starter each year from 2007-2009 who put up a 3.71-3.92 ERA.
McDonald had a small sample size, but he reflected a hope that seems archaic by today’s standards. Outside of two seasons by Kip Wells, and the one elite season from Oliver Perez, the Pirates hadn’t seen many starting pitching performances like McDonald since the 1990s. That’s especially true if you look at strikeouts from the same group of starters.
As a side note, it was the 2004 season from Perez that got me following the Pirates. Growing up an Orioles fan, I was jumping on my dorm room couch to celebrate the signing of Miguel Tejada ahead of the 2004 season. I even attended Orioles Fan Fest that year. It was the phenomenal season by Perez that led to many trips to PNC Park in the following years.
Perez had a 10.97 K/9 in 2004, putting up strikeout rates that were unprecedented for the Pirates. The next best Pirates starter from 1993-2010 in terms of strikeouts was Ian Snell, who had an 8.18 K/9 in 2006, with a 4.74 ERA.
By the time McDonald made his debut, the combination of high strikeouts and an ERA below 4.00 was uncommon in Pittsburgh. It was a reflection of not only the lack of hope stemming from those losing seasons, but a big reason for the years of losing.
What happened next was typically what happened with the Pirates.
In 2011 and 2012, McDonald put up a 4.21 ERA in 171 innings each season. His strikeout rate dipped to 7.5 K/9 in 2011 and 7.9 K/9 in 2012. He struggled across 29.2 innings in 2013, with a 7.6 K/9 and an elevated walk rate, and that marked the end of his Major League career — after being shut down with a right shoulder injury.
A New Pirates Generation of Pitching
The pitching situation was much different in Pittsburgh by 2013.
Their rotation included A.J. Burnett (3.30 ERA, 191 IP), Francisco Liriano (3.02 ERA, 161 IP), Charlie Morton (3.26 ERA, 116 IP), Jeff Locke (3.52 ERA, 166.1 IP), and a rookie Gerrit Cole (3.22 ERA, 117.1 IP). They also had brief moments of success from guys like Brandon Cumpton (2.05 ERA, 30.2 IP) and Jeanmar Gomez (3.35 ERA, 80.2 IP working mostly in relief). Wandy Rodriguez (3.59 ERA, 62.2 IP) was also acquired at the deadline to round out the rotation.
From 1993-2013, there were 85 pitchers who threw 110+ innings in a season for the Pirates. Four of the top nine ERAs during that span were from that 2013 club.
There were signs that things were improving on the pitching front, even before 2013. Out of those 85 pitchers mentioned above, 29 had an ERA under 4.00. Nine of those came in the 2011-13 seasons.
If we take this a step further, and expand out to 1993-2023, there were 123 pitchers with 110+ innings in a season. Out of that group, 42 had ERAs below 4.00. Over half of those seasons, 22 in total, came from 2011-2023. There was a dip after 2018, with Mitch Keller’s 2022 season being the only one since that qualified for the list with a 3.91 ERA.
Things have been much different over the last two seasons, and that’s fueled by Paul Skenes, who has put up numbers that are among the top 15 seasons in franchise history. Outside of Rich Gossage in 1977 and Ron Kline in 1968, you would need to go back to World War I or earlier to find a Pirates pitcher who has been better than Skenes in each of the last two seasons.
Keller, Luis Ortiz, and Bailey Falter have also put up ERAs below 4.00 in the last two seasons, showing an improvement over the 2018-23 dip in pitching performance.
Hope in the Age of McDonald
Going back to McDonald, the 3.52 ERA he put up in 64 innings in 2010 wasn’t even a small sample of a number one starter. There were 17 pitchers in the Majors that year with an ERA below 3.00, and 39 total who had 110+ innings and an ERA better than McDonald with the Pirates.
What McDonald represented was hope after years of hopelessness surrounding Pirates pitching.
The Pirates went years without a number one starter, and they didn’t even have a number two starter in those years. They barely had number three starters, who could put up average or better results. McDonald was the brief hope as someone who could lead the rotation, but he was a number three starter, at best, in his brief time with the Pirates.
Pirates fans had seen a lot of this during the losing streak. They would see a pitching prospect break into the Majors with a promising small sample of above-average numbers. This was never sustained, with those pitchers having brief runs of success before dipping to below-average numbers.
This repeated in many forms: Kip Wells, Snell, Paul Maholm, Zach Duke, and it even carried into the Neal Huntington years with Ross Ohlendorf and Jeff Karstens.
There was a good decade where Pirates fans were holding out hope that their rotation could be led by a pitcher whose best performance was along the lines of a number three starter in the game, with any struggles leading to their number one starter dipping to below-average results.
McDonald was just another case of a pitcher who stood out in Pittsburgh for simply not being below-average, only to immediately dip to average results, and see his career shortened by an injury.
By the 2013 season, all of that changed. For a brief period of time, at least.
The Analytics Revolution in Pittsburgh
One thing which stood out to me about that success from 2011-2018 was that it overlapped with the Pirates increasing their focus on analytics.
The Pirates hired Dan Fox in 2008, at a time when they lacked any approach to analytics. Fox was tasked with creating a computer database in 2008, then creating proprietary analytics for the Pirates starting in 2009.
In the middle of the 2012 season, the Pirates hired Mike Fitzgerald as a Quantitative Analyst, working under Fox. Fitzgerald had previously worked for ESPN, the Boston Celtics, and an emerging baseball data company called “TrackMan”.
The 2013 marked a shift for the Pirates, not just because it marked the end of their two decades of losing with a playoff appearance. The Pirates got back to winning by implementing radical defensive positioning, using analytics to place their defenders to where the opposing hitter was most likely to hit the ball. These defensive shifts weren’t exclusive to the Pirates, but they implemented them more than almost any other team that year.
Fitzgerald was a big part of that process, along with the analysis which found the offseason acquisitions which turned things around in 2013 — an undervalued Russell Martin, a reclamation project in Francisco Liriano, and a sleeper reliever in Mark Melancon.
After the 2016 season, Fitzgerald was hired away by the Arizona Diamondbacks to be the head of their Research and Development department. The pitching results for Arizona in 2017 and 2018 are their top two seasons over the last 15 years, which may have been due to Fitzgerald’s addition. Meanwhile, the Pirates began a slow and steady decline, as they struggled to replicate the process of finding value starters.
Major League Baseball changed around 2014-16, in large part due to the success that small market teams like the Pirates were having with their analytical approach. Teams with more financial resources began building their own analytics departments, while the Pirates began falling behind due to an inability to keep some of their smartest minds like Fitzgerald.
I touched on this in a recent article, noting how the Pirates went from a club which couldn’t compete financially on the field to a club which also couldn’t compete financially in the front office.
A lot has been written about the increase in spending by current General Manager Ben Cherington in the analytical department. Over the last few seasons, Cherington has made big hires to build up the R&D department of the Pirates. He hired Sarah Gelles from the Houston Astros in 2023 to build that department, and hired Kevin Tenenbaum this past offseason to oversee that department.
Time will tell whether Gelles and Tenenbaum have the same success as Fox and Fitzgerald did a decade earlier. My concern is that the Pirates were ahead of the trend with Fox/Fitzgerald, while they’re playing catch-up with Gelles/Tenenbaum.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing that Cherington is spending so much off the field, as opposed to on the field. The Pirates need to find a way to get back among the analytical leaders in baseball if they’re ever going to make the most of their minuscule budget. Even if owner Bob Nutting spends more on payroll, while sustaining the front office increases, the financial structure of Major League Baseball has the Pirates at a significant disadvantage.
Greater Expectations
The Pirates are a much different team than when James McDonald made his debut with the club 15 years ago today. They’re no longer a stranger to good pitching.
A big part of that for the current team is due to the lottery win that allowed them to draft Skenes in 2023.
The expectations are also higher, with Pittsburgh fans having experience watching good pitchers over the last decade. Pirates fans no longer have to pin their hopes on a number three starter leading their pitching staff.
A big question is whether they can regain the analytical edge they had during the last winning seasons.
To be objectively fair, the early results under Gelles/Tenenbaum haven’t come close to the immediate improved results under Fox/Fitzgerald. This might be due to the fact the Pirates have been surpassed by the rest of the league since Fitzgerald was hired away.
The challenge for the Pirates today isn’t just building an R&D department which can catch up to the rest of the league, but also finding a way to surpass the rest of the league. If they merely make up ground from the last decade, their low payroll will still prevent them from winning.
In a way, the Pirates are mirroring the sense of hopelessness they had in 2010. This time around, it’s not the hopeless feeling that they’ll never find good players. It’s more a feeling that they won’t be able to surround their good players with enough talent to win.
And I’m not sure that Major League Baseball’s economics make this possible for a team in Pittsburgh.
Until the next time I go live…
-Tim Williams