Prospect Roundtable: Evaluating the 2022 Pirates Draft Class

The Pittsburgh Pirates wrapped up their 2022 draft class by signing 19 of 21 picks. You can check out each selection and their player page on our new Draft Tracker.

With the 2022 signing class now finalized, we got together for a Roundtable to give our views of how this draft played out for the Pirates.

JOHN DREKER

I’m not a fan of how the Pirates handled this draft class. Their bonus pool was too high to end up with the group of players they signed. They also didn’t max out their bonus pool by using the 5% overage. It’s there to use, don’t leave it on the table. They didn’t sign a single player to an over-slot deal after the tenth round and failed to sign two players who had upside. The went fairly straight forward with their picks, basically like they were on an auto-pick mode. This is the same team that last year signed three of the top high school players and got the best college hitter in the draft, while still going upside in the fourth round and picked up an over-slot signing in the late rounds.

There are obviously players to like in this class, that’s undeniable, but that’s what happens when you pick 4, 36, 44 and can spend upwards of $16M counting late round bonuses. Anyone could have done what they did, so I don’t give them any real credit here. They got a lot of question marks that will rely on the development system now to get them to their ceiling so you get some value.

We won’t know for years whether or not this was a good draft class, but we can grade the picks on day one after doing research, and then see how it plays out. I personally loved their plan of attack in the 2009 draft, even with the Sanchez pick, and that turned out as bad as you can imagine. I wasn’t a huge fan of the 2020 draft and that isn’t showing high hope as of this moment. Things can change over the years.

I start every draft class with a C grade, and if you work draft magic like last year they you get an A+ grade. Getting a C grade means you did the minimum. I don’t think they did the minimum here because they not only didn’t sign anyone over-slot late with the money available, they paid some other draft picks more than I thought to get to the point that they maxed their bonus pool (without going over). I give them a D+ here for drafting/signing players.

As I said, they got talented players. No one I saw thinks they did anything wrong by taking Termarr Johnson with their fourth overall pick. It seems like a universally liked pick. People see a potential solid starting pitcher in Thomas Harrington and maybe even Hunter Barco, though you take on some risk selecting someone who is already injured. So while I don’t like the draft strategy, I wouldn’t grade the group of players as a D+ group. I just think the Pirates could have done a much better job with everything at their disposal. There’s a lot of hope riding on college players maxing out their ceiling for this class to look decent after Johnson. The Pirates are a team that absolutely needs to get impact talent through the draft every year to compete. I think they dropped the ball here.

WILBUR MILLER

It’s not an impressive draft. Termarr Johnson was a good pick, but after that comes the mystery. The Pirates chose to focus almost entirely on college pitching in a draft pool that was universally regarded as historically awful for college pitching. They also left money unspent in the end.

Most likely, the focus on pitchers who’d theoretically move to the mid-levels of the system was inspired by the poor progress of the team’s pitching in class A. Both Greensboro and Bradenton rank low in their leagues in ERA and high in walks. A lot of seemingly promising pitchers — Adrian Florencio, Jared Jones, Po-Yu Chen, Valentin Linarez, Luis Peralta, Ricky DeVito and Nick Garcia — have struggled to varying degrees. So have Luis Ortiz, Carmen Mlodzinski and Kyle Nicolas at Altoona. This draft has something of the look of a quick-fix effort.

The current regime’s strategy with college pitching seems to be to look for hidden value. They do this by drafting pitchers from obscure schools (Tom Harrington, Dominic Perachi, Josh Loeschorn), ones coming off injuries (Hunter Barco, Julian Bosnic, Elijah Birdsong), ones coming off down years who had success earlier (Derek Diamond) and ones with high spin rates (Mike Walsh, Perachi). They also pay considerable attention to performance in summer ball.

This strategy makes sense in the abstract, but they’ve followed the same strategy with college pitchers in all their drafts and so far it’s not working. In Ben Cherington’s first draft, four of the six picks were college pitchers. They’re all struggling this year, two of them badly. From the 2021 draft, the Pirates signed seven college pitchers. Tyler Samaniego has advanced quickly to Double-A and looks like a promising relief prospect. Drew Irvine has good numbers in seven relief appearances this year, but he’s a 22-year-old pitching in the Florida Complex League. The other five are struggling, very badly in some cases. College draftees struggling in the low minors is especially disconcerting.

Of course, some of these pitchers could come through. Some, both early and late picks, are certainly intriguing, but then so were many of the 2020-21 picks. The data we have now with this front office isn’t encouraging.

ANTHONY MURPHY

I think the worst thing you can do with this draft class is try and compare it to the Pirates’ 2021 edition. A lot of things had to fall into place for that to happen, and to expect Ben Cherington to pull it off two years in a row wasn’t likely.

With that in mind, the success of this draft will rest solely at the top. They got one of the best prep hitting prospects in recent history in Termarr Johnson, and he immediately became one of their top players in the system.

It doesn’t feel like there is a lot of depth in the system, and most of the college pitching they took have incredibly limited upsides, most likely as bullpen pitchers. Thomas Harrington has the chance to be a middle-of-the-rotation guy and Michael Kennedy is going to be 18 years old all next season so the Pirates can mold him into the exact arm they want him to be.

Overall, it would be nice to feel like there is some added help deeper down in case some of the top round guys don’t pan out, but then again once they hit the ground running, we may see something completely different.

While it may seem a bit underwhelming, you are just hoping for a couple of players to make an impact from each draft class, those names are just a little more obvious this year.

TIM WILLIAMS

If you combine the last two drafts, you start to see how important those top three picks are to the ability to maximize talent. Last year, the Pirates drafted Henry Davis first overall, saving money that allowed them to draft and sign Bubba Chandler. This year, the Pirates had the fourth overall pick. The team ahead of them, the Texas Rangers, took a similar approach to the 2021 Pirates strategy. The Rangers went signability, taking Kumar Rocker third overall. Their next pick wasn’t until the fourth round, and they took prep starter Brock Porter, paying him $3.7 million.

You could find a way for the Pirates to come away with Porter and Termarr Johnson. I think what we saw this year was a straight forward draft by the Pirates, where they trusted their scouts and their rankings and that whole speech we always hear from every General Manager. The truth is you can make an argument in favor of a lot of the players they drafted.

Johnson is the clear highlight as the best pure hitter in this draft class. The Pirates didn’t go signability here, which is the opposite of the approach they took last year when they passed over Jordan Lawlar for Davis. We talked about where Johnson ranks in the system last week, and for me, he’s the number one prospect now that Oneil Cruz has graduated. It’s not like the Pirates don’t have good prospects in their system. It’s just that Johnson is probably going to end up one of the top 25 prospects in the game.

Thomas Harrington seems like a safe pick to reach the majors, but he doesn’t have a high ceiling. He reminds me of the Carmen Mlodzinski pick, and I didn’t like that as much, because I’m not enamored by safe right-handers. I liked the pickup of Hunter Barco in the second round. He probably would have been an easy first rounder if he didn’t have Tommy John surgery. I am also left-handed, so I might just be super discriminatory here with these two pitchers. I like the two-way potential of Jack Brannigan, especially pairing him next year with Bubba Chandler. Michael Kennedy gives them a left-handed pitching prep arm who is only 17-years-old. They will have plenty of time to develop him, in a system that has done a good job of churning out pitching prospects. However, he has more of a finesse profile, limiting the upside.

On the flip side, you could make one simple argument that dashes the hopes surrounding a lot of these players: The history the Pirates have with their player development. Johnson, for example, is going to be highly rated due to his contact skills. We still need to see the Pirates help him get those skills to translate to the game, especially in the upper levels. That hasn’t been a strong suit for this organization. What’s problematic about this draft is that all of the impact rests on Johnson. The lack of high ceilings makes all of the picks after Johnson look like potential complementary pieces. This draft might be a bigger test for the player development system than the 2021 draft, just because it’s not as obvious where the upside lies here. There are potential MLB players after Johnson. You just need to squint harder to see them this year.