With the season officially in the rearview mirror, it’s now my favorite time on the baseball calendar—the offseason. That means one of the first items on my personal agenda is updating my spreadsheets. Last week I covered options used in 2022, and this week I’m going to look at service accrued for every Pittsburgh Pirate remaining in the organization.
I’m including my personal count of service time here, as it seems I apply MLB rules on the matter differently than they do. It’s a topic for another day and one that truly mystifies me, but my count is what is in my spreadsheets, so it’s what I’m presenting here. Typically, the difference is just a few days here and there, so it doesn’t matter one way or the other.
Here are the complete lists:
Players who accrued a full year (172 days), along with their career service time to date:
| Roberto Pérez | 8.083 |
| Ben Gamel | 6.027 |
| Robert Stephenson | 5.059 |
| Kevin Newman | 4.047 |
| Bryan Reynolds | 3.163 |
| Michael Chavis | 3.087 |
| Duane Underwood Jr. | 3.044 |
| Greg Allen | 3.031 |
| Mitch Keller | 3.023 |
| JT Brubaker | 3.000 |
| Ke’Bryan Hayes | 2.075 |
| David Bednar | 2.071 |
| Blake Cederlind | 2.036 |
| Wil Crowe | 2.009 |
| Tyler Heineman | 1.127 |
| Zach Thompson | 1.121 |
Players who accrued a partial year, along with how many days and their career service time to date:
| Jerad Eickhoff | 5 | 4.068 |
| Austin Brice | 27 | 4.013 |
| Miguel Andújar* | 51 | 3.161 |
| Tyler Beede | 169 | 3.100 |
| Josh VanMeter | 157 | 3.042 |
| Dillon Peters | 165 | 2.133 |
| Manny Bañuelos | 133 | 2.106 |
| Zack Collins | 113 | 2.093 |
| Chase De Jong | 168 | 2.063 |
| Bryse Wilson | 130 | 2.028 |
| Yohan Ramirez | 82 | 1.168 |
| Junior Fernandez | 49 | 1.155 |
| Johan Oviedo | 95 | 1.076 |
| Nick Mears | 138 | 1.072 |
| Jeremy Beasley | 23 | 1.018 |
| Max Kranick | 128 | 0.156 |
| Colin Holderman | 144 | 0.144 |
| Diego Castillo | 139 | 0.139 |
| Tucupita Marcano | 107 | 0.138 |
| Hoy Park | 67 | 0.138 |
| Yerry De Los Santos | 136 | 0.136 |
| Rodolfo Castro | 82 | 0.125 |
| Jack Suwinski | 118 | 0.118 |
| Miguel Yajure | 62 | 0.118 |
| Taylor Davis | 4 | 0.117 |
| Canaan Smith-Njigba | 115 | 0.115 |
| Roansy Contreras | 107 | 0.112 |
| Oneil Cruz | 108 | 0.110 |
| Jason Delay | 95 | 0.095 |
| Cal Mitchell | 94 | 0.094 |
| Eric Stout | 63 | 0.070 |
| José Godoy | 35 | 0.064 |
| Kevin Padlo | 22 | 0.044 |
| Cam Vieaux | 43 | 0.043 |
| Luis Ortiz | 23 | 0.023 |
| Cam Alldred | 14 | 0.014 |
| Ji Hwan Bae | 13 | 0.013 |
| Travis Swaggerty | 8 | 0.008 |
| Liover Peguero | 3 | 0.003 |
Just a few notes regarding service for the season:
As covered last week, even though I have Andújar listed as under 4.000 years of service, official counts likely aren’t going to agree, leaving him with two years of contractual control via arbitration as opposed to the three I’m implying. This is one of those rare times where the differences in my counts and the official totals actually matter.
At 2.106 years of service, Bañuelos is the closest player the Pirates would have to Super 2 eligibility. Even if my count is off, I doubt he ends up qualifying.
Finally, as you can see, the Pirates’ potential arbitration class stands at six heading into the offseason: Andújar, Brubaker, Keller, Newman, Stephenson, and Underwood Jr.
This is certainly smaller than projections had indicated for much of the season, as the team’s last four cuts—and five of the last seven—came from their group of arbitration eligible players.
Essentially, the team got a head start on their nontenders.
Offseason Calendar Update
Typically we have to wait for offseason deadlines, but the first hits us fast.
Between the end of the season and October 15th, any player eligible via Article XX(D) can choose to elect free agency. This is for players who were outrighted in 2022 who had been outrighted for either a second time or had at least three years of service at the time of the outright. For the Pirates, their list of potential Article XX(D) free agents is as follows:
Greg Allen
Tyler Beede
Austin Brice
Michael Chavis
Taylor Davis
Jerad Eickhoff
Eric Hanhold
Dillon Peters
Josh VanMeter
Cam Vieaux
Pirates Payroll Updates
—Junior Fernandez was recalled after the premature end to Wil Crowe’s season, and payroll went up $13,787.
—Nick Mears needed in on the party after being out most of the year, and Luis Ortiz drew the short straw, as he wouldn’t be starting again this season.
Ortiz gets to keep the service but loses out on a couple days of major league pay, as payroll goes down $581.
—Finally, the Pirates wanted JT Brubaker to make one more start before the season ended, so he was activated off the IL, taking the place of Roansy Contreras, who also wasn’t going to appear again this season. José Godoy was also optioned in favor of Tucupita Marcano.
Contreras saw his salary decrease $6,493, while payroll went up a whopping $55 due to the Godoy/Marcano swap, netting out at a $6,438 drop.
End of season moves can result in some amusing changes to the final payroll estimate. Speaking of, I’ll be covering the final numbers more in-depth next week, but for now…
—Payroll stands at $60,925,548 for the Labor Relations Department, while it’s $73,959,797 for CBT purposes.
A longtime Pirates Prospects reader, Ethan has been covering payroll, transactions, and rules in-depth since 2018 and dabbling in these topics for as long as he can remember. He started writing about the Pirates at The Point of Pittsburgh before moving over to Pirates Prospects at the start of the 2019 season.
Always a lover of numbers and finding an answer, Ethan much prefers diving into these topics over what’s actually happening on the field. These under and often incorrectly covered topics are truly his passion, and he does his best to educate fans on subjects they may not always understand, but are important nonetheless.
When he’s not updating his beloved spreadsheets, Ethan works full-time as an accountant, while being a dad to two young daughters and watching too many movies and TV shows at night.
Thanks for the update. With 9 of 10 XX(D) folks electing Free Agency, I guess that saves the Pirates FO from actually having to do something to unload that group.
Simply amazed that Josh VanMeter accumulated 157 days of MLB Service for the Pirates in 2022.
Arn’t Perez and Gamel free agents after 2022 in addition to the mess of losers listed
as Article XX(D) free agents?
Yes, correct, as indicated by them having 6.000+ YOS
Ethan, I cannot remember, do your estimates include the Pirate’s share of MLB benefits?
The CBT figure does, yes. I have an estimate of $16M, which is basically what I’ve seen anytime it’s mentioned.
Remember, that also includes the $1.67 share of the new $50M pre-arb pool.
Curious, what’s are your thoughts on adding monies spent on amateur draft and international signings? This is technically money spent on player acquisition but often gets overlooked by the avg fan 🤷🏻♂️
All of my calculations are based on how MLB tracks these numbers, and sense those are not included in the calculations, I do not include them in any way.
Also, I do track these numbers (int. as best I can, because they are hard to get), but it’s just not as interesting, because every team basically spends what they can there anyway.
Ethan,
You obviously have an affinity for numbers, which is something I have to admit I have always lacked, so I admire your articles despite not always fully understanding their meaning. I imagine you as being the guy who always sat in the front row of trigonometry class eagerly manipulating his slide rule (no calculators back then) while everyone else watched the clock hoping the bell would ring. That’s meant as a complement because I admired that guy too despite not really understanding him.
I also have to say that your first sentence threw me a little because I have always dreaded baseball’s off season and followed other sports largely to kill time until spring training started. Different strokes I guess. Keep up the good work and I’ll keep trying to follow along while probably not fully grasping the details.
Ha, I’m plenty young enough to have had calculators at my disposal, even though I loathed to use them. My classmates would actually hold contests with me doing calculations on calculators versus me in my head and I routinely won. I also wrote a paper in college advocating for taking calculators out of the classroom.
So, your other assertions are spot on. I owned a t-shirt that read “Math is Fun” that I wore a lot. I loved my lower-level math classes where I could solve for X, do calculations in my head, and manipulate figures quickly and efficiently (I wasn’t as into higher level math, because I deemed it rather pointless). My classmates would always come to me, both in HS and college, looking for my help on how to explain the work.
I would watch sports and come up with batting averages in my head, figure out how many points an NBA team was on pace to score, things like that. I was always the one to raise my hand and always the one to finish worksheets and tests first. I absolutely loved and craved math, and it’s why I went into accounting, because everyone said it had to do with math.
Nowadays, my brain, like any other muscle, has become not as strong after 10 years of using Excel each and every day. It truly makes me sad, but I don’t know exactly what to do about it.
It was mere minutes after I clicked submit last night that news came through on the XX(D) free agents electing free agency, so this is a little out of date.
9/10 elected free agency, with Vieaux being the only one who didn’t. It’s more typical for veteran journeymen to elect free agency this way, but Vieaux will still qualify for minor league free agency after the World Series, if he doesn’t resign that is.