The Pittsburgh Pirates ranked 27th in wRC+ and 28th in wOBA in the combined 2022-2023 seasons.
There’s a chance those advanced offensive numbers won’t register for you, even if the Pirates ranked at the bottom of the league. So, how about this.
They ranked 29th in batting average. 27th in on-base percentage. 28th in slugging percentage. You could turn to any metric, and there wasn’t a positive sign from the Pirates offense.
By the end of the 2023 season, one of the best hitters on the team, third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes, was meeting in secret with Double-A hitting coach Jon Nunnally. You can debate how much impact the work with Nunnally had on Hayes. What you can’t debate is that Hayes turned away from in-house Major League hitting coach Andy Haines to work with Nunnally.
This past offseason, the Pirates fired Nunnally, after word got out that Hayes had turned to the minor league coach for help.
Also this past offseason, the Pirates extended Haines. That news comes today from Alex Stumpf, who revealed the information on the North Shore Nine podcast.
There’s a reason this news has been kept secret until now. There is no way to justify extending Haines as a good move. Especially when the move was secretly paired with the parting of Nunnally.
I’ve written about the track record from Haines. The Pirates added him as their hitting coach in 2022, after he spent three seasons as the hitting coach for the Milwaukee Brewers. The offensive ranks for Milwaukee during that stretch:
wOBA – 18th
wRC+ – 21st
AVG – 28th
OBP – 13th
SLG – 20th
The Pirates added a hitting coach who led the Brewers to below-average offensive numbers for three seasons. The best results from those seasons came in 2019, when Milwaukee ranked 12th in wOBA and 14th in wRC+. That Brewers team had the following players:
- Christian Yelich in his age 27 season, batting .329/.429/.671
- Yasmani Grandal in his age 30 season, batting .246/.380/.468
- Ryan Braun in his age 35 season, batting .285/.343/.505
- Mike Moustakas in his age 30 season, batting .254/.329/.516
To be fair, Haines has not had that level of talent to work with during his tenure with the Pirates.
