One thing I’ve seen mentioned in a lot of online discourse is that the Pittsburgh Pirates didn’t plan on contending until 2025.
It’s one thing when this is mentioned by anonymous accounts on message boards. You don’t know if that’s an employee of the organization on a burner account with legitimate insight, or just a fan who can read between the lines and see the lack of effort this year.
It’s another thing when this comes from reporting. In his latest Insider column, Dejan Kovacevic reports that the Pirates have been targeting 2025-27 as their best chances to contend.
This has been easy to see from the outside. The Pirates didn’t have an aggressive approach to add to this team in the offseason. They didn’t have an aggressive approach at the trade deadline. In each case, they waited around to see what cheap options would fall to them at the last minute — eventually taking multiple lottery ticket type chances, instead of pursuing one or two impact players.
The team has been built around a 2025-27 window, with extensions to Bryan Reynolds, Ke’Bryan Hayes, and Mitch Keller. The successful arrivals of rookie pitchers Paul Skenes and Jared Jones this year seem to have caught the organization by surprise. But this is an organization that won 76 games last year, and should have known their players enough to know they were getting a significant rotation boost from the minor leagues.
The Pirates lack confidence. And it boils down to a need for control.
Confidence isn’t measured by establishing a plan and sticking to that plan religiously. Confidence is measured by the actions taken when variability inevitably removes the myth of control.
It’s like the Pirates were dealt an Ace-King, but they decided to wait to push their chips into the center until they had pocket Aces. There’s no guarantees of a future hand. Confidence is measured by playing the cards you’re dealt, when they’re dealt.
The Pirates have had elite starting pitching this year, even if they planned that for the 2025-27 seasons. There’s no guarantee that Skenes, Keller, and Jones will all be healthy and productive in 2025-27. Reynolds is working his ass off to put up the best offensive season of his career, and that level of effort and production shouldn’t be banked upon as a given for those future years.
This year, the Pirates were caught off guard with a team that arrived early. Rather than adding an impact player at the deadline who could help now and in the future, they essentially folded their Ace-King hand, banking on the idea that the next few hands are guaranteed to be better.
Every team in baseball has a plan to contend in future years. The best teams push their chips in when they’re dealt a winning hand. The Pirates were dealt a winning hand this year, and they haven’t made any moves to bet on that hand.
This has been shown not just from the lack of spending and talent acquisition from the top, but from their lack of changes to the coaching at the big league level.
The Hitters Are Going the Wrong Way
The Pittsburgh Pirates rank 28th in the majors in wOBA. They rank 25th in wRC+. If you’re unfamiliar with those summary stats, here are some traditional metrics. They rank 25th in both average and on-base percentage, and 27th in slugging.
By any metric, the Pirates rank as one of the worst offenses in the league. This isn’t limited to the 2024 season. In three years under hitting coach Andy Haines, the Pirates have bottom five rankings in all of the above categories.
What’s concerning about this season is that so many players on the Pirates’ roster are having the worst offensive seasons of their careers.
Michael A. Taylor is in his 11th season in the majors. His previous worst season was his first full season, when he had a .274 wOBA and a 69 wRC+. He’s at .246/54 this year.
Ke’Bryan Hayes has a .264 wOBA and a 66 wRC+. He was trending up in his career as of last season, after seeking help from Altoona hitting coach Jon Nunnally. The Pirates fired Nunnally as a response, and it doesn’t take a big leap to wonder why Hayes has completely fallen apart this season at the plate. A back injury is likely playing a part, but the Pirates did the opposite of validating one of their core players.
Rowdy Tellez was having his worst year of his career, until he sought outside help earlier this summer. He’s since been one of the best hitters on the team. Credit goes to Haines and the hitting program for the early-season struggles, and not the second-half rebound.
The trend of hitters moving backwards under this hitting program has extended throughout the minors. Baseball America recently ranked the Pirates with the 27th overall minor league system, and that is deserved. I broke down the hitting woes throughout the minors that led to such a low ranking in Thursday’s First Pitch.
When a guy like Hayes — signed to be a core player for the long-term — seeks outside help, that should be a sign to make a change at the Major League level. Instead, the Pirates doubled down on Haines and the hitting program throughout the system. It’s been obvious all season that the Pirates are struggling under Haines. But Haines was part of the controlled plan toward future winning, and the Pirates refuse to adapt their plan.
I’ve yet to hear about a hitter who has turned things around thanks to work with Haines. The more common story is the one you hear about Hayes or Tellez seeking outside help for improvements.
The hitting approach, to me, screams a lack of confidence. The Pirates have been an extremely passive team at the plate, to a detrimental level at some points. The coaching explanations teach hitters to eliminate their weaknesses, without the coaching ability to improve on those weak areas. It’s the old Blackjack method of counting cards and playing percentages, but the Pirates seem to be more focused on eliminating the bad than capitalizing on the good.
It’s a recurring theme: The good will eventually come. You just have to wait for it to arrive. And yet, the recurring theme has also been that when the Pirates get a fastball down the middle, they watch it go by more often than not.
The biggest move the Pirates could have made this season wasn’t at the trade deadline. The biggest move would have been making a change to the hitting approach early in the season, when it was beyond obvious that something was wrong with a team that had a chance to contend.
Sticking with Haines for so long — a hitting coach who led to three years of similar bottom-third offensive results with Milwaukee, before joining the Pirates — has been a critical error. And it’s an error the Pirates keep making over and over again.
A Lack of Consistent Winning
The Pirates opened the season winning five games in a row. They didn’t repeat that winning streak until July 19th-20th, when they won their fifth and sixth in a row. Between April 8th and July 13th, they had one three-game winning streak.
A lot has been made about how the Pirates went a long stretch without winning or losing more than two games in a row. The real story is that this team is more prone to losing streaks than winning streaks.
They lost six in a row, ending April 21st. They followed that with a five game losing streak, ending May 3rd. Despite the 5-0 start, the Pirates dropped to 14-19 by the start of May. This is the second season in a row under manager Derek Shelton that the team started hot, then hit a massive losing streak that might ultimately decide the season.
They lost three in a row on May 10th, before going on a lengthy streak of maintaining two game winning or losing streaks. They’ve lost four in a row again as of August 8th.
Rather than focusing simply on winning and losing streaks, I want to focus on the rolling ten game records. There are 105 days this season where the Pirates have a ten-game stretch. By the numbers:
- 10-0: 0 days
- 9-1: 0
- 8-2: 0
- 7-3: 5
- 6-4: 15
- 5-5: 28
- 4-6: 28
- 3-7: 20
- 2-8: 8
- 1-9: 1
- 0-10: 0
This is a team that is twice as likely to lose 60-70% of their games every ten days than they are to win 60-70% of their games. It’s a team that has almost twice as many .200 or worse rolling ten game stretches than .700 or better ten game stretches.
The Pirates are not a consistent winner, and that’s on Shelton. We can discuss in-game strategy all day long, but the bottom line is that Shelton’s team lacks a consistent preparation and application of their talents. They might not lose a lot of games in a row, but they trend losing twice as often as they trend winning.
Upgrades to the Marketing Department
From the top down, the Pirates care more about cheap perception than they care about being a winner.
On July 19th, around 10 PM, Nick Gonzales hit a walk off winner, putting the Pirates at 49-48, and extending their winning streak to five games.
The next morning, Gonzales and other members of the team were out in Moon Township for a charity event. They had a game that night, which they won. Since that charitable Saturday on short rest, they’ve gone 6-10, and Gonzales went down with a groin injury a week later.
You never know the true source of injuries, but Gonzales played every game until his injury, along with the charity appearance cutting into his rest and recovery time. Maintaining a schedule where you’re playing every single night during the dog days of July is difficult enough. Having to wake up on short rest for a charity event on a game day during the middle of such a stretch is going to tap into your energy levels. Eventually, the growing fatigue is going to kick in somehow.
Pirates owner Bob Nutting does not have a winning mentality. Born into generational money and power, he’s never had to win anything to get to where he is today. As such, he only ever spends his energy justifying his position. The Pirates never take financial risks, but Nutting spends a lot of effort sending his team into the community to display the greater good he’s doing. There’s a time and place for charity and community outreach. The end of July is a time for the Pirates to focus on winning, to reward the paying customers at PNC Park with some good on the field.
That’s the good that Nutting can bring the city of Pittsburgh. He’s in the entertainment business. People go to baseball games to be entertained, and losing is not entertaining. Winning requires risk, and in Nutting’s case, that risk comes from a financial commitment. It’s easier to rest on the layup of a baseline greater good, rather than taking a risk to put a good team on the field.
The focus of the greater good over winning is prevalent down to General Manager Ben Cherington and throughout the organization. Winning doesn’t seem to be the top priority over manipulating public perception about how the Pirates are doing things the right way.
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Earlier this year, the Pirates put on a display for their international signing class. They invited reporters down to the Dominican Republic, and championed the impact that was made to the players and their families with the signings. They’ve never had an event like this, and their plan was to make this bigger and better next season. This overlooked that the Pirates have been abysmal at developing international talent. This is a trend that has only gotten worse under Cherington.
The international signings were treated as no more than a different level of charity. Rather than focusing on why the Pirates haven’t had a top international prospect for years, the focus was on creating an event to champion the signings as life changing events. Which they are. But that’s a given when you’re budgeting $5+ million per year to spread around Latin American countries.
When you’re a team like the Pirates, and refuse to spend money on impactful free agents, you need to develop those impact players from within. When the Pirates are getting nothing from a key area of amateur talent acquisition, it’s a massive blow to the organization. When they’re hyping up the life-changing impact of personal lives, they’re diverting the attention away from a lack of success, toward the bare minimum that every team provides their international signings.
*****
One of the things which has stood out to me in recent years was that Termarr Johnson was taking business classes. Johnson was drafted out of high school with the fourth overall pick, and is currently in his second season in High-A. Drafted as one of the best pure hitters in the 2022 draft class, Johnson has shown an advanced approach at the plate. He hasn’t been challenged with advanced pitching, and the fact that he’s splitting his development time with school is not a good thing.
Every player like Johnson who signs out of high school gets money for future education. If his baseball career doesn’t work out, Johnson has the fourth overall bonus money and the paid opportunity for future education as a fall back. When you draft a player fourth overall, the full focus should be on developing the baseball career. Even if they’re drafted out of high school.
One year earlier, Jordan Lawlar was drafted out of high school with the sixth overall pick. The Diamondbacks sent him to Double-A by the end of his first full season, and he made it to Triple-A in his second season.
A similar aggressive approach for Johnson would have started him in Double-A this season, finishing in Triple-A. This would have forced his focus solely on baseball development, which is his career. Instead, he went back to High-A, where he currently has 561 plate appearances across two seasons.
Johnson struggled at the start of the year, and his offensive rebound over the last two months is promising. It would be more promising if he was aggressively pushed to make adjustments against upper-level guys, rather than a slower development pace complete with early hedging for the future.
If Johnson is going to be part of that winning window in 2025-27, he’ll need to breeze through the upper levels in 2025. That’s expecting a lot. It’s a micro case where the Pirates are trying to control the future outcome, rather than just letting a talented player loose and adapting to the variables as they come. Even with two-plus months of hitting in High-A, after a full-season’s worth of plate appearances, Johnson is still being held back in the lower levels.
Confidence Theory
The Pirates lack the confidence needed to adapt. Their approach, from individual player development all the way to Major League team building and the coaching of those players, is an attempt to control a highly variable outcome which can’t be controlled. And the control they impose is typically a reserved approach, based on a fear of losing their limited chips.
It’s not a surprise that they are turning a potential winning season into a losing campaign. It’s not a surprise that they have spent five years of rebuilding with trades and high draft picks, only to result in the 27th best farm system.
When your focus is avoiding the loss, and expecting winning to magically appear when you’ve planned for it, then losing becomes an inevitability.
When the focus is on winning, and adapting to unexpected losses, success is more likely. Yet, Pirates fans are currently left with the hope that the team will finally focus on winning in the upcoming offseason by finally adding reliably good players to boost their winning chances.
As the Pirates focus on mitigating losses, their focus is on losing more than winning. They’re not trying to maximize wins. Maybe they’ll adjust this offseason. Without a change in this approach, losing will be their reality, as they wait for winning to magically arrive.
And if winning doesn’t arrive, it won’t be enough to rest on the basic charitable and life-changing events that are the bare minimum for any professional team.
