Pirates second baseman Josh Harrison just returned from a five-week, 30-game absence from the lineup thanks to a broken fifth metacarpal in his left hand.
Right-handed starter Joe Musgrove has yet to throw an MLB pitch this season thanks to a nagging right shoulder injury that’s kept him sidelined.
Starting centerfielder Starling Marte has missed six games with a strained right oblique and will be out until at least this weekend.
Yet the Pirates — already projected to finish below .500 by most — are 26-21 and three games back in the NL Central.
Last season, the team’s poor outcomes were rightfully blamed on the absences of Jung Ho Kang, Starling Marte and Jameson Taillon, among others. The combination of missing two starters and a starting pitcher for an extended period of time was too much for that year’s club to overcome.
This year, it seemingly hasn’t been an issue. It’s now 30 percent of the way through the season and the Pirates have yet to have their best 25 men on the field, and that might not ever happen. Musgrove is set to make his debut Friday. Who knows how far off Marte is, with an injury that’s notorious for lingering?
The difference this year has been that the Pirates depth has done a terrific job when called upon.
In the lineup, Jose Osuna came up and has been productive offensively, with a .250/.276/.500 line, good for a 110 wRC+. He’s also provided solid defense in right field and at first base. In a smaller sample, Austin Meadows is hitting an absurd .400/.400/.800 in 15 plate appearances and has been the fourth Pirates player ever with two homers in his first four games.
On the mound, Nick Kingham has also fared well, with a 3.44 ERA and an even-better 2.57 FIP in his three starts.
It hasn’t just been about replacing injuries, either. Kingham’s emergence allowed Steven Brault to move to the bullpen, where he’s thrived with a 1.69 ERA and a 1.22 WHIP. When Dovydas Neverauskas and Josh Smoker struggled early in the year, the Pirates called up Kyle Crick and Richard Rodriguez. Crick has been good, with a 2.18 ERA and 1.30 WHIP, while Rodriguez has been practically un-hittable with a 1.53 ERA and 1.08 WHIP.
So what’s been the difference this year? Why has this team’s depth been so much more successful than last year’s? I asked around PNC Park for some answers.
“There’s no panic,” Harrison said. “The guys in here [the clubhouse] know what we bring to the table as a whole when he play together. A lot of it is just going out there every night saying ‘It doesn’t matter who we’re facing or who’s playing for us, whoever is in there is fully capable of getting the job done.’”
“It’s been a work since I’ve gotten here to create depth and to have depth,” manager Clint Hurdle added. “Whether you like it or not, there’s going to be opportunities presented to you where the depth is going to come into play and you’re either going to feel the award of your depth or feel the angst of not having the proper depth you needed to compete up here from time to time.”
So the Pirates are deeper, that much is pretty clear. But the team’s current roster construction also seems more able to withstand some losses than it has in the past. When the team traded Gerrit Cole for three major-leaguers, they took one big piece out of the roster, but replaced it with three. When Andrew McCutchen was traded for Crick and prospect, he was replaced on the roster by the acquisition of Corey Dickerson instead of relying on prospects to step up. The high-end potential of a Cole or McCutchen is gone, but the addition of a quantity of quality players added depth in return, which means that any one injury or absence is less likely to sink this club.
“Most good organizations have to have a good farm system in order to be successful in April and May because it’s hard to go outside your organization the first two months of the year and I could even argue, the first two and a half to three months of the year,” general manager Neal Huntington said. “If you have needs, it’s crucial to be able to replace them from within. It’s a credit to our scouting department that we’ve had internal options. It’s a credit to our development department that we’ve had these guys ready to hit the ground running when they get to the big-league level.”
Maybe the best part of the way that all this depth has played from a Pirates perspective? It doesn’t seem like the cupboard is bare. Infielders Kevin Kramer and Kevin Newman have both shown stretches of hot hitting in Indianapolis. Top prospect Mitch Keller remains in Altoona, but could be in the majors by the end of the year. There’s plenty more coming in Altoona, with the organization’s deepest group of prospects.
But now that the Pirates seem closer to getting healthy, where is the value in the depth? Kingham is back in the minors, and at least one of Osuna and Meadows will likely be joining him shortly. But that’s OK. Those players got meaningful major-league experience, and gave the team something on which to base their future projections.
It’s easy to move on from a player and turn to another option when they obviously aren’t performing, as was the case with the bullpen earlier this year. It becomes a bit more difficult to make such a move when the players involved are just not quite playing up to par. Could Kingham replace someone like Chad Kuhl in the rotation? What about Osuna taking David Freese’s spot on the bench? Those are tough decisions to make, but it’s a lot easier to make when a player has come up and had success in the role that they’d be taking.
Teams are often hesitant to make those kinds of moves early in the season, because it ends up detracting from the depth. What if they move on from Freese and Colin Moran starts to scuffle midway though his rookie year? What if they turn Kuhl into a reliever only for an arm injury to pop up in the rotation?
As the Pirates have shown, depth is a valuable asset and the front office isn’t going to be in a hurry to get rid of it. But they’re in a far better position this season then they have been in the past.
