Pittsburgh Pirates Service Time Accrued in 2022

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:

Players who accrued a partial year, along with how many days and their career service time to date:

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 15^th, 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.

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