The Pirates pulled out a shocker on Christmas Eve Thursday, sending Josh Bell to the Nationals for a pair of right-handed pitchers, Wil Crowe and Eddy Yean.
Because of course it would be right-handed pitchers. The Pirates have been stockpiling them all of 2020. It started in the Starling Marte trade in January, picking up Brennan Malone. Five of their six selections in the amateur draft were righties. They took two more in the Rule 5 draft earlier this month.
“Look, the demographic will even out over time,” Ben Cherington said in a Zoom call with reporters Thursday. “I promise you, we didn’t set out a year ago just to accumulate right-handed pitching. That’s nowhere written in our plan. We did set out a year ago to accumulate as much player talent as we can.”
Maximizing trade return is difficult enough when the team is positioned as a seller. It’s even harder for a guy like Bell, who is a year removed from an All-Star campaign but didn’t do as well in the second half of 2019 or really at all in 2020.
So what did the Pirates get in return, and better yet, how do these two right-handers stack up to the others the Pirates have acquired this year?
Crowe, 26, is Major League ready. He was added to the Nationals’ roster in August and made three starts, though none of them went well. He allowed 11 earned runs over 8 ⅓ frames, with his fastball being hit hard in particular.
Going by FanGraphs’ most recent scouting report, all of Crowe’s pitches are either 50- or 55-grade, so he does have the potential to have a four or five pitch mix in the majors. Looking at that heater, the four-seamer averaged nearly 2,300 rotations per minute, which is pretty good considering it sits in the low-90s. It could probably play in all the quadrants of the strike zone, including the upper half.
The sinker, on the other hand, seemed to come in flat:
Crowe has a five pitch mix, but I suspect that may be cut back to four. Pitching coach Oscar Marin emphasizes having his pitchers work to their strengths, and that led to some pitchers simplifying their repertoire or altering their pitch usage.
When looking at strengths, Crowe’s slider appears to be a plus pitch. It averaged about 2,600 RPM of spin and moved about an inch and a half more than the league average, both vertically and horizontally.
When it’s really working, that vertical movement is apparent:
Crowe relied on those fastballs and his slider in his first taste of the majors, though the other offspeed pitches are regarded as potentially above average offerings.
“We still see some improvement opportunities for him, and looking forward to getting him in our system and working with him,” Cherington said.
Despite that rough start last season, he has a chance to earn a job this spring training. There could be more spots opening as the offseason progresses, as there has been reported interest the past few months in all of the starters in the Pirates’ rotation besides Mitch Keller and the other 2020 rookies.
“I think Wil’s at a point in his career, certainly that he would come into spring training and be a starting pitcher in spring training, and be competing for opportunity to make starts,” Cherington said. “... He’s certainly at a point in his career where he can be a factor in 2021 and have an opportunity to earn more opportunity over time.”
That opportunity might not be as clear if the Pirates do not trade at least one starter. Jameson Taillon is going to go into spring training as a starter, and the rotation already as Keller, Joe Musgrove, Steven Brault and Chad Kuhl. Of those options, Musgrove is the most likely to get dealt.
If a spot does open, Crowe will be in competition with JT Brubaker and Cody Ponce, who both made a good first impression last year, for that fifth slot. Depending on how the Pirates want to go from there, the losers of that competition will either go to the bullpen or to class AAA, where they would be depth in case someone gets hurt. The bullpen seems to have several spots open, though Luis Oviedo will have to make the team or be offered back to the Indians since he was taken in the Rule 5 draft.
At some point midseason, Cody Bolton and Max Kranick should be ready to make the jump to the Majors. Bolton was just ranked as the sixth best prospect in the system by Baseball America and has the highest upside of the Pirates’ Major League ready prospects. Kranick was added to the roster last month after making some mechanical changes and wowing the new regime in the satellite camp.
Crowe, Brubaker and Ponce will have a head start in 2021 to establish themselves in a role, If they struggle early, it may be harder to get another opportunity to consistently start.
After his rocky introduction to the majors, Crowe’s stock dropped. Yean’s, on the other hand, is rising.
“Big, physical kid from the DR [Dominican Republic] who kind of came on the scene in 2019 in short season, and his stuff started popping,” Cherington described Yean.
Video of Yean is in short supply, but if you want to see him work out and then throw one pitch off the mound, here you go:
At 19, Yean is still developing. He’s already put on about 50 pounds since signing with the Nationals at 17, so he has grown into that 6-foot-1 frame.
MLB Pipeline ranks Yean as the Pirates' seventh best prospect. FanGraphs' report on him reads his "stuff [is] typical of most late first or early second round high school arms."
“He looks even bigger and more powerful than he did last year,” Nationals assistant general manager of player development Mark Scialabba told Nationals reporter Mike Rosenbaum about Yean during the Nationals’ development camp in October. “The other day he was throwing 96-97 mph power sinkers and four-seamers up, with a hard 86-88 mph slider and a changeup he can throw for strikes. If he had been coming out of the draft this year, there weren’t many guys who look like him.”
The fastball was sitting in the mid-90s before the shutdown too, with Cherington praising its movement, too. He also said his slider has the potential to be really good and that the changeup is developing.
“He’s a strong, physical kid who we think has a chance to be durable,” Cherington said. “All the reports we did in terms of the background work were really positive, so looking forward to getting to know him.”
Yean has only two class A starts under his belt, so he’s going to fit in somewhere in the lower half of the farm system in 2021.
“He’ll join a group of young pitchers in our system kind of at the lower levels, low, full-season levels that we’re excited about,” Cherington said.
That’s turning into quite the group.
In addition to the aforementioned Malone, there’s Quinn Priester -- who is expected to crack top 100 prospect lists this year -- 2020 first round pick Carmen Mlodzinski, top-10 prospect Tahnaj Thomas and sleeper Michael Burrows. All of those arms, plus Yean, are expected to reach the majors during the 2023 season.
When factoring in Keller, Bolton and, ideally, Crowe and the other young starters who should be in the majors in 2021, it could be the basis for one of the best rotations in baseball, if they are properly developed.
Of course, not all of those players will hit. The Pirates have revamped their player development for pitching, including hiring Josh Hopper as their new pitching development coordinator, but there are no guarantees.
That’s part of the reason why the Pirates have stockpiled so many young arms.
“No matter how well we do in pitching development, there’s going to be some attrition over time,” Cherington said. “We know that. To build a pitching staff that’s good enough and deep enough to win in Pittsburgh, we don’t need 15 or 20 guys, we need 30 or 40, because they don’t all work out as well as we want them to, and there’s other stuff that happens.”
