Going into the 2019 season, the Pirates’ rotation consisted of Jameson Taillon, Chris Archer, Joe Musgrove, Trevor Williams and Jordan Lyles. At the start of this offseason, all but Lyles were projected to be in the 2021 rotation.
Now they’re all gone.
Archer had his club option declined and Williams was designated for assignment within the first month of the offseason. Taillon and Musgrove were traded just seven days apart recently. The team’s roster has undergone drastic turnover since Ben Cherington became general manager in November of 2019, especially in the rotation.
The only person whose name you can write into the 2021 rotation in pen is Mitch Keller. Steven Brault and Chad Kuhl have both drawn some level of trade interest over the past five months, and while there isn’t any traction of a trade for either pitcher right now, that could very well change at some point during the season. But as long as they are with the Pirates, they’ll remain in the rotation.
After that, it’s wide open. The Pirates have four members on the 40-man roster who could theoretically step into the rotation opening day. Cherington has also discussed adding to the rotation via trade or free agency before the season starts.
Of course, missing the opening day rotation or roster does not mean the season is lost. Players get hurt, need breaks, get traded and so on, so just about every team will use at least eight or nine different starters over the course of a season. Everyone on this list should get at least a couple starts this season.
There’s also the wild card that the Pirates could go back to piggyback starts, something they explored early last year before injuries forced them to spread out their starters.
"I think everything's on the table, just for the sake of what we're gonna do and how we're gonna do it,” Derek Shelton said during his last media availability in December. “To eliminate anything, we can't do that right now. It is way too early.”
For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that it’s a traditional five man rotation. With that said, in the name of the competition and meritocracy Cherington and Shelton want to create, which pitchers could fill these two open spots in the rotation?
JT BRUBAKER
The most familiar face on this list would seemingly have one of the best chances of retaining his spot in the starting five. After missing almost all of the 2019 season -- and a chance to make his debut that year -- Brubaker finally did reach the Majors in 2020, cracking the opening day roster in the bullpen before quickly moving back into the rotation.
His season results weren’t exactly exciting -- a 1-3 record with a 4.94 ERA -- but in a shortened campaign, a bad outing or two can inflate an ERA. In his final seven starts of the season, the ones where he was finally stretched back out as a starter, he allowed two or fewer runs in five of them. He allowed 12 runs in the other two.
Brubaker was mainly a sinker-slider guy coming up through the Pirates’ farm system, but he started to mix in more four-seamers and curveballs in 2020. Of those two new pitches, the curveball definitely played better, holding batters to a .182 average with a 38.1% whiff rate. Its spin doesn’t perfectly mirror his fastball, but it’s pretty close for the four-seamer.
The curve was a nice addition, but Brubaker’s slider is and probably always will be his best pitch. It drops more than it runs, and he’s not afraid to throw it to either right-handers or left-handers, especially as a putaway pitch. Of his 48 strikeouts last year, 24 came on the slider.
His fastball is servicable, he has a good slider and a curveball that could also be considered a plus pitch if it continues to develop. Given the Pirates’ current situation, he’s fine as a backend of the rotation starter, but in a perfect world, he would probably do better as a multi-inning sinker-slider reliever and pitching just to his strengths.
Shelton and Cherington have talked many times about establishing a meritocracy and having players earn their opportunities. One can argue Brubaker already did that last year, and while that counts for something, he’s going to have to earn his spot in the rotation again this season.
WIL CROWE
While most of the players the Pirates acquired in the Josh Bell, Taillon and Musgrove trades were young (even by prospect standards), Crowe was one of a few Major League ready pitchers the club acquired this winter.
You’re going to have to excuse those first couple starts in the Majors though, because Crowe was just flat out bad in them. He made three starts, lasted 8 ⅓ innings and allowed 13 runs. He blamed it on some rookie jitters and trying to be too fine.
“You go out there and you’re trying to be perfect all the time, trying to do things that may not be in your strong suits,” Crowe told me back in December. “… I was getting into some bad habits.”
Crowe wants to challenge hitters, and he has five different pitches to do that with -- four-seam, sinker, slider, curveball and changeup. In my write-up of the Bell trade, I theorized that pitching coach Oscar Marin might tell Crowe to ditch the sinker and emphasize his strengths on the mound instead.
Baseball Savant had a hard time registering which of his breaking pitches was a curveball and which was a slider, but after looking at the date of individual pitches, it looks like his curveball sits around 2,600-2,800 RPM and the slider about 2,400-2,550 RPM. If that’s the case, that would put his slider in about the top-third of MLB pitchers in spin rate and the curve in the top-quarter. That can lead to some good movement:
That could help his low-90s fastball play up a bit, though the spin of his pitches don’t mirror each other, so they probably won’t tunnel. That may be the best way to describe Crowe’s career to this point. If you look at individual parts of his game, there are definitely things to like, but as a whole, those pieces haven’t really come together yet. Or at least they haven’t come together since he hit AAA.
The Pirates got two pitching prospects in the Bell trade. Eddy Yean is 19 and on an upward trajectory. Crowe is 26 and has been trending down the last few years. He still has potential -- and the opportunity -- to establish himself in a rotation, but he was barely a top 10 prospect for one of the worst farm systems in baseball. The Pirates have a wave of pitching prospects coming up over the next couple years, including first-rounders Quinn Priester, Brennan Malone, Carmen Mlodzinski and whomever they take first overall in the draft (presumably Kumar Rocker). Crowe needs to claim his spot soon or he could be washed away.
CODY PONCE
Hey, it’s Mr. Doubleheader.
Ponce made three starts last season, all of them in doubleheaders. (He also made two relief appearances over the course of the year.) When asked if he minded being the 29th player for those second games, he jokingly responded back to the reporter, “would you be upset playing in the big leagues?"
Ponce did pretty well bouncing between the Majors and the alternate site, which is a hard and usually thankless job. Granted, it was a bit easier to do this year because the Pirates knew when their doubleheaders were scheduled, giving him more time to prepare, but the point remains the same. And while his peripherals were not too flattering, a 3.18 ERA over your first 17 innings is not too shabby of a way to start your Major League career.
Stuff wise, Ponce is going to rely on his fastballs, which makes sense because they’re three good offerings. The sinker drops, the four-seamer has the spin to play in all parts of the zone and the cutter can run away from right-handed batters.
The cutter sits in the 87-89 mph range and the other two around 92-94 mph, so he doesn’t blow these pitches by anyone. He relies on filling the zone with different looks and movement. When it’s working, that cutter starts to tilt closer to a slider and can make hitters look foolish:
But what does he have to offer besides those fastballs? Well, his curveball got whiffs last year and batters had a hard time squaring up his changeup, but that could be mostly attributed to a small sample size. Looking at where these pitches were thrown, a couple of these should have been tagged:
Courtesy of Baseball Savant.
Now Ponce did throw his fastball over two-thirds of the time last year, which could explain why batters missed these. They were sitting on his plus pitches and were caught off guard by his secondary stuff.
That’s fine in short bursts, but it isn’t a reliable strategy. He has to do a better job burying the curve and hitting the outside edge with his changeup against left-handers. His fastball and cutter are good, but not good enough to carry him as a starter. He needs to take a leap with at least one of these pitches this year.
Ponce will be turning 27 in April, so this is going to be a pivotal year for him. Like Brubaker, he has a clear path to a bullpen spot if he can’t stick as a starter, but that’s a backup plan.
Obviously everyone involved would like him to stick in the rotation, but he already has plenty of experience out of the bullpen while in the Brewers’ farm system. The Pirates have plenty of relief options right now, though, so this seems like more of a possibility when the wave of young pitching prospects approach the majors in 2023.
MIGUEL YAJURE
The final player on the 40-man roster, Yajure was acquired from the Yankees in the Taillon trade this week. Looking at their roster, had he not been traded, there was a pretty decent chance he could have been the fifth starter in the Bronx this year, so surely he could fill the same role for a rebuilding club.
He’s 22, still trending up as a prospect and has the highest ceiling out of the other pitchers competing for spots right now. At the moment, I’d say he has the best chance of any pitcher not named Keller, Kuhl or Brault of making the rotation. With the exception of Keller, I would hazard a guess and say he has the best chance of making the 2022 rotation as well.
Yajure primarily relies on a fastball that sits in the low-to-mid 90s that he likes to throw up in the zone, a high-spin cutter, a curve that has some drop but that tends to hang and a still developing, but already pretty good, changeup. He’ll also throw in a slider once in a while.
Of those, the cutter is considered to be the best pitch, with him using it more as a breaking, secondary pitch rather than as a fastball:
Unlike the other pitchers on this list, Yajure has three legitimate pitches he can rely on right now -- the fastball, cutter and changeup. If the curveball isn’t working on a given night, he can get by without it. That gives him a huge leg up on his competition for a rotation spot.
This entry is a bit shorter since I just wrote about Yajure, and honestly, I don’t know how much more I can say about him right now. The Pirates were fully prepared to go into the regular season with Taillon in the rotation.
They didn’t need to trade him yet, and it was going to take a lot from another team in order to pry him away. The Yankees met the asking price, and Yajure was the headliner. He could be a solid middle-of-the-rotation pitcher moving forward, and this season is a potential platform for him to establish himself.
FREE AGENT OPTIONS
After trading away three of their best players this offseason, Cherington and his staff are putting more energy towards adding to the 2021 roster, including starting pitching. Right now, the odds are better that they will add someone to the rotation than not, so those four internal options could be vying for one spot rather than two.
The question is how much the Pirates want to spend here. Cherington said he was not given instruction from ownership to shed payroll this offseason, so it would be safe to assume there is money to spend.
Taijuan Walker is often injured but often good. If he stays healthy, he would be an attractive trade piece at the deadline. If they want a cheaper, riskier but potentially higher return, Carlos Rodón was non-tendered by the White Sox , who balked at his potentially $4.5 million arbitration salary.
James Paxton’s fastball velocity was back during a recent showcase, and the 32-year-old has been a good No. 2 when healthy. If any of these pitchers get hurt, the Pirates have the other options listed above for the rotation.
They’re low-risk, potentially high reward pitchers that won’t break the bank. There’s very little downside for a team that’s going to fall well out of the playoff picture.
Cole Hamels and Rich Hill are, if you will excuse the cliche, two crafty lefties that could provide some veteran leadership and some innings. Of course, a player’s last gasp in the Majors is a serious thing, and nobody really wants to spend it on the team that finished with the worst record the year before.
Rick Porcello, Félix Hernández and Jake Arrieta are former Cy Young award winners looking to get their groove back. The Pirates kept the door cracked for a potential Archer return after declining his option earlier this offseason. Collin McHugh has very good peripherals and has been on that starter/reliever line for years, so this might be his last chance to prove he can start.
The Pirates won’t be able to attract the top free agents, but with pitchers and catchers reporting in less than three weeks, the market is tipping in their favor. There are good options available, either to pitch for a full year or potentially flip come July.
LATER THIS YEAR
It’s worth keeping in mind these are just the options for the opening day rotation. The Pirates have several other pitchers who could be ready to make the leap midseason.
Cody Bolton is the Pirates’ sixth-best prospect, per Baseball America’s most recent top 10 list, finally making the jump from a sleeper to one of the system’s best prospects. He spent the year in the Altoona camp, which is where he would have started last year had it not been for the pandemic. He will need to be added to the 40-man roster this offseason anyway, so there’s a good chance he makes his debut at some point this season.
His fastball sits comfortably in the mid-90s but can rise a couple extra ticks when in a groove. He also has a plus slider and serviceable changeup. He dominated Bradenton in 2019 and got roughed up a bit after reaching Altoona. He’ll need to prove he can rise to the challenge of the majors, but he has the potential to be a middle of the rotation arm.
Max Kranick was one of two players the Pirates added to the roster this winter to protect them from the Rule 5 draft. I did a longer feature on him earlier this offseason, but the main takeaways are he has reworked his mechanics to take better care of his arm, his fastball velocity is up and all of his pitches are spin more efficiently and moving more. His trajectory has gone way up over the past 12 months, and he has the opportunity to pitch his way into the Majors this year.
Like Yajure, I profiled Roansy Contreras in the Taillon trade breakdown. He has three pitches that are graded by FanGraphs as MLB average right now, but each still has some room for growth.
He has a smooth delivery and carries his momentum towards home plate, helping him get some extra velo. Cherington said he’ll have a chance to start, though he still needs to develop some more. He’s probably a better fit for the 2022 mix, but since he’s already on the roster, he could get some consideration later this year.