John Baker’s setup in his kitchen looked like an improvised baseball heaven. Three different devices, three different games, with several of his coordinators on Zoom as well.
After a 610-day layoff, minor-league baseball had returned on that May 4 night, and Baker wanted to watch as much at once as he could.
“That was unsustainable,” Baker told me about his setup, laughing. The new plan would be to watch one game live and then video of the others the next day.
About six months prior, in November 2020, Baker had been hired as the Pirates’ director of coaching and player development, a reworked take on the traditional “farm director” title. With the change in leadership also comes a change in ideology. One that is more player-centric and focuses on tapping into what makes individual players click.
“What is this guy’s bullet, and how do we build around that?” Baker said. “What’s the unicorn?”
It sounds basic on paper. In practice, it takes knowledge, a willingness to experiment and, perhaps most importantly, trust.
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MATT SUNDAY / DKPS
Ben Cherington (center), Travis Williams (left) and Bob Nutting (right) talk with DK Pittsburgh Sports on the day of Cherington's introduction as general manager.
In his introduction as the Pirates' general manager on Nov. 18, 2019, Ben Cherington laid out the plan for how he wanted to build this team.
“The four pillars that will drive our success are elite talent identification, acquisition, development and deployment,” Cherington said during that first press conference. “My entire career has been spent focusing on developing great systems to be elite in these four critical areas, which will fuel our future success in Pittsburgh.”
Despite being limited under strict financial constraints, former general manager Neal Huntington’s Pirates teams did rather well in those first two areas, talent identification and acquisition. Tyler Glasnow, Austin Meadows, Gerrit Cole and Shane Baz were some of the notable names who were acquired via the draft. Charlie Morton came in a trade when he was still a prospect. Daniel Hudson, the pitcher who got the final outs of the 2019 World Series, signed as a reclamation-project free agent in 2017. Players who would go on to be All-Stars and Cy Young finalists passed through the system.
The catch was most of these players did their best after leaving the Pirates. Glasnow was an inconsistent middle reliever before being traded to the Rays. Hudson was traded away in 2018 after failing as a backend reliever. Cole and Morton were the first two-runners up for the 2019 Cy Young.
By the end of the 2019 season, Baseball America ranked the Pirates as having the No. 20 farm system in the sport. Those failures in player development, especially with the prospects who were supposed to be the core of the Pirates' next competitive team but went on to have success elsewhere, convinced owner Bob Nutting to make significant changes to leadership. He fired Huntington, team president Frank Coonelly, manager Clint Hurdle and several other key members of the front office.
The first hiring was a new team president in Travis Williams, who pegged Cherington as the architect for the rebuild shortly after. As Red Sox GM, Cherington built a World Series winner in 2013 and oversaw the development of a group of prospects that would lead to another in 2018. After resigning from the Red Sox in 2015, he was named the vice president of the Blue Jays’ player development, overseeing one of the most talented position-player cores rise to the majors.
In that introduction, Williams referred to Cherington as a “talent magnet.”
“Ben is exactly what we need in this organization at this point in time,” Williams said then.
In Cherington’s first two years with the Pirates, the most significant changes to the front office and coaching staff have been made with player development in mind, including the hiring of Baker, assistant general manager Steve Sanders and Josh Hopper as the coordinator of pitching development.
In that time, the Pirates have seen their farm system replenished with talent, now ranking fourth-best by Baseball America. The only other teams to improve their standings by 16 spots in that short a time are the Royals (from 19th to 3rd) and the Rangers (from 27th to 11th).
“It would be great recognition for a lot of work that’s been done by a lot of people in the organization, but it doesn’t get us wins on the field,” Sanders said about being ranked so highly. “That’s the work that goes on throughout the system.”
Most of that improvement has come from high draft picks and trading away most of the talented players off the major-league roster Cherington inherited. Many of the players the Pirates have targeted over the past two years, especially in trades, have been young players with high upsides but low floors. Whether or not that gamble pays off depends on if that reworked player development system produces players.
If it does, the result could yield serious major-league talent.
“The goal’s not just being a big-leaguer,” Class AA Altoona hitting coach David Newhan told me. “You want to be a starting guy that plays for a team that wins a division. There’s a difference there. You look up and down the lineup [here], there’s obviously guys that you can project to do that.”
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⚾️😃 pic.twitter.com/nrRhR55GQC
— John Baker (@manbearwolf) May 7, 2021
When Baker put down the catcher’s mitt in 2015 and picked up a laptop to take online classes, he quickly felt drawn to performance psychology. He had spent 14 years as a professional trying to help his pitchers maximize their potential. This transition felt natural.
Baker found work with the Cubs as a baseball operations assistant in 2015. He rose through the ranks there, putting that performance psychology to use as the mental skills coordinator. When baseball resumed in 2020, he returned to a major league dugout to try to help the players stay loose and focused.
That offseason, Cubs team president Theo Epstein was planning to depart the organization. At the same time, Baker and Cherington already had begun talking about him potentially coming over to the Pirates. Cherington was Epstein’s No. 2 with the Red Sox from 2009-2011, serving as senior vice president and assistant GM. Epstein strongly encouraged Baker to go for the new job.
Baker accepted, taking with him the lessons he learned from the mental skills side of the game. He often goes back to the words of one of his mentors in the sports psychology world, Dr. Ken Ravizza.
“Do you need to feel good to play well?” is how Baker explained Ravizza’s message. “Are you that bad that you need to feel good and feel great and feel like everything’s lined up and perfect for you to go out and compete?”
This ideology guides Baker and he wants to pass it on to players. It challenges them, whether it is a veteran or an 18-year-old newcomer to pro ball. The Pirates are planning to challenge them in their development, in ways that take them out of their normal routines and maybe make them a bit uncomfortable. It’s in that area where people can grow if there’s mutual trust.
And players are buying in, especially during practice.
“You can look at it from the lower levels ,from the Florida State League on up. We have a lot of great talent,” Class AAA Indianapolis outfielder Canaan Smith-Njigba said. “A lot of people are performing, and that’s just due to how we’re changing how we practice. We’re practicing a lot harder so the game becomes easier. So I’m on board.”
Coaches will routinely challenge players with something they may not have seen before, like ramping up the velocity during batting practice or mixing up pitch deliveries. It’s something not all teams do, opting to see those situations play out in games. The Pirates want to do that too, but Baker says they have the most influence in pregame. One can take lessons from games, but pregame is the controlled environment.
It also gives them more time since it’s a more individualized approach than in the past. Finding out what that player’s “unicorn” is and making that the center of their development. It takes more time, but the results could be greater.
“He’s really good at relating with people,” Sanders said of Baker. “Obviously it’s a baseball job, but overseeing player and coaching development is a people job. His ability to connect with players, connect with coaches, to think outside the box, find ways to push us forward but do it as a group, has been really good. He brings a fresh energy and excitement to everything we’re doing.”
He wants those relationships with coaches too. When Baker was introduced, one of the things he wanted to change is how teams “preyed” on minor-league coaches’ love of the game, exploiting them with little chance of promotion because they want to stay in pro ball. Baker wanted to make sure they are armed with the skills necessary to give them as many touchpoints with players, making them better promotion candidates by extension.
He also took on some of the dirty work that coaches are usually tasked with, like being the one to deliver bad news to players, including when they are being cut or demoted.
“Let that guy be mad at me so we can hopefully provide some safety and security for our managers, who are tasked to develop these really close relationships with players,” Baker said. “... If I can take all of the bad and let everyone else take all of the credit for the good, then by the end of my contract, I’ll think I’ll have done a good job.”
Baker also gives his managers the green light to play for wins, especially since there were no minor-league games played in 2020. That could mean pulling a prospect for a pinch-runner or defensive replacement late, or playing a bullpen matchup. The Pirates wanted those players to get a feel for what it is like to win as a team again.
Winning can often be secondary in the minors. The Pirates don’t want it to be. If they win and build that player-centric culture, they can get players to buy into how the team tracks biomechanics, movements, analytics or whatever gets them to click. Gets them to win more.
“One of the messages that we’ve spread is we have to be different,” Baker said. “We have to be different. We can’t be the same. We’re not going to be different for different's sake, but it can’t look the same. 2022 can’t look the same as 2021, and 2023 can’t look the same as 2022. Nobody has the answers to all of these things. To claim you do have the perfect system that gets every player better is very arrogant, and we’re not going to be arrogant. We’re an organization that’s built on leadership, from Derek Shelton to Ben Cherington to Travis. This is an organization built on a growth mindset and continuous learning, and when we get better information, we’re going to evolve our process, every single time.”
Or, as he put it much more concisely shortly after: “It’s OK to fail.”
Those who do fail and try to learn from it, rather than revert back to what’s comfortable, tend to be the ones who make strides.
“The player has to be willing to be challenged, and it’s in that willingness that we’ve seen guys like Matt Fraizer really grow,” Baker said. “And it’s not an easy thing to do, especially at a young age. Because if you’re going through some failure or practice is difficult, it really requires a willingness on the player to do that. And that can be scary.”
While that extra practice has resulted in an improving farm system and the Pirates' affiliates posting the best combined winning percentage of any National League club, it’s those individual cases of players taking extra steps to get better that really stand out.
“I think you see it in the emergence of guys like Matt Fraizer and Jared Triolo as, for me, are major-league prospects that I don’t know if there was a lot of talk about those two guys when I came over here,” Baker said. “Now … you go ‘wow.’ ”
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ROB LYNN / ALTOONA CURVE
Matt Fraizer rounds second base for the Curve.
Before he went down to spring training, Fraizer wrote down goals for the 2021 season.
A .280 batting average. Ten home runs. Twenty stolen bases.
That middle goal looked the most challenging. He had never homered as a professional and only had three in his three years of college ball with Arizona. But he had to show he had some pop to stick out among the organization’s group of outfielders.
If not, then that decision to leave college early might come back to haunt him.
He had planned to return to college for his senior year after breaking the hamate bone in his right hand. He didn’t think anyone would take him after just 94 plate appearances in his junior year. But as the draft approached, Derek Venderson, the Pirates' scout who had been following him for years, called to offer his condolences about his hand. As the conversation continued, he talked about how much he had seen Fraizer grow as a player.
“I didn’t think much of it at the time he called, but after, I realized there was definitely some interest there,” Fraizer recalled at a picnic table at Peoples Natural Gas Field in Altoona.
Still, the plan was to go back to school. He didn’t think he would be drafted early enough for it to be worth it. He didn’t even bother to host a draft party. He and his dad, Terrance, half-watched it at home.
With their third-round pick in 2019, the Pirates selected Fraizer and signed him for $525,000. It was under the pick's slot value, but the total, paired with the prestige of being a high draft pick, was enough for him to forgo his senior year. It would also mean that he would return to a baseball diamond sooner.
That early return backfired. His swing never felt right. In 43 games with low Class A West Virginia, he hit .221 with just six extra-base hits, none of which left the yard.
“I think it’s good for your career to fail,” he said, now with the benefit of hindsight. “In order to succeed, you’ve got to go through those failures sometimes.”
But those failures lingered, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic canceled the minor-league season. Now two seasons removed from his last college game, all Fraizer had to show were some terrible results in short season Low-A.
Leaving spring training early, Fraizer decided to throw himself into a swing change when he got back home. When he was at the Florida instructional league after the 2019 season, he was told that his contact point was too deep. He wasn’t getting the barrel out in front and was late on too many pitches.
It was the first time in his career Fraizer’s swing was challenged like this.
“I was always told you have to get the ball deep,” he said.
While in Florida, Kevin Young, the former first baseman and an instructor in the league, introduced him to some drills to help. The first was a visualization. Young put a baseball on the back of home plate. That’s where Fraizer was making contact. He then moved it out front. If he got the barrel out there, he was going to get more power. Using a Trackman, a radar that can track a baseball’s flight path, they were able to see him get in front more before returning from the instructional league.
Fraizer felt better returning to Bradenton, Fla., in 2020, but was sent home much sooner than anyone expected.
“I didn’t have a good early showing, but I was excited for that first full year,” Fraizer said. “[I thought,] ‘I’m ready now.’ But then it got cancelled… It was definitely frustrating.”
Back at home, Fraizer decided to double down on what Young said at instructional league, modifying his swing to try to generate more power. The first change was in his lower half, positioning his feet closer together so he could generate more force stepping into a pitch. He also changed his hand motion. In the past, his swing started with him moving his hands back. That contributed to the deeper, later contact point. Instead, he positioned his hands higher, starting his swing by dropping them to his old load position, but much sooner on the pitch’s flight path.
The goal was to keep refining those changes all year, but to also be ready at a moment’s notice in case the season did start.
“None of us knew when we would get back to playing,” he said. “The whole year, you had to be just as ready as you can, because at the snap of a finger, you could be back.”
In the end, there was no season, so Fraizer spent those months hitting off a tee and off his dad in their backyard while lifting and trying to add muscle. In late September, he got a call that he was invited back to Florida for the instructional league again, and within four days, he was in Pirate City showing off his work in progress.
He had a new way of describing his approach, too: “Be slow, be early.” The goal is to get the bat through the zone sooner, but still time up his pitches.
“If I’m early and then I’m late, I’m on time, if that makes sense,” he said.
When he returned again in 2021, the plan was to send him to high Class A Greensboro to start the year. That affiliate had many of the organization’s top prospects, including Nick Gonzales, Liover Peguero and Quinn Priester, all ranked as top-100 prospects from the early parts of the season. Standing out in that setting would bury his concerns after 2019.
But he didn’t at first.
“I think I hit 30 ground balls,” Fraizer said of his start to the season. “I couldn’t hit the ball in the air.”
Fraizer did not have an extra-base hit through the first week and a half of the season, striking out more times than he got a hit. He trusted that his new swing would work, though, and continued to refine it with hitting coach Ruben Gotay.
During that second week, Fraizer finally ran into one, but pulled it foul. Getting back to the dugout, Gotay and the coaches encouraged him, saying he was close. Fraizer was feeling better.
Soon after, he ran into another. This time it stayed fair, clearing the fence for the first time since college.
“I just remembered that feeling of what I felt and trying to replicate that as much as I can in every at-bat,” Fraizer said.
Not soon after, Fraizer started to take off. That .280 batting average goal he set? He hit .314 with the Grasshoppers. Ten home runs? He doubled it. The one goal he didn’t reach was stolen bases, partially due to the fact that too many of his hits went for extra bases.
The Pirates were stingy with promotions throughout this season, wanting to help establish a team culture at each level. But in August, Fraizer got the call to Altoona.
“Fraiz left no question and kind of forced their hand to go to AA,” his Greensboro teammate Michael Burrows said. “There’s no other way to put it. He just couldn’t stick around here any longer.”
In Altoona, he continued to rake, recording 18 extra-base hits over 149 plate appearances with an .848 OPS, standing out in a very deep lineup. At the same time, he broke onto the Pirates’ top prospect list with Baseball America, ranking at No. 26 but with a clear upward trajectory.
“Sometimes you just need to stay out of their way,” Newhan said when asked how he approached coaching a hitter as hot as Fraizer. “The whole goal is they don’t need me.”
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UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA-BIRMINGHAM
Pirates pitching coordinator Josh Hopper while with the University of Alabama-Birmingham.
Josh Hopper was told to take some time over Thanksgiving to think about the offer.
By that point, though, he had basically made up his mind. Going through more interviews and Zoom calls than he could have expected, he was struck by the level of genuineness he encountered within the different departments of the organization. The Pirates wanted him to come aboard as their new pitching coordinator, and he was excited for what this next career step could mean.
“This was an opportunity to do it at the highest level and see if our theories work at the highest level,” Hopper told me in Altoona about what drew him to the Pirates.
The theories had worked at the collegiate level. When Hopper took over as Dallas Baptist University's pitching coach in 2019, the Patriots saw their staff ERA drop by half a run, while being just one of nine teams in the nation to record 600 strikeouts. It was the school’s best strikeout total, highest strikeout rate (9.9 K/9) and lowest batting average against (.241) since they had moved to being Division I in 2004. With that pitching, the Patriots went on to win 43 games and earn a trip to the regional round of the NCAA tournament.
Hopper wasn’t looking to leave anytime soon, but in November 2020, the Pirates reached out to see if he would be interested in interviewing to be their pitching development coordinator.
Given what the Pirates were looking for, it makes sense why they approached him.
“We were really looking for someone who is able to think about the entire pitching development continuum,” Cherington said shortly after the hiring was announced. “Not looking to go after someone who just is an expert in pitch design or just is an expert in game planning or just is an expert in delivery or just is an expert in throwing program, etc., but someone who has really thought about all those pieces and can help us think about all those pieces.”
Hopper was uniquely qualified because he didn’t plan to get into coaching. After pitching for Berry College, Hopper joined the Mets as a reliever and pitched two years there before hanging it up as a player. (“Please don’t tell them my stats,” he joked, referring to the Pirates' pitchers. “I don’t want to ruin my street cred.”)
Leaving the playing field, Hopper returned to school to become certified in strength and conditioning and study biomechanics. This was at the turn of the millennium, when that biomechanical work would entail drawing dots on CRT televisions with dry erase markers to track movement. He thought he was going to become a trainer.
He had almost completed his masters when he missed being around the game again. For that last semester, he asked if he could join again in a small coaching capacity, just so he could be back in the dugout.
After that, he caught the coaching bug and unintentionally became perfectly positioned for the next wave of pitching coaches. First it was back to Berry. Then the University of Alabama at Birmingham, then Dallas Baptist.
At Dallas Baptist, they had a full arsenal of toys to play with. Rapsodo. Edgertronic high-speed cameras. Trackman. He had picked up those skills through his coaching journey, too.
“It was a little bit of adapt or die,” Hopper said. “You always want to be better at whatever you do. With the direction that baseball is going, it doesn’t mean you have to abandon your philosophies or anything, but your philosophies had better be open to adaptability. Learning to question everything has been a positive in my career. Question: Can we do this better? Is there a way to do this same thing that gets the message across more efficiently?”
It’s that type of mindset that explains why he was a target for Cherington. Hopper would accept the job after Thanksgiving, and he was announced as the new coordinator in early December.
“He's pretty all-encompassing from the pitching development side of it,” Dan Heefner, Dallas Baptist’s manager, said to me in December shortly after Hopper’s hiring. “He’s gonna be able to talk to everybody within the organization. It’s a perfect fit for him because he has knowledge in all of those areas, and experience.”
Hopper is involved in all areas with pitching, including mapping out development plans, ways to manage workload or rehab and in-person coaching. During the season, Hopper would visit affiliates for two to three weeks a month, spending the rest of the time either at Pirate City in Bradenton or mapping out plans for pitchers from home in Sarasota, just a few miles away from the Pirates’ Florida facilities.
It’s a different setup from his college years, where he would only have to focus on a handful of pitchers at a given time. Now, it’s four minor-league levels, not to mention everyone in the majors and their Bradenton and Dominican complexes. It’s an exciting change, though.
When Hopper did accept the job and settle in, the first thing that struck him was the opportunity that was here. Not just for him as a coach or coordinator, but for what the end product could be.
“I had my two years," he said. "I got the best out of my very limited talent level. I want to see these guys chase their dreams.”
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PITTSBURGH PIRATES
Jared Jones at the instructional league in Bradenton, Fla. in 2020.
Jared Jones doesn’t like weighted ball drills. They’ve taken off in popularity across the league, helping pitchers to either build up arm strength and velocity, make mechanical changes or tighten their control. They are part of the routine for many major-leaguers now, and it was something pitching coach Oscar Marin was quick to implement when he joined the Pirates' coaching staff.
But Jones isn’t a fan. He prefers to do his work with the regular five-ounce ball he has been using his whole life. The second-round draft pick in 2020 has the high-90s fastball and wipeout breaking ball that earned him an over-slot deal and elevated him to the team's No. 12 overall prospect, according to Baseball America. All signs are pointing to that improving.
So why does he do weighted ball drills? Because of Hopper. He trusts him.
“He really wants the best for people,” Jones said about the coordinator. “Really pushes you. Just wants you to know, yourself, how to get better.”
Hopper chuckled when the subject of Jones and weighted balls was brought up. He knew which drills Jones was referring to.
“I hide it better now, but I’m a fiery, competitive guy as well,” Hopper said. “There’s been some interesting conversations, for sure, but that’s because I think the world of Jared. I think he’s going to be a stud.”
He’s glad Jones buys into the program, even if he might not have under other circumstances.
“These guys are talented,” Hopper said. “They got here for a reason. They know what got them here, so if you try to shove something down their throat, that’s not going to work. What we try to do is meet them where they’re at, educate them as to why we want them to try something and then ask them to try it for us. We try to have a relationship that’s a true relationship. Tell me what your preparation is and your work looks like. What do you like and why?”
So how do they approach those changes or implementation of new ideas? It takes five minutes. That’s it. That’s the biggest change in how the Pirates are doing player development. It comes in five-minute increments.
It might be at the end of a bullpen session, throwing on the field or just approaching them in the clubhouse. Hopper or a coach would go to a player with an idea. A different movement, grip, set position. They would talk about it and, hopefully, try it out for five minutes.
Plenty of times, that’s where the experiment ends. Sometimes, they build off it.
“If you’re humble enough to put yourself out there, [they’ll try],” Hopper said. “Say, ‘Try this with your fastball,’ and you could look and say, ‘Heck yeah, we changed it!’ Or you may have to look at it and say ‘Yeah, that was not a good idea at all. Scrap everything I said in the last five minutes.’ But it gives us truth, and in that's the beauty of it. And where, in my mind, a lot of gains can be made.”
It encourages new ideas, something that was needed on the pitching side. One of the benchmarks of a good start under the old regime was retiring batters quickly, branded as “outs on three pitches or less.” It was a phrase that was most commonly associated with Hurdle and former pitching coach Ray Searage, but it was also cited and tracked by minor-league coaches in the system.
There are obvious benefits to getting quick outs, but that ideology was very similar to pitching to contact. For some pitchers, that works and may produce the best version of themselves.
But it also left pitchers like Burrows in an awkward spot. An over-slot 11th-round pick in 2018, Burrows has obvious upside with a high-spin curveball and a fastball with ride, both of which tunnel off each other.
Yet, he was being instructed to pitch down in the zone to try to get those quick outs, just like everyone else. Coaches were able to identify he had great spin, but didn’t know how to put it into practice differently.
“Good luck with him getting outs on three pitches or less,” Baker said about the right-hander. “Guys can’t put a ball in play against him half of the time.”
Burrows wanted to be a good student and get to the majors one day, so he listened to the pitching coaches. The end result in 2019 was something all too similar for many of the notable pitching prospects the Pirates had developed for years: Good stuff, only OK results.
Burrows wasn’t the only pitcher who experienced these shortcomings. Cole, Morton and Glasnow all found more success when they started throwing more fastballs up in the zone. Chris Archer posted terrible results when he did the opposite and started throwing more sinkers after coming to the Pirates.
That craving for more instruction led to a lot of independent research for Burrows during the quarantine. When he returned, he was sent to Greensboro with many of the other top pitching prospects. There, he met pitching coach Matt Ford. Ford is not an analytics guru, but he is knowledgeable enough to incorporate that with discussions on game planning, pitch sequencing and other aspects that will help Burrows unlock his full potential.
“He understands that we’re not the same,” Burrows said. “He can’t really tell us to pitch the same. Me pitching to my strengths is going to be different than Quinn Priester or Carmen Mlodzinski. He understands that. He knows where our stuff plays best. Kudos to him for doing that with 18 different pitchers on this team. That’s special.”
With that new instruction and new game plan, Burrows’ 2021 season was much better, slashing his 4.33 ERA in low Class A in 2019 in half to 2.20 in high Class A. In the same time, his strikeout rate -- where he is “stealing souls,” according to Baker -- jumped 12 points, now fanning over one-third of his hitters faced. He rose to the No. 10 prospect in the system, even as the club restocked with the draft and trade deadline. If he could repeat that performance next year in Altoona, his stock will continue to go up.
Ford checks the boxes of what the new Pirates look for in a minor-league coach: Collaborative, builds trust with players, knowledgeable in a variety of areas. But he wasn’t a new hire. He’d been with the organization for eight years.
“It’s been incredibly different,” Burrows said. “The staff that’s still here from 2019, I feel like they can be themselves more.”
Giving coaches more freedom ties back to Baker, too, but it was one of the main points Hopper wanted to emphasize with those on the pitching side: “Do simple better.”
“The one thing I think the baseball community is guilty of is there are so many resources that we want to make sure we feel like, and the player feels like, we are using everything,” Hopper said. “Well, we could use everything and filter it down to, ‘This specific player needs this.’ I think that’s what we’re impressing on our coaches, is we are to be the filter to them. If we are not giving them information, they are going to get it somewhere. We would like to have a voice in the information that’s being given to them.”
There is nothing more vital to a low-revenue team like the Pirates than a steady pipeline of young pitching. They have done well on the acquisition side, whether it is the draft -- where they added right-hander Bubba Chandler and southpaw Anthony Solometo, both of whom were graded as first-round talents -- or trades, bringing in players like Roansy Contreras and Miguel Yajure, both of whom should make the jump to the majors next season. But they had done well acquiring before but not made the most of it. The fact they let so many talented pitchers slip through their fingers was ultimately the downfall of many of those who were fired after 2019.
Only time will tell if those now in power are the truly right fits or, as Hopper put it, if those theories apply to the highest level. One thing is for sure, and that’s if they do fail, it will not be for the same mistakes those before them made.
If they succeed, it will be because of how they earned the trust of players in five-minute increments.
“I think that’s what makes our (pitching coaches) so special…. They’re very relationship oriented,” Hopper said. “Fear makes you run out of the burning building. Love makes you run back in. The commitment I see from all of our pitching coaches is what gains them that extra five minutes to say, ‘let’s try something else,’ and guys trust them because of it.”
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TOM REED / DKPS
Quinn Priester fist-bumps a fan on his way off the field in Greensboro, N.C.
On Sept. 15, the Greensboro Grasshoppers were closing in on clinching a spot in their conference championship game with their top pitching prospect, Priester, on the rubber.
It did not go well. The right-hander walked a season-high five batters, balked, made an error and took the loss. He would end the year being named the high Class A East League pitcher of the year, but it was his worst outing of the season.
Baker’s reaction was different than what one might expect. He was excited to see how Priester would handle this opportunity to learn.
“I truly believe in the future, there may be a Wild Card game that he’s starting, and how are we going to know how he is going to respond unless we put him in some of those situations,” Baker said.
Priester rebounded in his next start in that playoff series, striking out seven over five innings of one-run ball, leading the Grasshoppers to a win.
The Grasshoppers would lose the five-game series, 3-2. One level down, in Bradenton, the Marauders won their series to be their level’s champion. Minor-league success does not guarantee success at the majors, but the fact that the two levels which have been most influenced by the new leadership’s ideologies, can only be viewed as a good thing. Those two teams swept their league’s MVP and pitcher of the year awards, too, with Fraizer winning in high A and catcher Endy Rodriguez and right-handed pitcher Adrian Florencio in low A.
“There’s great opportunity for this to be a special group,” Hopper said. “We all know the pieces have to fall at the right time, so timing is as much a part of this as anything, but we definitely have guys who have a skillset that not only makes them a big leaguer, but a substantial big-leaguer that can go there and stick. Not just float around.”
Prospect experts are already taking notice at the Pirates’ improvement over the past year and how it should carry from the lower to upper-levels in 2022.
Internally, the Pirates know which direction they are heading. They also know they can get better.
“I’m not one to hang an ‘A’ on everything I’ve ever done,” Baker said when asked to assess this first year. “So I think we’re right in the ‘B’ range with some room for improvement.”
And for those external evaluations?
“I don’t need someone to tell me how good our guys are,” Fraizer said. “I know our guys and how good they can be.”
