Kovacevic: Contreras, Keller offer velocity, vitality to Pirates' rotation

BRADENTON, Fla. -- "Guys good, very good."

Roansy Contreras' English is about a billion times better than my Spanish. So I'm sharing his verbatim response to my question on this Wednesday morning at LECOM Park not for some cheap laugh but, rather, to illustrate how few words are needed to convey what's been the buzz of the beginning of the Pirates' spring training.

The pitching guys who'll be part of the 2022 rotation ... good? Very good?

Maybe. At least they'll be building off good, very good material. Albeit raw and young.

"We're excited. I'd say that's the word," Justin Meccage, one of the pitching coaches, was telling me. "When you see the arms we've got, the velocity, the offspeed stuff, the different ways they come at you -- and I don't just mean on the big-league roster -- there's a lot here. And to be honest with you, we're excited to see even more."

Meccage's emphasis, to stress it again, was on the entire system. He was including Quinn Priester and other prospects, most of whom remain a level or two away from Pittsburgh. 

But he wasn't exactly exempting Pittsburgh, either. Nor should he, based on what I've seen and heard down here this week.

Or, as Bryan Reynolds put it to me on this day, "You seen our guys throwing 100 yet?"

Starting pitchers, he meant. And yeah, I had. And yeah, it's now plural.

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Look, I'm skeptical about this rotation. There's no way not to be. 

The starters in 2021 had a cumulative 5.33 ERA, second-worst in Major League Baseball, in addition to logging the fourth-fewest innings (753 2/3), allowing the third-highest batting average (.276) and the second-highest WHIP (1.48). And even though pitching wins as a statistic have gone the way of the 8-track, it's still startling that the staff combined for 28 wins -- basically one a week -- over a full season.

Oh, and this one might cut the deepest: The starters failed to last six full innings in 134 of the 162 games.

So, skeptical might not be a strong enough term, especially considering most of the names will be the same.

At the same time, we're talking about a staff that's still young. Beyond Jose Quintana, a 32-year-old reclamation project who'll have a role in this but won't get much of my attention because he's irrelevant to the future, the six remaining candidates are all 28 or younger:

• JT Brubaker, 28
• Wil Crowe, 27
• Mitch Keller, 25
• Bryse Wilson, 24
• Miguel Yajure, 23
• Contreras, 22

Add into this equation that Brubaker, Crowe and Wilson all just came off their first full season in the majors, and the lack of experience counts as a variable, as well.

But it can be a positive variable, since it's still fair and reasonable to believe they'll mature and/or improve.

"We’re encouraged by that group. There'll be healthy competition for those rotation spots,” Ben Cherington would say of his starters, but while also adding, “If we can add to that group, we will. We’d like to, if we can. We need to see if anything lines up.”

Skeptical. Understandably so.

And he wouldn't be alone inside the organization. In my talks here with people on the inside, the target for the Pirates to contend, while still not attached to a specific year, continues to be tellingly attached to the next wave of pitching, with Priester and other prospects, most of whom were with Class A Greensboro last summer and none of whom will pop up at PNC Park anytime soon.

Still, that hardly precludes the six younger members of this rotation, all of whom I spoke with on this day, taking strides forward and putting themselves in position to play significant roles for years to come.

Particularly those tripping triple-digits on the radar guns.

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Contreras might not make the opening day roster. In fact, I'm hearing he won't, that he'd be better served, coming off an elbow issue that shut him down for two months of 2021, spending some time with Class AAA Indianapolis.

That's OK by me. Health comes first. He's lucky to have avoided Tommy John surgery, and he's got everything to gain by building up arm strength after a lockout-interrupted offseason, plus all his confidence.

What's important is how he arrives, not when. Because he really is that important.

"Special" was how one team evaluator described him. "Across the board."

He's one of the 100-mph guys, of course. He's been that all through the professional ranks, including before Cherington acquired him from the Yankees in the Jameson Taillon trade. His four-seam fastball, pumped from a powerful, slender 6-foot, 175-pound frame, comes with bite and deception, and he's also adept at locating it in all quadrants of the strike zone. And that's to say nothing of an equally dynamic arsenal of slider, curve and change that can look unfair when following the heat. Or vice versa.

Even this round of long-tossing on this day reveals a bit of that bite:

What does someone that gifted do with one's offseason? How to improve?

"I just need to pitch more," Contreras replied when I asked that. "Be consistent."

And make it back to Pittsburgh?

"Yes," he'd come back with a broad grin.

He's already done it once. After wrapping 13 minor-league starts and a 2.64 ERA around those lost two months, management rewarded him with a cameo debut at PNC Park in the season's final week, one in which he put up three scoreless innings.

"So happy," he recalled. "I love it. Thank you to everybody."

After that, he went out and dominated the Arizona Fall League.

He'll make it soon enough. And when he does, a lot of that skepticism about the rotation -- or one-fifth of that skepticism, anyway -- will get rung up for good.

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One 100-mph guy was known. The other most certainly wasn't.

But Keller, maybe the Pirates' most vexing pitcher since Kip Wells or even way back to Kris Benson, endured another maddening season in 2021. Only this time, for the first time, it wasn't any willful-or-otherwise reluctance to throw inside that was killing him but, rather, his fastball.

One start, he'd run it up there at 95-96 mph, and he'd do OK.

Next start, he'd nosedive to 90-91 mph, and he'd get belted.

Now, after an offseason breakthrough, he's regularly up to 100 mph, including in his first live batting practice -- pitcher vs. hitter on the field at LECOM Park, with two pitching coaches, a data dude and a gun behind him -- Tuesday:

“I've thrown hard my whole life," Keller told me on this day. "So it's just kind of getting back to finding how I used to throw hard and why I used to throw hard. Just looking at old video and seeing how my body used to move and just kind of doing drill work to find that same way I was moving in 2017 through 2019."

That's when he was the No. 1 prospect in the Pirates' system, mostly with Class AA Altoona.

"I tried to emulate that form and get better here and there, and then it just kind of unlocked for me.”

There isn't much to the story, in large part because he's right that it'd been there before: He needed to get his upper and lower bodies more in harmony, allowing the leg drive to provide a lot more oomph. His own video study, coupled with work done on site by the Tread Athletics performance center in Charlotte, N.C., showed the solution. He nailed it from there.

“More fluid, more loose, less tense," was how he described it, "and then using my legs.”

I'll set aside for now that this represented the second instance of Keller needing to go to someone other than Oscar Marin, the Pirates' own pitching coach, for answers. The first was when management demoted him to Indianapolis last summer to work with Joel Hanrahan. Not a great reflection on Marin, no matter how it's broken down.

I asked Keller if maybe he'd been held back by the Pirates, the way Tyler Glasnow was under the previous administration. In that event, Glasnow was dropping velocity in favor of two-seamers aimed at getting ground balls. Once he went to the Rays, he cut loose and struck out the world.

“They're letting me pitch. It wasn't that," Keller quickly came back. "I wasn't feeling comfortable in my mechanics, so I knew I needed to change something. I'm glad we found something that seems to be working right now.”

That's a quality hedge on his part. He's lugging a 6.02 ERA over 39 career starts. He'll have to do a lot more than throw really hard to flip that script.

But it's an inspired re-start.

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The other four haven't got that kind of heat, though each has potential in his own right ... provided, as I see it, that each takes care of one sore spot.

Brubaker was promising -- at times more -- through the first half of 2021, with a 4.47 ERA and 1.15 WHIP, but the second half saw those figures well to 7.57 and 1.65. Most of that was due to a barrage of 28 home runs, 15 of which came in July and August. And it was a strange sight. He'd be pitching fine, then boom. Pitching fine, then boom.

I asked about that:

"It was just getting too far ahead in the AB, thinking too many pitches ahead instead of just focusing on that one pitch," he'd reply. "It's something I don't feel I recognized at the time, so it was, like, 'Let's go back to one pitch at a time.' You have to have an idea of how you want to attack the guy, but don't get three pitches ahead."

I'm a Brubaker backer. Been that way all along. Won't back off now. Love his competitiveness. Love, too, how he pushed through 2021, motivated by never having had a complete season in the bigs, having lost all of 2019 to injury.

"All 162, my first time," he'd say when I brought this up. "That meant a lot."

Home runs are curable. He'll be fine.

Crowe's season went the other way, down then up. He wound up with a 5.48 ERA and 1.57 WHIP, which is lousy no matter how it's analyzed. But I felt through most of his struggles that what he'd been lacking was an out pitch and, thinking it might not exist, was plenty surprised when his final three starts became his best, with four earned runs over 15 2/3 innings, plus 16 strikeouts.

He'd credited a resuscitated changeup at the time, and he reiterated that for me here:

"I think building off of what I did at the end of the year is a big thing," he'd say. "I started really finding my own and figuring out what I wanted to do against certain teams, certain guys. So, for me, I think it's staying in the zone early, controlling the zone early and then just going after guys instead of messing around, thinking about three to four pitches. Get them out, get back in the dugout and get our guys back up to the plate.”

Not sure what to think here, to be candid. The baseball world's littered with but-he-bounced-back-in-September stories. Crowe might need to anchor himself onto that changeup, which would be uncommon for any pitcher, and do his best with the rest.

Wilson's similar in that sense. His stuff's ... efficient at times, and yet his 16 starts saw a 5.35 ERA, a 1.45 WHIP and, most annoying, seven of those starts didn't reach five full innings.

That was most annoying to him, too, apparently.

“I think, for me, it's just consistency," he'd tell me. "Getting to the point where -- and that's a big thing that I worked on this offseason -- my mechanics are consistent every single pitch. From pitch to pitch, game to game. Because last year was kind of up and down. I'd have a good one, then kind of a not-so-good one. It's just bringing the same approach and the same consistency to every single pitch, as well as every single outing.”

As with Crowe, I'd feel far better about Wilson if he could just rear back when needed.

And then there's Yajure, who arguably never needs to do that.

Man, I enjoy watching this young man pitch. Because that's what he does: He pitches. He's got the best usage of offspeed stuff of anyone at any level of the system, and he's got the faith in it to match.

This is from May 14 against the Tigers at PNC Park, and it's a blast:

Neat, right?

Well, it didn't hold up. Because he didn't hold up. He'd go down to Indianapolis, he'd go down with a strained forearm, and he'd finish with four appearances in Pittsburgh -- three starts -- and an 8.40 ERA.

At season's end, he'd talked about having lost some zip on his fastball in returning from the injury and wanting to work on mechanics to bring it all the way back.

But on this day, he went a lot further in what he told me.

"I made adjustment in eating better," he'd say, "because last year I was a little ... let's say a little chubby."

Wait, what?

Which athlete ever admits that?

I wanted to make sure I wasn't losing anything in his second language, so I reached out and gave a playful tap on his belly.

"See?" he responded, lighting up. "Nothing there."

Well, the 2021 media guide had Yajure's height and weight at 6-1, 220 pounds, which isn't optimal. And which visibly was more than he's carrying now. I could see it in his face, too.

"This offseason, I eat a lot better. I lost a couple pounds. So now, I have to start working on my arm position to make sure all my pitches have the same release point. I want to learn a little more how to mix my pitches and be the same body mechanics every time I pitch. Work with the catchers a little more, I think. I hope to spend a little more time with them. I think that will be the key to make the next step.”

OK, then. Wasn't expecting that, but here's a round of applause for honesty.

If he gets his fastball back up to 92 mph, the rest of his stuff -- the stuff that matters -- will play better. That part's for sure.

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Toss in Quintana and whoever else Cherington might still add -- meaning real threats to start, not just the Cody Ponce roster-filler types -- and this rotation's still super-challenging to forecast. In either direction.

But I've got to say, I'd prefer that to having it all look eminently predictable. Because the precedent isn't kind for almost all of them.

"We're ready for the challenge, I think, to grow together," Wilson spoke of the starters. “I think there's a lot of potential, especially with the work that all of us did this offseason and the way we kept in touch with each other, the way we pushed each other. We all went into the offseason and came out stronger. For me, coming from Atlanta, we had a super-young pitching staff there, too, and it worked out. I think it could work just as well here, if not better.”

“We're a really young group, so we need to keep learning, learning and learning, including from each other," Yajure added from the next stall. "We will be better this year. I think we will have a better season. I hope so. I hope we do really good this year.”

With that, Wilson tapped Yajure on the shoulder to let him know, "Meeting in five minutes. Need to go."

Off they went. We'll see where they go.