With the minor league season almost entirely wrapped up now (only Altoona is still in the playoffs), I wanted to tak a quick look back at the minor league season and kind of ruminate out loud about the idea that a lot of people have that it was a bad season for the Pirates and their prospects in general. The basic reason that a lot of people have been saying that is the sheer volume of injuries: Tony Sanchez, Starling Marte, Victor Black, Colton Cain, Brett Lorin, Gorkys Hernandez, Quinton Miller, Brock Holt, and probably at least one other minor leaguer I’m forgetting all suffered serious injuries and missed a lot of time in 2010.
Obviously that’s not good. Sanchez and Marte are the team’s two best hitting prospects, Holt was having a breakout year with FSL Bradenton, Hernandez was starting to come out of his funk in Altoona, and Black, Cain, Lorin, and Miller are all interesting pitching prospects. Any time a team has that many prospects go down, it’s frustrating at the very least and possibly disastrous for a franchise at the worst.
But that wasn’t all that happened to the Pirates in the minors in 2010. They opened the season up with almost no established pitching prospects behind Brad Lincoln at Triple-A, and they’re ending the year with Jeff Locke, Rudy Owens, Justins Wilson, and Bryan Morris all performing well at Double-A. Locke barely missed a beat after pitching excellently in Bradenton for most of the year, Owens built on his 2009 breakout, and Wilson was quietly one of the best pitchers in the Pirates’ system this year. None of these guys project as aces, but they could all be middle-of-the-rotation type talent and the Pirates need more of that after the disastrous performance by the pitching staff in 2010.
That means 2011 could follow a similar pattern to the one 2010 did with the position players: guys like Charlie Morton, Jeff Karstens, Brad Lincoln, etc. start the year out in the Pirates’ rotation with a chance to prove themselves and if/when they don’t, the players that are performing well with Indianapolis get their chance. With Morris and Locke struggling to various degrees last year and Wilson and Owens unproven above High-A, this year went about as well as it could’ve for the four of them and that’s a great thing for the Pirates.
Not all of the injury news was awful either. Starling Marte made it back for 34 games with FSL Bradenton after his hamate injury and hit .338/.396/.462, better than he hit in the 26 games before his injury. It’s obviously no good that he missed development time and maybe a late promotion, but he also managed to get back in time to play a bit and I don’t think the injury will force him to repeat the Florida State League next year. The same can be said for Tony Sanchez, who’s injury shouldn’t affect his baseball that much once his HBP-induced broken cheek heals. He can make up for some of his missed development time in the Arizona Fall League this year. His injury will keep him from making an early summer debut with the Pirates in 2011, but if he hits well in the AFL and starts strong with Altoona he might still move quickly through the upper part of the system.
In the very lower minors, Zach Von Rosenberg put up some nice numbers in State College and Cain pitched well for the Spikes, high ERA notwithstanding, after returning from his injury. Evan Chambers had an interesting year in West Virginia, as well. And the Pirates added a ton of talent into the system with this year’s draft and on the international market.
I’m not trying to argue that so many injuries, especially injuries like the ones Holt and Miller and Black and Lorin suffered that caused them to miss a lot of time, weren’t frustrating. They were and the system would be in much better shape today without them. But there were a good number of players that had good years, too, and that’s without mentioning Neil Walker or Jose Tabata or Pedro Alvarez. Young players are going to get injured; that’s the nature of the minors. Maybe part of the problem this year was that the Pirates have more interesting minor leaguers than they’ve had in years and so injuries didn’t fly under the radar the way they did in the past.
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