Let’s start with apologies: since the Pirates were eliminated from the Wild Card Game, I’ve been working on both submitting a paper so that I can finally finish grad school, and writing my thesis for a thesis defense that is in the near future. The MLB off-season is mostly dead until the winter meetings, anyway, and so my plan was to hunker down and focus on writing non-baseball stuff until something happened.
Something finally happened on Friday: JA Happ signed with the Blue Jays for three years and $36 million. This is a big deal for the Pirates, because with Happ’s departure and AJ Burnett’s presumable retirement (and with his status as an injury-prone and unreliable old man/free agent, in the absence of said retirement), the Pirates’ rotation looks like this:
- Gerrit Cole
- Francisco Liriano
- Charlie Morton
- Jeff Locke
- ???
Tyler Glasnow, for all of his talents, won’t be a Pirate until June. Nick Kingham and Brandon Cumpton are recovering from Tommy John surgery. Jameson Taillon’s hernia means that he hasn’t pitched in a regular season minor league game in two full seasons. Casey Sadler had a Tommy John surgery of his own late in the season. The Pirates have some decisions to make this winter and there are some changes they could make and maybe even some that they should make, but the only thing that they have to do this winter is find more starting pitching.
As always seems to be the case with the Pirates, this is a fine tightrope for them to walk. They need pitching now, but they don’t necessarily need long-term signings because they have Cole, Liriano for two more years, Glasnow, and probably Taillon* waiting in the wings without considering guys like Steven Brault, Stephen Tarpley, or the future Glasnows that are currently just off of our radar.
Still, the larger issue is this: if I look back on 2014 and I think about the regular season and how abruptly it all ended, the one thing that I keep coming back to again and again is this: the Pirates won 98 games, sure, but they finished two games behind the Cardinals while giving 53 starts to Charlie Morton and Jeff Locke. I say over and over again that I hate criticizing a 98-win team for not winning 100 games because it’s true, but after the Pirates signed Liriano and Burnett last winter I was hoping for them to find one more Vance Worley in the rough to shore up the back end of the rotation, and it took them until July 31st to put that pitcher in black and gold. There are no guarantees that replacing 20 starts of Morton and Locke with a competent pitcher would’ve won the Pirates the division, but that’s my one big “what if” for 2015.
Now 2016 is barreling towards us, and the Pirates have the same issue. They need one starter just to have a full rotation, and they’ll not-quite-bold-letter-need-but-still-need a second one if they don’t want to start with Locke and Morton back in the rotation. The problem is that it’s impossible to know from here what the Pirates will need on July 1st. It’s possible that Glasnow won’t be ready as soon as we’d like (his control issues were much more pronounced in AAA than they’d been in the low minors) and Taillon will take some time to recover. It’s possible that they’ll both blow the doors off of Indianapolis and we’ll all be howling with rage at the .500 Pirates for not calling them up sooner.
My hope, pipe dream that Jeff Samardzija will fall in value enough to take a one year Searage Fix-it Special aside, was that the Pirates would get Happ for ~2 years/$20 million and then find a project to take the other rotation spot. That’d leave one spot to split between Locke and Morton, and leave two spots for Glasnow and Taillon when/if they need them, and leave some non-Locke/Morton insurance for Taillon, who’s a huge unknown at this point.
With Happ signing a Liriano-style deal, it seems pretty clear to me that the Pirates won’t be signing any sort of sure-thing pitcher on the open market this winter (David Price’s gigantic deal today just furthers that suspicion). That leaves either a trade, two project-type pitchers, or to start the year with Morton and Locke both in the rotation.
My hunch, given that the Pirates start just about every year with one starter fewer than I’d like them to start the season with, is that they’ll go with option #3. They’ve shown interest thus far in both Trevor Cahill and Justin Masterson, who both make sense from the project perspective, though Masterson seems like a huge roll of the dice at this point in his career. It’s also worth mentioning that the Pirates will have some real trade options this winter. The deadline to non-tender players is tomorrow, which means that we could have news of a Pedro Alvarez trade at this time tomorrow (though I suspect that they’ll be forced to let him walk). I think that Mark Melancon and Neil Walker will likely both get tenders from the Pirates, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see both players start 2016 in different uniforms. If the Pirates are going to find a pitcher more reliable than Cahill or Masterson, I’d guess that it’ll be from trading one of those two players.
*I very seriously don’t mean to make any implications about Taillon here other than that it’s been a very long time since he’s pitched and that that makes him much less than a sure thing. He has always been a supremely talented guy, and a Tommy John surgery and a hernia don’t necessarily change that. The issue is that first off, two years off means that it’s impossible to know what that means for him in 2016 and, secondly, if we don’t know what to expect from him in 2016, than we obviously don’t know what to expect in the long-term, either.
Photo by Jared Wickerham/Getty Images
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