The Pirates held this pick as closely to the vest as possible, but today’s reporting and speculation that they’d be taking Gerrit Cole with the first overall pick turned out to be dead on; the big, hard-throwing righty from UCLA is the Pirates’ selection with the first overall pick in the 2011 MLB Draft. We could debate the merits of picking Cole over Rendon forever, but I’m done with that. I wanted to see the Pirates pick Rendon, but I will now root for Gerrit Cole and Jameson Taillon and some combination of the Pirates’ other major and minor league arms to conquer the world and perhaps colonize Mars. This is a logical hope; I’m guessing when next year’s pre-season prospect rankings come out, most people are going to agree that the Pirates have more pitching talent in their minor league system than just about anyone else in baseball.
That said, I do have two real questions about Neal Huntington and his minor league system going forward. They are roughly of equal importance, but we’ll start with the one that relates to pitching:
Important Question #1: What really makes a successful Major League pitching staff? FanGraphs is absolutely right in pointing out that history is against the Pirates by taking a pitcher at 1-1 in the First Year Player Draft. So here’s my question: how much does that history matter? Even though there are no hard and fast rules about how to keep a pitcher healthy, I think we’re undoubtedly better at understanding how pitch counts and innings counts and how they vary from year to year affect a pitcher’s development in 2011 than we were even when the Pirates drafted Kris Benson in 1996. Andy Benes is the best pitcher ever taken with the first overall pick, but the last two taken have been David Price and Stephen Strasburg. It’s too early to judge, but there’s no reason to think that either is anything but an impressive Major League talent. That wasn’t true for guys like Benson or Luke Hochevar after even a year or two.
So why do some teams seem to stockpile pitching so well, why others struggle? Is it because they are better at identifying it, or because they’re better at developing it and keeping their pitchers healthy as their careers wear on? I suspect that for pitchers, development plays a much larger role than people realize. Charlie Morton, for example, could’ve had an entire Major League career without ever coming close to realizing his potential the way he has this year without good coaching. Are the Rays, for example, that much better at identifying pitchers that will fully develop and not get hurt than everyone? Or does their organizational focus on strict minor league pitch counts and possibly on eschewing sliders (I can only find anecdotal evidence of that, but it makes sense) raise their success rate considerably.
If you’re the Pirates and you’re very careful with things like pitch counts in the minors and you use some non-traditional developmental methods that may help keep arms healthy (I know that the stated reason for making their young pitchers throw mostly fastballs in the low minors is to improve command, but it also keeps young arms that have often been overworked in college and high school from throwing breaking balls for a significant amount of time; I have no idea if this helps keeps arms healthy or not, but it seems to me like it might) and in the 3+ years that you’ve run a minor league system you haven’t had many siginificant arm injuries directly attributable to your development prgram, should the ugly history of pitchers going first overall scare you as much as it scares some people?
Obviously there’s always going to be a risk in drafting a pitcher, but how big is the risk for teams that do things “right?” And are the Pirates a team that does things “right” right now? I think that’s probably the most important question right now as it relates to Gerrit Cole and the Pirates pick in this draft.
Important Question #2: So what about the position players? MLB’s draft is never for need. Everyone knows that. That doesn’t change the fact that the Pirates need hitting. They have questions about most of the hitters they do have in Pittsburgh and they don’t have a huge number of position player prospects in the minors. So where do the position players come from?
It’s by design, but most of the talent Neal Huntington has acquired as Pirates’ GM has been pitching talent. The system was almost devoid of pitchers at any level in late 2007 when Huntington succeeded Dave Littlefield, and he and Greg Smith have spent 3+ years restocking the cabinet. Because of that, and because it’s smart to cast a wide net when acquiring pitching talent, it seems like the Pirates have focused almost exclusively on pitchers recently. Besides Pedro Alvarez and Tony Sanchez, most of the big draft picks (both the high-round picks and the later tough-sign guys) have been pitchers. Huntington’s best trade acquisitions, Jose Tabata aside, have been pitchers. The trade-acquired prospects in the minors that are the most promising are pitchers.
By contrast, some of Huntington’s more questionable moves have involved hitters. Andy LaRoche and Lastings Milledge were both going to be experiments with a chance of failure from the moment they were acquired, but they both failed spectacularly in Pittsburgh. Pedro Alvarez is far from being a bust, but in 2008 there were people that recommended both Justin Smoak and Eric Hosmer over Alvarez (note: I wasn’t one and I’m not claiming that I was) and though that was a minority, those people are looking awfully prescient in 2011. Tony Sanchez is a better prospect than we thought on draft day in 2009, but if he can’t find his power stroke in Double-A before 2011 ends his stock is going to take a pretty serious hit.
It’s not the right way to think about things, but I guess my underlying question is whether or not the Pirates should’ve taken Rendon with the first pick yesterday not because they need him, but because they’re not great at identifying good hitters. I know that’s backwards logic to the extreme, but it’s something I’ve wondered about a bit. Huntington and Smith haven’t been completely without success in acquiring hitters via the draft or otherwise (again, Tabata was a steal, Alvarez and Sanchez haven’t been bad picks, even if it’s far to ask of they were the best picks for the slot, and Matt Curry and Robbie Grossman both have solid potential as late round finds) but to this point I think it’s worth wondering if they’re as good at identifying hitters as pitchers.
My concern is this: building a minor league system around pitching prospects is creating a bit of a house of cards, because pitchers are volatile no matter how much of an edge you think you have in coaxing arms along. At some point, it’s going to be time to deal some of these pitchers for hitters or to make a concerted effort to focus the on hitting in the draft. With the Pirates leaving the closest position player to a sure thing (I know Rendon’s medicals are a question, but the rapid-fire nature of baseball’s draft sometimes puts players into free fall when they drop even a pick or two lower than they were expected. It’s what happened to Stetson Allie last year; basically he dropped a few spots down and no one was sure if his asking price was ridiculous or if something else had happened and no one wanted to risk a high pick on him until the Pirates had time to do their homework and grab him on the second day. If teams like Arizona and Kansas City and Baltimore had assumed Rendon would be gone in the first two picks, they may have simply been more uncertain than scared and with only five minutes to do draft day homework, they all went with the guys they were sure about) on the board by not picking Rendon, can Huntington find bats somewhere else?
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