Pittsburgh Pirates Offensive Struggles: Sign of a New Approach?

The Pittsburgh Pirates are currently near the bottom in all major offensive statistics so far this spring training, but is that really a big deal?

The Pirates haven’t set the world on fire offensively to start the spring training season. The old adage is pitchers have the advantage early in spring training because it takes time for hitters to get their timing back. While that may be true, the lack of offense from the team has alarmed many fans. Do they have a reason to be worried?

Here now are the team’s statistics and rankings for Grapefruit League play to date:

During the past two seasons, the Pirates have been a fairly mundane spring training team. Their average ranking was 10.5 in runs scored, ninth in on-base percentage, sixth in home runs, and 3.5 in batting average.

Quite simply, the Pirates have generally been a poor spring training team offensively in recent seasons.

The Pirates entered 2016 with the knowledge they would most likely hit less home runs than they did in 2015 when they finished 10th in the NL in that category. The team subtracted Neil Walker and Pedro Alvarez and replaced them with Josh Harrison and John Jaso in the starting lineup. Neither player is likely to come close to matching the home run totals of Walker and Alvarez; the Pirates are in transition offensively.

All off-season, Clint Hurdle and Neal Huntington have preached a new philosophy to the Pirates and that is a more on-base-centric attack. Could the Pirates struggles with the bat simply be them stubbornly working on this new approach?

Hurdle said this to reporters early in spring training:

“The game is transitioning in a lot of different ways in a lot of different areas. The nuts and bolts of it is, if you have more ‘on-base’ guys in your lineup, you’re going to have more guys on base, which can help create more runs, if we walk through the math together. Every team talks about it. The elite teams were the ones who were able to do it late. No one did it better than the Royals, who ended up winning the last game of the season.”

The Pirates have walked 50 times in just 12 Grapefruit League games, which is good for an average of 4.16 walks per game. In 2015, the Pirates walked 461 times in 162 games, for an average of 2.84 walks per game. This cannot be a coincidence as you don’t spend an entire off-season talking about getting on-base more and end up walking nearly 38 percent more than you did in the previous season.

Spring training results do not matter in the slightest. Wins and losses are completely inconsequential, but the overall process is vital and the Pirates seem completely committed to their new offensive attack. Could the stubbornness to the commitment be the reason for the decrease in runs and home runs so far this spring? If you’re completely selling out for one result during an at-bat, most likely it’s going to end in failure. Baseball is hard enough when you aren’t completely looking for one outcome in an at-bat.

No player is a better example of the Pirates committing to walking more than Josh Harrison. He’s walked twice in 21 at-bats so far this spring.. That is not a high amount, but he walked twice in 55 at-bats last spring and once in 40 at-bats in 2014. He’s clearly trying to see more pitches per at-bat and become a more patient and well-rounded hitter. Projected over a full season (500 plate appearances), Harrison would walk at a rate of about nine percent, which is almost triple Harrison’s career walk rate of 3.6. It isn’t realistic to expect Harrison to triple his walk rate in one season, but this is a clear indicator that the Pirates are obviously in the midst of changing their entire offensive identity.

The Pirates likely won’t out-slug many teams this season, and it is unrealistic to predict the Pirates to hit many home runs, but there’s a lot of value in getting on-base and bunching together hits, which is clearly the road the Pirates are on early in spring training. The results might not be pretty right now, but since the wins and losses don’t matter in March, now seems like a good time to work on a new team concept. Walks might not be sexy, but they could be a path to success for the Pirates in 2016.

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