Pittsburgh Pirates Trade Target Profile: Matt Shoemaker

As part of our Trademas in July series, we’ll take a look at potential trade targets for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Today we look at Matt Shoemaker, right-handed pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels.

When it comes to staring pitching available on the trade market, no team seems to have more to offer than the Tampa Bay Rays. The Pittsburgh Pirates themselves have scouted their starters, as have many other teams. With a miniature market forming around Tampa, the Pirates may be priced out of the services for Jake Odorizzi, Drew Smyly or Matt Moore.

General manager Neal Huntington and his staff are likely looking to other teams with significant controllable starters to bring in, and they should add the Los Angeles Angels to that list by inquiring about Matt Shoemaker‘s availability.

Profile and Performance

Shoemaker is a four-year veteran who has made 71 appearances overall for the Angels. He burst onto the scene in 2014 thanks to a 16-4 record that garnered him enough AL Rookie Of The Year votes to finish second for the award.

Below are Shoemaker’s career stats:

 

 

Pitch-wise, Shoemaker has an interesting mix that might be intriguing. The right-hander employs a sinking fastball, split finger and slider in addition to a four-seam fastball that can touch the mid-to-high 90s. The split finger is the strikeout pitch of the bunch, with a 22.35 swing and miss rate on the year.

In 2016, Shoemaker carries above average rates in O-Swing percentage (35.8), First-Strike percentage (63.7) and Swinging-Strike percentage (13.5). These are improvements across the board over his career numbers, showing that Shoemaker may have found his way out of the wilderness that was his 2015 campaign.

Shoemaker has good splits against left-handed bats, and his strikeout-to-walk ratio jumps to 5.0 against them. He has good – if not great –  control overall, with just 22 walks for a 1.9 BB/9 rate. His FIP of 3.36 and WHIP of 1.26 join forces to inflate his ERA to 4.08, but in his breakout campaign he was much luckier with a 3.04 figure.

The case for Shoemaker

• When we looked at another Pittsburgh Pirates trade rumor target in Nathan Eovaldi, we mentioned that the team lacks a starting pitcher with a reliable split finger fastball. Shoemaker’s splitter carries the best ground ball rate and whiff percentage of any of his pitches. Adding a pitcher who can effectively use something different may benefit the Pirates in less obvious ways over the course of a series.
• With apologies to Pokemon Go, controllable starting pitchers are all the rage in 2016. Shoemaker is under team control until 2021 and will enter his first round of arbitration this off-season at the age of 29. Though the Pirates have a glut of starting pitching, signing a player like Shoemaker can allow the club to bring in an established arm to go alongside less sure-bets.
• The righty’s 2014 was masterful. Assuming regular starting duties for the first time, Shoemaker kept the walks low and struck out almost 9.5 hitters per nine. For his career, he has a 8.6 K/9 rate.
• Though some may point to Shoemaker’s inflated ERA, since the calendar turned past April, he has posted a 2.85 ERA with 94 strikeouts against 12 walks.

The Case against Shoemaker

• The other side of the split finger coin is that teams know it is coming. In any count with two strikes, Shoemaker throws the pitch twice as much as the next-most thrown pitch (the four seam). Teams are already starting to pick up on this, as the pitch was taken for more balls in June than in any other month on two-strike counts.
• Though not particularly injury prone, Shoemaker has not pitched more than 136 innings in a given season. Provided he retains good health, he should eclipse that number this year. Teams may need to see more before committing to acquiring him.
• Shoemaker’s 2015 was as bad as his 2014 was good. Is it fair to slap a “Yo-Yo” label to his career to date? If he truly has turned the corner, this should not be a worry. If he has not, and has tendencies that he can regress back into, his controllable years become less of a factor.

What it might take

The Los Angeles Angels’ farm system is famously barren, but one truly doesn’t realize how empty it is until they take a close look. Their top prospect as rated by MLBPipeline is a catcher with below average hit tools that is at least two years away. They have zero prospects in MLB’s top 100 overall. I’ll spare you the rest of the gory details, but the Angels’ farm system should serve as a cautionary tale for any team that thinks they can remain competitive without a good pipeline.

To that end, the prospect haul that would go back to the Angels trade would be one of quantity over quality. The Angels would likely be more than happy to take several mid-level prospects in order to start stockpiling their system. A cursory look through closed fingers shows that only two pitchers in their top thirty are left-handed. The Pittsburgh Pirates left-handed prospects are headlined by Steven Brault and Stephen Tarpley, with considerable dropoff from there. Brault has shown to be ready for the majors while Tarpley is still a ways away. The club may want to hold onto Tarpley a bit longer to address their own left-handed pipeline. With Tarpley blocked for at least two years regardless, however, this may be less of a factor.

Conclusions

Switching gears from a left-handed controllable starter to a right-hander would be a change in philosophy for Huntington and the Pittsburgh Pirates. However, Shoemaker retains the controllable years that GMs lust after, and is quite possibly beginning to mature into a reliable middle of the rotation arm. Though there have been no rumors specifically linking the Pirates to Shoemaker, the team would do well to give him a look.

Follow along with our Trademas In July coverage with these other trade target profiles:

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Featured Image Credit – Keith Allison via Flickr Creative Commons