In the face of what I think almost every Pirate fan considered a lack-luster off-season, I spent a lot of time thinking about the way the Pirates had attempted to balance their rotation and bullpen. As a rule of thumb, I do not like to spend much time lamenting the financial state of the Pirates or baseball in general. There are broad conversations to be had about what the Pirate payroll is and what it should be, but both as a fan and blogger, I try to think of the financial constraints like the weather. It is what it is, and you work around it as opposed to trying to change it.
My main off-season focus was on the way the Pirates had used their bullpen in 2015 to keep Charlie Morton and Jeff Locke (both of whom had poor years) afloat and to accelerate the JA Happ Renaissance beyond pretty much anybody’s wildest dreams. It is an objective fact that the 2014 and 2015 Pirates were much better than the projection systems expected them to be, and the reason for that lies in the way they’d leveraged an excellent bullpen in both years to extend a starting rotation that tended to be short on talent. From the distance of an off-season and with two years of history behind us, it was relatively easy to talk yourself into a bullpen that could keep Jeff Locke and whoever (I thought at the time that it was going to be Ryan Vogelsong, but Juan Nicasio falls into the same category since he’s not durable enough to pitch more than five or six innings on most nights) above water until the minor league pitching calvary was ready. On paper, it made enough sense that as I worked through the entire thought process I felt a little bit silly about being so worried about it. And yet, I still ended that post with a big caveat of uncertainty. Here are two excerpts from the end of that post:
Of course, that leaves quite a few “ifs.” It assumes that Searage will, in fact, be able to fix Niese and least one or two of the pitchers they’ve acquired. It assumes that Locke and Vogelsong will only be pretty bad, and not disastrously and unsalvageably bad. It leans on Glasnow, Taillon, and Kingham quite a bit to prevent the team, in turn, from leaning on Locke and Vogelsong all year.
[…]This might work, and I’m willing to concede the benefit of the doubt to a front office that’s earned it, but having so many moving parts with the pitching staff feels at least a little bit to me like playing with fire at a point in the team’s general progression towards [whatever they’re progressing towards] that I’d hoped they’d be past this. The National League is not sitting idly by, either; the Cubs are poised to set the world on fire in 2016, and the Giants and Nationals were both more or less playoff afterthoughts by September and it’s a safe bet to figure that one or both of them will be back in the mix in 2016.
It’s only May 15th, but I think that we can say without reservation that this approach has been a failure. What’s left to do now is ask a few questions: Why did it fail? Could the Pirates have avoided the failure? How can the Pirates make it better going forwards?
The first question, of why this approach failed, is multi-layered and tricky. The Pirates are 18-12 in the 30 games in which they have not played the Cubs. That’s a .600 win percentage that tracks pretty closely with the 2015 Pirates. They are 0-5 against the Cubs and have been out-scored 37-11 by them. Their closest loss to the Cubs was by a score of 6-2. There is no one magical move that would’ve salvaged these first five games; the Cubs have beaten the hell out of the Pirates, and the Pirates have deserved all five losses richly. It is tempting to say that there’s nothing the Pirates could have done to slow the Cub freight train down, and that the universe sucks for throwing the Pirates in with this Cub team after the previous three Cardinal teams that they’ve had to deal with.
This is an unproductive line of thinking. When things fail, either you assess why they failed and you learn from them, or you continue to fail. The Pirates are nine games behind the Cubs on May 15th, the NL Central race is all but over, and the Pirates are facing a long slog for the right to face Strasburg/Scherzer or Syndergaard/de Grom in a Wild Card Game. The Pirates are 18-17, Gerrit Cole and Juan Nicasio are the only two starters with ERAs that even approach average (and Jon Niese and Francisco Liriano are worse than their numbers) and the bullpen has been a mess outside of Melancon and Watson (who hasn’t quite been his usual self), with a decent supporting showing by Ryan Vogelsong. To say that the only reason this is happening is the Cubs is to accept that all of that stuff is OK, and it accepts that 18-12 is a perfectly fine record against the non-Cub teams when you could parse that down further. The Pirates are 5-1 against their Cardinal tormentors, and 13-11 against the Reds, Brewers, Diamondbacks, Padres, and Rockies, which is not great. Find two more wins against the dregs of the league and one win against the Cubs, and the Pirates are five games back with a chance to go to four behind Gerrit Cole today.
I suspect that the main reason this happened is that the Pirates mis-read the work that Jon Niese needed. We don’t need to re-hash this in great detail, but the Pirates left three rotation spots to Locke, Charlie Morton, and a question mark when AJ Burnett retired and they failed to re-sign JA Happ. The Pirates traded for Niese, gave one spot to Locke, and signed a bunch of arms and gave them a chance to fill the last spot, ultimately giving it to Nicasio. Nicasio has been fine as a back-end starter, I think, and Locke has been Locke (the bullpen has blown three of his starts after he’s come out; last year’s second half run was anchored partly in the bullpen’s ability to win Locke and Morton’s non-decisions), which is to say that he’s plugging a fifth rotation spot like a fifth starter. Niese has been awful, though, and that blows everything apart.
What I think the Pirates saw in Niese was a pitcher similar to Happ; a lefty that works from his fastballs. Happ’s stuff is a bit more swing-and-miss and Niese’s is a bit more groundball oriented, but their approaches aren’t that different and the Pirates turned Happ around on a dime. They still might turn Niese around, but his last four starts have been brutal; 22 inings, 18 runs, seven homers, 14 strikeouts, ten walks. On the season, four of his seven starts haven’t gotten through the sixth inning. The top of the Pirate rotation, with Cole and Liriano, is always a bit precarious because Liriano isn’t really all that consistent or durable. Even on his best nights, he’s a threat to strikeout 12 and walk three and throw 114 pitches in six innings and leave the bullpen some work, and his worst nights resemble his starts in Arizona, Colorado, and Chicago this year. The third starter is the linchpin holding things together, and it works beautifully when the Pirates are playing well (Burnett in the first half last year, Happ in the second, Volquez in 2015). Sometimes, though, it looks like this.
This isn’t to say Niese is the only problem, of course; the Pirates of last year didn’t just have Happ, they had Blanton and Caminero working as lights-out swingmen and Soria pitching strong seventh innings on most nights. Even if you allow for Vogelsong as a decent swingman, Feliz has not replaced Soria and Caminero has been awful. Add in Liriano’s struggles and Cole’s average start and the Pirates have a huge pitching mess on their hands. I want to say that this happened because they put too much faith in their “process” (mostly in Niese and Feliz), but I don’t know how much more they asked of it this year than in year’s past. Edinson Volquez was a huge project that they put in a key spot that paid off several times over, Burnett and Happ were both projects last year that were essential to the team’s success, and this whole run of success started with Liriano himself, maybe the original project. It’s possible that they over-interpreted a small sample size of successful projects to the point of hubris, but that assigns the same starting success value to every pitcher and that’s not quite how this works. Really, what they did was mis-read Niese, and maybe Feliz and maybe the long-term prospects of Caminero. Even with Niese, we’re only working with seven starts, and with Feliz we’re looking at 12 innings.
There are two ways to approach fixing a multi-faceted problem like this one. You can change one variable at a time and observe the results, which lets you diagnose the exact problem that’s facing you. That would probably look like calling Glasnow or Taillon up to pitch in Locke’s rotation spot, thereby hopefully alleviating some of the pressure on Niese until he gets his stuff together. You can also say that money is of no object and the only important variable is time, of which you have a limited amount, and tweak the hell out of every possible problem spot and hope that it makes everything better. That would probably result in calling up Glasnow and Taillon for Locke and Nicasio’s rotation spots, putting Nicasio into the swing-man role where I think he could thrive, and maybe even throwing Chad Kuhl into the mix in the Lobstein spot for good measure. There is no guarantee this works, though. As much as nobody likes to hear it, Glasnow and Taillon are in Triple-A for Super-Two reasons, yes, but also for innings and pitch counts. They could come up right now, of course, and it’s hard to imagine them being worse than Niese or Locke to this point, but they’d likely be looking at five or six inning starts most nights for at least another month or so, and if the bullpen can’t help them out, then I don’t know how many extra wins that turns into. If that happens, you’ve agreed to pay them more and you’ve maybe changed your developmental plan for them and for what gain?
The uncomfortable truth on May 15th is this: the most pragmatic route for the Pirates to take at this point is now to do nothing. They won’t catch the Cubs, save some outside event that they have no control over. The Cubs don’t appear on the schedule again until June 17th, at which point changes will likely have started to occur. The schedule between now and then includes the Mets and Cardinals at home and not much else that’s intimidating. The team has, to my eyes, pretty closely tied their development process to the Super-Two deadline, meaning that they prime their players to be ready by mid-June (this includes innings counts for pitchers, even when they look like they have nothing left to work on) and thus have even fewer reasons to tempt themselves before then. The NL Central ship has sailed and the NL Wild Card ship isn’t even in the harbor yet, so why take unnecessary risks at this point?
The problem is that pragmatism is how you end up with Jon Niese instead of JA Happ and pragmatism is why you decide not to pay Joe Blanton $4 million and try to piece the middle part of the bullpen together through other means. I don’t think the Pirates expected their pragmatism to start them on even-footing with the Cubs in 2016, but they had to have planned that it’d keep them close enough to the Cubs that they’d be able to close the gap after their mid-season rotation make-over started to mesh with their impressive new-look offense. It’s May 15th and the Pirates will either win today and be eight games behind the Cubs, or they’ll lose and be ten back. Pragmatism didn’t work this winter.
The Pirates under Neal Huntington have employed a strategy over the winters and at trade deadlines that I think would best be described as low-risk/higher-than-you-expect reward. This approach has, for the most part, served them well. They were a laughingstock when Huntington took over and they closed last year on a three-year run as the second best regular season team in baseball, which is a tremendous achievement that felt borderline unfathomable a few years ago. They’re in the NL Central, though, with a Cub team that has no empathy for their plight. The Pirates are currently set up to be good for the foreseeable future with the core they have in place and the players they have coming, but from where we sit today it feels like they could be the second best team in baseball for the next half-decade, and still need to get lucky to win the NL Central. At some point, I hope they start making their own luck.
Photo by Jon Durr/Getty Images
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