For starters, a gap opens
Missing this season complicates Archer’s future here, but . . .
For as much ire as Chris Archer and the trade that brought him to the Pirates have drawn the past couple of years, the 31-year-old right-hander still was slated to be at the top of the rotation in 2020.
But now, with Archer having season-ending surgery for neurogenic thoracic outlet syndrome, his season is over before it began. And it leaves the Pirates with a hole in their rotation, heading into a season that is already surrounded by uncertainty, with no set return date or length.
Pirates general manager Ben Cherington said Wednesday he thinks teams around the league are going to be hoarding starting pitching. That, along with the league -wide roster freeze, means that whoever is tasked with filling Archer’s role — and it will likely be more than one pitcher — will come from within the organization.
“I would just say if you think about, in a normal season, most of the time a team is going to carry 13 pitchers,” Cherington said. “I would just say that in this season that we hope to get to, we hope that there’s an opportunity to carry
more than that first. We also believe that we have many more than just 13 pitchers who can help us get outs at the major league level.
“Our job will just be to figure out how to deploy that total group as best we possibly can. Some of the roles will look more traditional. Some may not.”
Manager Derek Shelton echoed the idea that he and his coaching staff might have to get creative in a Wednesday radio appearance on 93.7 The Fan.
He named Joe Musgrove, Trevor Williams, Mitch Keller and Derek Holland as the guys likely leading the race for the rotation, though he walked that back a bit, saying he didn’t want to pencil anybody in until they get back together as a team. For the fifth spot, Shelton pointed to Chad Kuhl and Steven Brault, two guys who are battling back from injury, both of whom director of sports medicine Todd Tomczyk said will be healthy and ready to compete for spots on the roster by the time the season begins.
If there is a setback and they aren’t ready, though, Shelton also named JT Brubaker and Cody Ponce — two young right-handers who have not yet made their major league debuts — as up-and-comers who could figure into the equation.
More interestingly, Shelton and Cherington mentioned getting creative with who starts games, leading to questions about using an “opener,” someone who starts a game but only throws one or two innings, leaving the manager to use bullpen arms to piece together the rest of the game.
“I would say there’s a chance at some point this year we will use it, and we’ll put our guys in the best situation possible,” Shelton said. “Where you’re really seeing it come into play now, is teams are doing it in playoff situations, and, as we’ve talked about, when you play a lesser amount of games in a season, every game is more meaningful, so there could be times where we play more of a matchup game with certain guys.
“So to say that we will use it 100%, I’m not going to say yes, but I would say there’s a strong likelihood at some point during the season we will use an opener, we will use a piggyback situation and kind of go from there. But we will definitely put our guys in the best type leverage situations to help us win games.”
Getting back to Archer, the question now becomes how this surgery and the lack of a 2020 season will affect his long-term value.
The Pirates already are going to have to make a decision on his contract at the end of the season since he has a team option for 2021 that, if picked up, would pay him $11 million. The greatest value the Pirates could have received from Archer might have been on the trading block, where they could have dealt him at the 2020 deadline to bolster their minor league system.
That now seems unlikely.
As for the decision this coming offseason, Cherington, as one might expect, wasn’t willing to say that Archer’s surgery does or doesn’t sway the front office’s opinion on his 2021 option right now.
“I mean, we won’t have games to evaluate, but there will be other information that we have at that time that we don’t have now,” Cherington said.
“So we’ll just want to take all the time we have, and I think with really any decision that we’d make in baseball operations, we want to take all the time we possibly can until we have no time remaining, and then make the best decision we can at that time.”