GM presses his pursuit of prospects
Cherington: ‘We don’t have enough’
The latest episode was a Joe Musgrove-to-San-Diego swap that netted the Pirates five prospects, a trade for which many evaluators praised general manager Ben Cherington, considering he was peddling someone whom most contending teams viewed as a back-of-the-rotation starter.
But think beyond the deal itself. It has been a little more than 14 months since Cherington was hired. What exactly are the Pirates right now, and what sort of influence has Cherington had on them?
A sizable one, no doubt. And the area where Cherington has effected the most change was helped out in a big
way by the Musgrove haul: the minor league system. Those five players — of varying ages, positions and nationalities — have allowed the Pirates to take important baby steps in the depth department.
“We think it’s improved over the last year,” Cherington said. “We’ve been able to add talent, but we don’t have enough. We need more. We need to keep going.”
Hearing Cherington discuss the Musgrove trade on a Zoom call Tuesday was fascinating. It said a lot about how Cherington viewed Musgrove — he’s obviously a huge fan and said Pittsburgh would be rooting for the well-respected pitcher — and also the state of the Pirates, most notably the recipe the GM seems intent on following here.
Trade talks involving Musgrove have occurred for much of the offseason, Cherington explained. The guts of this particular deal crystallized over the weekend. While it was the number of players that seemingly turned heads, Cherington said the Pirates didn’t set out with that as a preference. Quality or quantity, just don’t screw up the trade.
Where things got interesting involved a couple of other topics that Cherington tackled, these more calibrated to the larger picture of the Pirates.
Cherington said he was never ordered this offseason to shed salary. And now that those dollars are gone, the payroll stripped to the point where Gregory Polanco will consume more than a quarter of the entire thing, the Pirates would like to repurpose that money in a way that makes sense. That means either spending on processes, current free agents or potential extensions.
It could potentially involve a franchise player, which Cherington — who’s usually the 180-degree opposite of someone who makes emotional decisions — said he did see a need to have. (The Pirates have traded their two closest things in Musgrove and Josh Bell.)
“We try to win baseball games, and we’re also trying to be something that fans want to come watch,” Cherington said. “We want fans to connect with players over time, so there’s some value to [having a franchise player].”
Cherington also insisted he, president Travis Williams and owner Bob Nutting were all on the same page about the direction of the Pirates, an answer he gave to a question about whether he feels like he’ll have enough time to see this plan through before the need for a second fire sale comes along.
Toward the end, Cherington was asked for the umpteenth time about using the R-word to describe what he’s doing, whether he calls this a rebuild to his players (but not the public) and whether he sees a need to define his modus operandi at all.
“I’ve seen different words used to describe what we’re doing,” Cherington said. “It honestly matters less to me than what we’re doing, and that is just that we need to commit. We need to commit to adding talent and developing it.”
So call it chess, checkers, landscaping or mental gymnastics. Doesn’t matter. But the results in these 14-plus months are starting to become noticeable.
One example: MLB Pipeline on Tuesday released its updated top 30 prospects for the Pirates. Fourteen of those guys were acquired since Cherington took over. That’s a feather in Cherington’s cap or a damning indictment of the former regime, but likely both.
The latest batch of prospects came via the Musgrove trade, which was headlined by a young, fivetool outfielder named Hudson Head, a player the Pirates have been tracking for the past year-plus, Cherington said.
It’s also the second such lottery ticket Cherington bought in the past five days after Friday’s international free agent signing of Shalin Polanco for $2.35 million, the two of them intertwined because they represent hope.
Cherington doesn’t know for sure whether either of these guys will pan out, the same for Omar Cruz, local product David Bednar, Vanderbilt pitcher Drake Fellows or — gasp — a catching prospect with offensive upside in Endy Rodriguez. The hope is that if the Pirates play enough, something will click.
The only incontrovertible truth that Cherington knows, and what he expounded upon Tuesday, involves how the Pirates have girded themselves for this entire process, how they’ve torn down and rebuilt the way they handle player development.
Having that, and continuing to push to add talent, is something for which the Pirates under Cherington are striving.
“If you think about a team like the Padres, part of the reason they’re in this position to be able to acquire the players they have this offseason is because they didn’t stop adding,” Cherington said. “They didn’t add prospects for one year. They kept doing it, so they’ve built a base there that allows them to do things.”
Cherington is far from delusional. He knows where the Pirates are on that particular spectrum, and it’s nowhere near the Padres, who will roll out a veritable AllStar team in a couple of months.
Cherington also isn’t dumb. He knows how to oversee a process that we’ve seen unfurl over time, a way of doing things that led the Pirates to trade Musgrove when and for what they did, and it’s a cycle that actually doesn’t require them to spend gobs of money.
Don’t look foolish in trades. Draft well. Know how to develop. Find players you can make better. Then what you’re baking — a word Cherington has invoked often — is nearly finished, then it’s time to add. That’s where Nutting will come in.
The Pirates are not at that point yet, but as we’ve seen since Cherington was hired, he knows the recipe. And if Williams and Nutting plan to support that, both with patience and payroll dollars, then Pittsburgh might actually have something in a couple of years.
“We’ve had a lot of conversation about who we want the Pirates organization to be and what we need to do to drive that,” Cherington said. “It’s up to us in baseball operations to execute on that vision, at least in terms of the onfield part of it, and that’s what we’re going to focus our energy on.”
“I’ve seen different words used to describe what we’re doing. It honestly matters less to me than what we’re doing, and that is just that we need to commit.”
— Ben Cherington