MAKING A TWO-WAY A CASE FOR PLAYER
Bubba Chandler might not be Shohei Ohtani. But at least the Pirates are willing to find out.
What the Pirates are doing with Bubba Chandler, their third-round pick from June’s draft, is surely going to be exciting. In the year of Shohei Ohtani, the Pirates plan to let Chandler explore becoming a two-way player, pitching and hitting with a relatively equal amount of attention spent on each.
And good for them. It’s the right move. Sure, some pitchers are truly terrible hitters, but not all of them. Why not let the player decide what he can or can’t do instead of operating under an arbitrary set of rules?
“We don’t want to put any limits on what Bubba can be,” assistant general manager Steve Sanders said of Chandler, who had a 1.25 ERA with 96 strikeouts in 442⁄ innings
3 as a high school senior and also hit .411 with 12 doubles, 8 home runs, 35 RBIs and 41 runs scored.
The point here, though, isn’t about the Chandler Experiment and whether or not it will work.
It’s more about its unintended consequences on a small group of Pirates pitchers who actually want to hit, guys such as Steven Brault with the major league club and Jared Jones at low Class A Bradenton.
“As soon as I saw that I started thinking, ‘ You know what? I could probably do this. It can’t be that hard, right?’ ” Jones told the PostGazette this past week. “I’m kind of happy just pitching, but I really do miss hitting.”
It’s certainly not too late for the Pirates to let Jones — their 12thranked prospect by Baseball America — try it, although it doesn’t seem to be a terribly pressing issue at the moment. They’re more concerned with the 20-year-old’s pitching development.
Drafted in the second round in 2020 out of La Mirada High School near Los Angeles, Jones has gone 3-2 with a 3.33 ERA in 12 games (nine starts) for the Marauders. He has struck out 70 and walked 19 in 46 innings.
But after working on his swing every other day this offseason, Jones has not yet recorded an official at-bat.
“Once I prove that I can be a major league pitcher, maybe they’ll let me swing the bat a little bit,” Jones said. “But until I prove myself, I think I’ll just be on the mound.”
The Pirates certainly could make worse moves than giving Jones a chance.
Jones was named the 2019 Perfect Game/Rawlings National High School Two-Way Player of the Year and slashed .394/.473/.566 in high school, finishing with 22 doubles, 3 triples and 7 home runs in 101 games.
In his last full season, Jones hit .457, had a 1.175 OPS and stole 22 bases in 24 attempts.
They’re high school numbers, sure. So are Chandler’s. The fascinating thing would be giving Jones the chance to show what he can do, much like the Pirates in the past experimented a little with Brault.
The end of the 2019 season seems like decades ago in Pirates land, but
late that September, former manager Clint Hurdle said the Pirates planned to tinker with Brault as a part-time outfielder.
“Maybe that’s why they fired everybody,” Brault joked.
The new regime has not followed through on that desire, but it also has been tough given the injuries
Brault has incurred on the mound, missing time each of the past two seasons due to shoulder/lat problems.
Brault did both in college at Regis University and hit .333 as recently as 2019 while also posting a .777 OPS in 50 plate appearances.
As much as Brault wants to prove himself as a two-way player, he knows the dynamic is tricky. Most important remains staying healthy.
But Brault isn’t giving up hope, which is why he was still bothered by his first at-bat since Sept. 28, 2019, being a strikeout to Milwaukee’s Freddy Peralta, a right-hander who’s holding opponents to a .133 average and .271 slugging percentage with his four-seam fastball.
In his first start of the season on Aug. 4, Brault fouled off three consecutive heaters before swinging through a slider on the eighth pitch of the at-bat.
“Hitting is exhilarating,” Brault said. “You can take as much batting practice as you want, take as many swings in the cage as you want. But it’s nothing like facing a pitcher.”
The hope, of course, is that things change. Perhaps Chandler thrives, and the Pirates feel comfortable enough with Jones’ pitching development to let him hit. Brault will have at-bats when he starts and hopes to use those as an audition.
It may not seem like much, but for some pitchers, the Ohtani or Chandler track remains very much a fantasy, something many believe they can do.
“We’ll see,” Brault said. “I do tell [manager Derek Shelton] all the time. ‘Hey, I’m gonna hit.’ We have fun with it. ... I’m gonna hit, then we’ll see what happens.”