Buy stock in these players
The reality of finishing the 2020 season with the worst record in Major League Baseball is that not many Pirates had good seasons.
A glass-half-full view would mean plenty of Pirates are due for a bounceback season.
Even if it doesn’t help them become a successful, playoff-contending club in 2021, it could help build toward the future. Either players can play themselves into a possible role in that future or build up trade value, perhaps being dealt later to augment organizational depth.
For readers who don’t want to think that hard about which players fit into some nebulous, future roster, well, bounce-back seasons in 2021 would likely at least make the season more fun.
Here are the three most prominent candidates with reasons to believe a turn around is possible:
OF Bryan Reynolds
Reynolds might be the player the Pirates most need to improve. For all the young prospects rising through the minor league ranks, many of the best are pitchers or infielders. In Baseball America’s ranking of the top 10 Pirates prospects, just one of them is an outfielder.
Plus, Reynolds only just turned 26 years old, meaning he’s certainly in the mix as someone who can hang around in Pittsburgh for years to come. The problem is he slashed .189/.275/.357 last season after a .314/.377/.503 line in 2019. His strikeout percentage rose, while his average exit velocity and hard-hit percentagedropped.
The outfielder knows it wasn’t good. As with some other Pirates, he mentioned at the end of last season that it was hard to mentally dig himself out of an early hole. After 21 games, he was hitting .174. And rather than have over 100 games to correct that, the COVID-shortened year was more than a thirdof the way finished.
The thing is, Reynolds has never hit below .300 in college or the minors, excluding an 18-game, .188 stint in the Arizona Fall League. One would think that would mean a correction is coming. If Reynolds can cut down the strikeouts and generate a bit more bat speed, his natural talent should be able to make him aproductive hitter again.
INF Kevin Newman
The 27-year-old shortstop and second baseman is in a similar situation to Reynolds, albeit with a bit less dire stats. He went .224/.281/.276 following a 2019 season in which he finished .308/.353/.446. That .276slugging percentage was the 49th-lowest in MLB last season. To contextualize it, he had just six extra-base hits in 172 plate appearances.
The positive for Newman is that he just doesn’t strike out. He did so merely 11.7% of the time in 2019, and that
rose just a smidge to 12.2% in 2020, which put him in the 96th per centile in MLB.
And though Newman ranked in the 5th percentile in average exit velocity last season, that isn’t necessarily the issue. In fact, his average exit velocity and hard hit ratein creased from 2019.
He just made a lot more frequent weak contact — 8% of his batted balls were considered weak by MLB Statcast, up from 3.2% the year prior.
The good news is even with that, Newman’s expected batting average — measured by comparing his batted balls to the results from past batted balls with similar exit velocities and launch angles — was .254. That would have been better.
Newman isn’t going to be a power hitter anytime soon, but he does have the profile of a lead-off guy. He doesn’t strike out, he’s pretty speedy and he puts the bat on the ball. Improvement moving forward may just mean makingthe most of contact.
RHP Kyle Crick
It isn’t really fair to call last year a bad one for Crick, since he pitched in just seven games total before missing the rest of the season with side strains. He said as much Thursday when speaking with media.
The big concern was that his fastball velocity dipped from the mid-90s all the way downto an average of 90.9.
In a recent interview with the Post-Gazette, Crick chalked some of that up to an inability to train as effectively after the 2019 season dueto a right finger injury.
But even in 2019, Crick struggled far more than his previous two seasons, allowing 10 homers and a 4.96 ERA inhis 49 innings of work.
The larger point here, though, is that Crick was very good the season prior, witha 2.39 ERA in 2018.
Crick says now that he’s working on tunneling his pitches, throwing them out of the same arm slot to effectively dupe opposing hitters. His slider is still his best weapon, and if he can return some speed to his fastball, those two pitches coming out of the same spot, paired with a sinker mixed in here and there, will make for a really strong arsenal.
Plus, if Crick comes back like he was in 2018, you can start to see a pretty strong bullpen building for the Pirates. Richard Rodriguez was very good last year. Rookie right-hander Blake Cederlind throws gas and figures to improve with experience. Geoff Hartlieb, Chris Stratton and Sam Howard were all positives in their own right. Right-hander Edgar Santana is returning to the team for the first time since allowing just 24 earned runsin 66⅓innings in 2018.
A problem would be that not many of those players have pitched in late-inning, high-leverage roles consistently. Crick has. A return to form would make that experience even more valuable.