Roster picks may, may not affect future
Prospects who are left unprotected for Rule 5 draft always a gamble
There’s ample precedent supporting the roster moves the Pirates made Friday, when they basically said they don’t think any of the other 29 MLB teams will select the prospects they left unprotected in the Rule 5 draft by deciding against adding them to the 40-man roster.
But to borrow a line from PNC Park-bound Billy Joel, they may be right … or fans may go crazy.
How else to explain a situation in which Tahnaj Thomas, Mason Martin or Cal Mitchell could be lost in favor of Cody Ponce (0-6 with a 7.04 ERA in 2021), Eric Hanhold (has yet to pitch in Pittsburgh), Jared Oliva (.179 average as a big leaguer) or Anthony Banda (5.29 career ERA for four teams)?
The Pirates have talked plenty about prioritizing prospects, and they’re not wrong to do it. Until Major League Baseball admits that its financial system is nothing short of goofy, and even the most well-intentioned teams are taking up an unfair fight, it’s pretty much their only hope.
Nothing prevents the Pirates from drafting good players or finding them on the international market, then developing them the right way so they contribute early in their careers. Sure, they’re not going to keep as many as other clubs, and unpopular trades will still occur. But that fan frustration can be mitigated with legitimate prospects replacing guys they lose.
The key part of that is avoiding self- inflicted wounds, whether that’s failing to develop the prospects they do have (a flaw they seem to have corrected) or losing good players to the Rule 5 draft, something that seems at least marginally possible after the choices they made Friday.
Martin is one of six top-30 prospects they did not add to their 40-man roster, and it’s hard to say he’s a complete player. Yet he’s also a massive human being who has a good head on his shoulders, works his butt off, fields his position well and hit 25 home runs and drove in 81 runs between Class AA and Class AAA in 2021.
He obviously struck out entirely too much — 171 in 498 plate appearances — but what if there’s a team out there that thinks that Martin might be able to improve his plate discipline or make more consistent contact while sharing a first-base role with someone else?
Imagine the frustration for fans who’ve bought into the team’s focus on the future … only to see them lose someone with nearly as much power as Oneil Cruz.
The good news is that this sort of thing, at least at first base, rarely happens. Teams know they must keep a Rule 5 pick on their roster, and many already have better options at a position counted upon for offensive production. But it’s also not a guarantee.
The same for someone like Thomas, who’s a converted infielder and a late-bloomer on the mound. The Pirates picked up Jose Soriano and Luis Oviedo in the Rule 5 draft a year ago because they liked their raw stuff, velocity and upside. Couldn’t another team view Thomas, who has reached 100 mph, the same way?
As for Mitchell, another player the Pirates decided against adding to their 40man roster, he began the 2021 season as a top-20 prospect and proceeded to have a fine year, finishing in the top 10 in the Class AA Northeast League in several offensive categories and earning a lateseason promotion to AAA.
Cody Bolton, meanwhile, was formerly a top-10 prospect who lost games due to the no minor league season in 2020, then a knee injury that wiped out his 2021. These guys aren’t bad players; they just require additional development time.
What has seemed to irritate Pirates fans the most prior to the 2019 offseason was the lack of definitive direction. It seemed like the
Pirates were still trying to patch holes while still doing just enough to win 75 or so games, 81 or 82 if things really broke their way.
One of the toughest things to do in pro sports is to be caught in between, without a definitive direction and trying to cling to the present while keeping one eye on the future. Which is why it has been at least semi-encouraging for the Pirates to blow it up, start over and focus their efforts on obtaining a bunch of young talent and they’re developed the right way.
Saying that you sometimes lose good players in the Rule 5 draft, as general manager Ben Cherington has reiterated throughout this process, makes sense, and perhaps one day the Pirates will have a competitive enough 40-man roster to where that happens, simply because there’s nowhere to stash prospects who still need work.
It’s also hard to say they’re at that point, with a roster that helped them win just 61 games in 2021 and the tacit understanding that there won’t be a bunch of outside help arriving for 2022.
Cherington said the Pirates explored trade options prior to Friday’s deadline, conversations that conceivably included such arbitration-eligible players as Chad Kuhl, Colin Moran and others. It also can be deduced that the return the Pirates would’ve received wasn’t as much as they would have liked … but good luck getting anyone to care about that if they lose a player with recognized potential, someone who could actually become part of what they’re building.
The decision the Pirates made also didn’t occur in a vacuum. They have a welldocumentedhistory of watching in disdain as their prospects developed other places. If that happens again with a player they chose not to protect in the Rule 5 draft, it doesn’t take a genius to figure
out that it wouldn’t go over terribly well with the fan base.
Which is why it’s imperative for this gamble to work out for the Pirates, who have actually done a solid job convincing fans to believe in the new plan, with Cherington executing an excellent draft strategy and earning trust that did not exist before.
But again, as they’ve learned, all it takes is one player to pop at the wrong time for fans to start screaming, “Here we go again.” It’s why what they did was a gamble bigger than many realize and why it could be costly to lose one of these prospects in favor of guys who almost assuredly have no future in Pittsburgh.