Floyd: Pirates Takeaways From A Disappointing 2024

This is the first in a series of columns breaking down Pittsburgh Baseball Now‘s takeaways from another Pirates’ season gone by.

The Pirates enter the 2024 offseason with most of last year’s hope, goodwill and building expectations siphoned away. At the start of the year, the anticipated addition of rookie phenomenon Paul Skenes to a team that won 76 games had fans dreaming of contention in a way that felt grounded for the first time in half a decade.

At season’s end, after seeing Skenes author a campaign that made similarly touted pitchers like Stephen Strasburg and Fernando Valenzuela look like mere mortals, the Pirates sit with that same 76-86 record. Optimism gives way to disappointment and ‘what could have been’. Such is life at 115 Federal St.

Despite the deflating end to their 2024 season, it would be an overreaction to say that the Pirates are down and out of it. Here’s what we learned from another season of Buccos’ baseball.

Paul Skenes is Legit… Give Him A Winner

The Pirates still have Skenes and fellow rookie Jared Jones under contract for another five seasons, two of those years blessed with pre-arbitration financial flexibility. Similarly important (on a big picture scale), general manager Ben Cherington and the rest of the front office got a litmus test of how far they still need to go to make the postseason.

Spending more on free agents, as Cherington said he would during the 2023 winter meetings, doesn’t cut it when the free agents acquired are the Rowdy Tellez’s, Michael A. Taylor’s and 36-year-old Aroldis Chapman’s of the world.

With the postseason window as open as it’ll ever be during the duration of Skenes’ rookie contract, there’s no more time to stand pat and wait until next year. The Pirates will have to put their money where their mouth is in order to maximize this opportunity, not hope to luck into a sudden playoff run à la the 2015 Kansas City Royals, a team with similar financial restrictions.

Pitching Prospects Aplenty

2024 also showed that the Pirates have a significant backlog of starting pitching talent. Although they struggled in the second half, Mitch Keller and Jared Jones both serve as excellent compliments to Skenes, creating a rotation cornerstone for much of the rest of the decade. Johan Oviedo, who missed all of 2024 with Tommy John surgery, is another sturdy option when healthy, as is Luis Ortiz.

The Pirates also have promising starting pitching prospects like Bubba Chandler, Braxton Ashcraft and Thomas Harrington likely to make their big league debuts before the end of next season. Mike Burrows, another highly-touted option, made his MLB debut at Yankee Stadium on Saturday.

It would be foolish to expect that every one of those prospects pans out, but the Pirates have plenty more where they came from. Moving down the line there are Anthony Solometo, Hunter Barco, Levi Sterling, Zander Mueth, Michael Kennedy, and even sleeper picks like WVU product Carlson Reed.

Some prospects who start out with an eye on the big league rotation end up turning into bullpen options as they progress through the minor leagues, but the fact remains that Ben Cherington has more starting pitching prospects than there are spots in the rotation.

That takes me to my last takeaway.

If You Can’t Draft Them… Trade For Them?

On the flip side, this Pirates regime has consistently struggled to develop hitting talents. Of top position player prospects like Termarr Johnson, Mitch Jebb, Jack Brannigan, Tsung-Che Cheng and Lonnie White Jr., the highest OPS posted this season is Brannigan’s .834; after that is Johnson’s .752.

Neither is the type of mark you hope to see out of players who spent the majority of their season in hitter-haven Greensboro… and those are the two best numbers. Oft-maligned hitting coach Andy Haines getting the pink slip could help turn the Pirates’ offense around, but it feels like a stretch to say that will trickle down through the rest of the system.

For some of the Pirates’ pitching prospects, their trade value is the highest it will ever be: look at Roansy Contreras, who was considered one of the top 100 prospects in baseball during 2022 before being unceremoniously kicked to the curb in return for cash considerations after getting designated for assignment in June.

Bullpen woes aside—which are notoriously fickle from year to year—Pittsburgh has the makings of an excellent pitching staff. With more arms than they know what to do with (and well-documented financial restrictions) they’ll need to turn to the trade block in order to overhaul an offense that posted the fourth-worst OPS in all of baseball this season.