The nightmare scenario for general manager Neal Huntington and the Pirates front office when trading Tyler Glasnow, Austin Meadows and Shane Baz to Tampa Bay for Chris Archer last year was not that the Pirates would be a punchline in October. No, the nightmare scenario, the one that probably didn’t show up in any of their projections or computer simulations, was that the deal would backfire so spectacularly that everyone in the front office would be fired.
Well, nightmare averted.
Not tonight, Twitter. pic.twitter.com/yb72uPcnUl
— Pirates (@Pirates) October 10, 2019
The Pirates are only a punchline this postseason — even the team’s Twitter account is in on the joke — and the front office is intact. Pirates fans either avoided their TVs Thursday night or tuned in to Game 5 of the American League Division Series to dream of what could have been. Entrusted with starting an elimination game were Gerrit Cole and Glasnow, an ace for the Houston Astros and a budding ace for the Tampa Bay Rays, both of whom would still be under club control had the Pirates not traded them.
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The FOX cameras had barely clicked on before a broadcaster mentioned that Cole and Glasnow, drafted five rounds apart in 2011, were once teammates in Pittsburgh. When Cole flicked a 97 mph fastball past Meadows for the game’s first pitch, there again was a reminder of the Pirates connection. Meadows was snookered into seeing a slider for strike three, and Cole’s 10-strikeout gem had begun. The Astros chased Glasnow early, and Cole carried them to a 6-1 win.
Today, the Pirates are a team without an ace. They traded for Archer in search of one. His ERA has trended in the wrong direction for four consecutive seasons now — from 3.23 to 4.02, 4.07, 4.31 and 5.19 — but, at the time of the trade, Huntington said, “We believe the indicators are there that Chris Archer is still an upper-echelon, top-of-the-rotation starting pitcher.”
So far, Archer has proven to be … not that.
Glasnow wasn’t exactly an ace in the making, either. His time with the Pirates was marked by miserable outings. He posted a 5.79 ERA over parts of three seasons with them, bouncing from the rotation to the bullpen to the minors. When I spoke with him shortly after the trade, he sounded relieved.
“I really did want a change of scenery,” Glasnow said at the time. “My window of opportunity was closing (in Pittsburgh). Not that the belief was lost or anything, but I did badly for a year and a half. They gave me so many opportunities, and I didn’t show them what I could do. It was bittersweet, but it definitely is a good chance for me to grow.”
Now, a year later, the baseball world has taken notice that pitchers leave Pittsburgh and improve. There’s evidence across the playoff picture, with Cole and Glasnow but also Charlie Morton and Daniel Hudson. Cole’s spin rate and strikeouts spiked. Glasnow had a 1.78 ERA this season. Morton remade himself in Houston and is a two-time All-Star now. Hudson is closing games for Washington. This is an undeniable truth: The Pirates failed to get those men to reach their peak potential. That trend continues to trouble the front office, according to sources within the organization, but the solutions remain elusive. The first order of business for Pirates management this offseason was to turn over the coaching staff, firing manager Clint Hurdle, bench coach Tom Prince and pitching coach Ray Searage, leaving the rest of the staff in limbo.
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Those changes, necessary as they may have been, had no impact on the Pirates’ larger problem — their inability to draft and develop pitchers.
In the 12 drafts since Huntington was hired as general manager, the Pirates have drafted and signed 178 pitchers. Twenty-three of those prospects reached the majors. Seventeen played for the Pirates. Only five produced a positive WAR pitching for the Pirates — Cole (11.3 WAR), Jameson Taillon (8.6 WAR), Chad Kuhl (2.3 WAR), Justin Wilson (1.6 WAR) and Brandon Cumpton (0.2 WAR), according to Baseball Reference. That’s a short list.
The pitchers drafted and developed by the Pirates since Huntington arrived have produced nearly twice as much value to other teams than to the Pirates.
Think about that. The 23 pitchers who were drafted by the Pirates from 2008 and 2019 and later played in the majors have brought 13.9 WAR to the Pirates, and 25 WAR to other teams. (An example: Cole had an 11.3 WAR in five years in Pittsburgh, and 12.1 WAR in two seasons with the Astros.)
Now, WAR is an imprecise statistic, particularly for pitchers, but, in this case, precision isn’t the point — comparison is. Last month, FiveThirtyEight writer Travis Sawchik, who authored “Big Data Baseball” and “The MVP Machine,” pulled data from every draft since 2012 and discovered that three teams had net negative pitching WARs from those drafts — the Pirates, Oakland Athletics and New York Mets.
Sawchik’s timeframe seems acutely pertinent to the Pirates. Following the 2011 season, a wave of promotions swept their front office. Kyle Stark became an assistant general manager; Greg Smith, an assistant general manager; Larry Broadway, director of minor league operations; Kevan Graves, director of baseball operations; and Joe DelliCarri, director of amateur scouting.
Eight years later, those five, along with Huntington, remain rooted in the front office. The Pirates have yet to announce any changes to their management team this offseason, so, for now, this is the team they have chosen to lead them. It’s a front office that deserves credit for the 2013-15 playoff seasons and blame for what has happened since. Since DelliCarri’s first draft, in 2012, only one pick, Kuhl, has become a positive-WAR pitcher for the Pirates. Most homegrown pitchers arrive in Pittsburgh wholly unprepared to collect outs.
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That spells bad drafting, a broken player-development pipeline, or both.
Either one is hard to overcome if you operate the way the Pirates choose to, with a vanishing payroll and a razor-thin margin for error. (To that point, staring at the Rays and saying, “But their payroll is tiny, too,” ignores that the Rays run a functioning player-development machine.) It’s not as if the Pirates can’t identify talent. They drafted Walker Buehler, Trea Turner and Paul DeJong, none of whom signed. They groomed Meadows. But more often than not, the Pirates have missed on developing. And since ownership refuses to pay for premier free agents, that leaves the Pirates with two ways to improve:
1. Develop prospects and resuscitate veterans’ careers. For a few years, this worked. Cole, a No. 1 pick, charged through the farm system and, in 2013, joined a team packed with players developed by the Pirates — Andrew McCutchen, Starling Marte, Neil Walker, Pedro Alvarez, Jordy Mercer. Searage saved some careers left on life support, from A.J. Burnett to Francisco Liriano to Edinson Volquez. The Pirates’ prospect pipeline is running dry, and relying on veterans on one-year deals to put the team back on track isn’t a sustainable plan.
2. Trade for what you can’t develop. This is a risky proposition. A failed free-agent signing costs a team only money. A failed trade lives longer, and the price tag is typically prospects and years of control. Small-market teams trade stars a year or two (or three) before they hit free agency. If they’re buying, they dangle prospects. Historically, the Pirates almost never pulled the trigger with prospects. Then they did, with Archer, and they have paid dearly.
In the case of the Archer trade, maybe one mistake begat the next. Had the Pirates not traded Cole a few months earlier, would they have gone looking for an ace with years of control at the trade deadline? They’d already have one.
Five seasons and one cool nickname. #ThankYouColeTrain pic.twitter.com/DvJ0OqStiz
— Pirates (@Pirates) January 14, 2018
But it’s easy to try rewriting history while watching Cole cruise through eight innings in a crucial playoff game, setting a division-series record with 25 strikeouts in 15 2/3 innings of one-run baseball. The Pirates got four players for Cole — Joe Musgrove, Colin Moran, Michael Feliz and Jason Martin — but none of the Astros’ top prospects. The Pirates sold low, which sounds strange in a four-for-one trade. Cole’s numbers had worsened the previous two seasons. He had two years before free agency. The clock ticks fast for this franchise. The Pirates don’t extend pitchers, and they don’t shop for top starters in the free-agent market. The front office determined it couldn’t afford to allow Cole’s value to fall farther. In hindsight, that desperation led to a fleecing.
Imagine what they could have traded Cole for last offseason, or at this trade deadline. Unless he continued to decline with the Pirates.
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Cole hasn’t lost since May 22. He advances to face the New York Yankees, the team that drafted him in the first round in 2008, in the American League Championship Series. He’ll finish either first or second in Cy Young voting this fall, then receive a preposterously rich contract in free agency.
Last month, The Athletic’s Andy McCullough asked Cole whether he ever thought about how his career might have turned out if he hadn’t left Pittsburgh.
“No,” Cole replied. “That’s kind of a non-essential thought.”
He’s right. It’s not essential. But people in Pittsburgh can’t stop thinking about it.
(Top photo of Cole: Troy Taormina/USA Today)
