Shortly after the trade deadline passed, things were looking very similar to how last year played out. The Pirates made a move to swap bad contracts, trading Jon Niese to the Mets for Antonio Bastardo. They also added a rental starter in Ivan Nova who doesn’t look that appealing on the surface, but could be this year’s version of J.A. Happ. They sent two players to be named later for Nova.
And then, about 45 minutes after the trade deadline passed, everything went crazy when the news came out that the Pirates had traded Francisco Liriano. By 6:00, the full trade was revealed: Liriano, Harold Ramirez, and Reese McGuire for Drew Hutchison.
That trade is a nightmare to break down, and including it with the other trades would only make things extremely complicated. It seems that the Nova and Bastardo deals were made to be lower key moves to help the team this year, while the Liriano move was more about clearing future salary and helping the team beyond 2016. So I’m going to save the Liriano analysis for tonight, and just focus on how the Pirates addressed the remainder of the 2016 season in this recap.
Overall, Huntington said that they planned to give the 2016 team an opportunity to continue trying to compete.
“Our goal in this was to continue to allow this 2016 team the opportunity to compete for a playoff spot,” Huntington said. “The addition of Nova, the addition of Antonio Bastardo, we feel adds to that. Drew Hutchison is an arm that we’re excited about, and feel fits very well for us in the future. We fully recognize that we’ve given up two quality prospects in Reese McGuire and Harold Ramirez, and there’s two players to be named later in the Nova deal. We feel like we dealt from a position of organizational depth.”
You could view the Liriano deal as addition by subtraction, depending on how low you were on him this year. He had a 5.46 ERA and a 4.51 xFIP. By comparison, Ivan Nova has struggled this year, putting up a 4.90 ERA and a 4.06 xFIP, which are both marks better than Liriano has put up.
As for Nova and Bastardo, the Pirates will hope to recapture the magic that worked so well for them last year, adding low-cost guys with high upsides.
Ivan Nova the Next J.A. Happ?
I’m going to throw out some numbers for you, and I’m pretty sure you already know what the comparison is going to be, so I’ll save you the mystery numbers.
J.A. Happ, Pre-Trade 2015: 4.64 ERA, 4.15 xFIP, 6.79 K/9, 2.65 BB/9, 1.08 HR/9, .319 BABIP, 70.9% LOB%, 11.1% HR/FB, 42.1% GB%
Ivan Nova, Pre-Trade 2016: 4.90 ERA, 4.06 xFIP, 6.93 K/9, 2.31 BB/9, 1.76 HR/9, .297 BABIP, 75.4% LOB%, 21.3% HR/FB, 54.3% GB%
There are a lot of very similar numbers here, primarily with the xFIP, but also the strikeouts and walks. The key differences are that Nova is giving up a ton of homers, due to a high HR/FB rate, and Happ was giving up way too many hits with a high BABIP (which dropped to .299 with the Pirates).
It would be easy to say that Nova’s HR/FB ratio will magically correct itself, although that’s ignoring a few alarming trends. There are a lot of Pirates pitchers with the same problem. Jon Niese was most notable, with a 22.7% rate. Jameson Taillon is at 21.2%. Liriano was at 19.6%. Juan Nicasio, Ryan Vogelsong, Jeff Locke, and Tyler Glasnow were also over 10% each.
Then you look around the league and see that the numbers are up everywhere. Across MLB this season, the HR/FB rate is 13.1%. Prior to this, it ranged anywhere from 9.6% to 11.8% in a single season. So this is a huge trend league-wide, and the worst team is the Yankees. Of course it doesn’t help that the fourth worst team is the Pirates.
So maybe the Pirates can figure out what is going on with Nova, but that assumes his HR/FB issues aren’t due to some weird league trend that is impacting the other Pirates’ starters, or that they would actually be able to fix him, despite having the same issue with all of their starters. The Pirates do feel that a change of scenery will help, and a change in leagues.
“We’ve liked Nova for a while,” Huntington said. “We’ve believed that Cervelli and now Fryer or Stewart or Diaz — whoever is catching — we believe that will enhance the quality of his sinker, which he’s got a really good one right now. We believe coming to the National League will continue to push him forward. And we felt like he was a good addition to plug in for Liriano, and keep moving this thing forward for ’16.”
Huntington said that Nova will step right into the rotation with Gerrit Cole and Jameson Taillon. He also talked up Ryan Vogelsong, but left Jeff Locke in the mix with the prospects. It’s important to note that Locke is scheduled to pitch on the same day as Nova, so it’s possible Nova could take his spot on Wednesday.
“As we sit here now, with Cole, with Taillon, with Nova, with Vogelsong and everything that he’s done, and everything that he’s been through, and everything that he has done in that clubhouse, we wanted to give him the ball, and see where he can take it,” Huntington said. “And then we’ve got Kuhl getting healthy, Glasnow getting healthy, Jeff Locke. We’ve got some other guys, Steven Brault. So we’ve got some things that we’re working through for the short-term.”
The big reason for the addition of Nova was that the Pirates didn’t want to go with all prospects, and needed another veteran after their trade of Liriano.
“We wanted to add another veteran to the rotation, as we subtracted Liriano, to allow our young guys to progress at the proper pace, and not at a forced pace in a playoff caliber environment, with asking a little more of them than perhaps they’re ready to handle right now,” Huntington said. “We love each one of them. We’re going to continue to allow them to grow and develop. We’re going to have some transition in our rotation in August, most likely. Nova is a guy we can plug right in and feel good about doing a nice job for us for the final two months of the season.”
The Pirates saw this approach work so well with J.A. Happ last year, only to see him walk as a free agent in what might be their biggest miss of the off-season. Huntington discussed the possibility of re-signing Nova if things go well.
“Who knows? We’ve liked him for awhile,” Huntington said. “If we can do some things to help him, he discovers that he likes it here. He likes our club, our facility, our players, our coaches, our fan base, maybe he wants to stay here, and maybe this leads to something bigger. Maybe it doesn’t. Again, we felt like we could plug him right into our rotation. He could pick up where Liriano was, and allow us to continue to develop our young starters at the appropriate pace.”
The alarming thing here is that today’s moves signal the completion of the downfall of the Opening Day rotation. Gerrit Cole is still here, but Francisco Liriano and Jon Niese were traded today. Juan Nicasio is locked into the bullpen. One of Jeff Locke or Ryan Vogelsong will be joining him, and I have a feeling that the other one will join him by the end of the year. Meanwhile, the plan was for Jameson Taillon, Tyler Glasnow, and the rest of the prospects to help out by now, but only one of those guys is currently in the rotation. Huntington discussed the decision to blow up the rotation recently, admitting once again that they had a poor off-season.
“We knew going in [to the 2016 season] that we had quality young arms coming,” Huntington said. “We knew going in that we had some pitchers that we were looking for some bounce back, or looking for some continued progression. As we worked through where we are going for the second half, or for the final two months, and hopefully three months for the 2016 season, we recognize that we had some guys that weren’t getting the job done.”
I would expect that the prospects will still play a factor here, although the Pirates could now give Tyler Glasnow plenty of time to work in Triple-A the rest of the year, since their chances of contending — even if they’re still going for it — are slim now.
The Swap of Bad Contracts
One of the poor moves that Huntington made over the off-season was the trade of Neil Walker for Jon Niese. As much as people love Neil Walker in Pittsburgh, that part of the deal wasn’t bad. But the addition of Niese was a bad move, with the lefty struggling in the Pirates’ rotation, and failing to show any kind of promise that would make his option years valuable. Huntington has discussed the trade, noting that it didn’t turn out to be a good move. He repeated those comments tonight, after dealing Niese for Antonio Bastardo.
“As people focus in on where Jon Niese has gone, it hasn’t gone as well,” Huntington said. “We weren’t able to do the things, and in hindsight, it doesn’t look like we made the right call.”
The trade for Bastardo was a strange move, since they let him walk as a free agent last year. This led to the inevitable “They gave Neil Walker away for a player they could have signed” line of thinking, which is a bit distorted. The reality is that they made a bad move trading Walker for Niese, and that’s where the Walker factor ended. From there, they had a choice to try and get what they could from Niese, and that turned out to be Bastardo.
“As we go forward, we could have made a move for optics, and could have just stayed with it for the purpose of optics, but our intent was to help this club as we move forward,” Huntington said. “I think we’ve been pretty out there about owning mistakes when they look like mistakes in hindsight. We don’t have the benefit of second guessing. We’re the ones that have to first guess. We’re the ones that have to make the decisions that we believe make the organization better. Others can second guess, and we are the ones that are accountable for it. We’ve taken ownership of it.”
The interesting thing is that the Walker trade might have ended up poorly, even if they did pass on Niese.
“Quite candidly, the players that we could have gotten for Neil in the off-season, nobody would have been thrilled with them either,” Huntington said. “So it was not a great situation. Sometimes trades work out incredibly well for both sides. Sometimes they work out incredibly well for one side. Sometimes hindsight always brings a better response.”
Bastardo also hasn’t worked out for the Mets, after they gave him a two-year, $12 M deal. He has a 4.74 ERA and a 4.72 xFIP in 43.2 innings this year, which is way down from his 2.98 ERA and 4.27 xFIP last year. Just like Nova, this move all comes down to the HR/FB ratio.
Bastardo has a 9.48 K/9, which is down from his 10.05 rate last year. He has a 4.33 BB/9, which is high, but not out of the ordinary for him. He’s been an extreme fly ball pitcher, which should play well in PNC Park. His biggest issue though is his 14.8% HR/FB ratio, way up from 5.1% and 5.6% the last two years, and 8% in his career. If the Pirates can figure that out, then they’ll have a quality reliever under control through the 2017 season.
“We made a move today that we felt made this 2016 club better,” Huntington said on Bastardo. “We also have Bastardo under control, under a potential contribution next year. And we like the addition of Watson, Rivero, and Bastardo of the foundation of a bullpen. I’ve finally given Clint three left-handed relievers. And then we’ll build the bullpen around them as we go forward.”
The three lefties could help Bastardo. Last year, he worked in a lower profile role, with Tony Watson acting as the top lefty in the bullpen. He will likely be the second lefty behind Felipe Rivero, with Watson obviously being the closer. Perhaps that lower profile role could help him get back on track. He also might already be getting back on track, with a 4.09 ERA/4.03 xFIP in 11 innings last month. In this case, anything they get from Bastardo is a bonus, since they weren’t going to be getting much from Niese down the stretch.
Overall, the Pirates made two low-key additions today. We don’t know what they sent off for Nova, so it’s hard to get a full evaluation of that deal. But there’s a chance that both players could help boost the pitching staff down the stretch, much like the boost the Pirates saw last year at the deadline from Happ and Joakim Soria.
