PITTSBURGH — Pirates manager Clint Hurdle said Sunday there’s a chance his team adds a couple additional players for the stretch run.
But there are some things conspiring to keep that from happening. Catcher Elias Diaz is in town, but he’s here to see the team’s medical staff to get treatment on a cellulitis infection. Shortstop Gift Ngoepe and reliever Dovydas Neverauskas were arrested in Toledo last week, which “certainly didn’t help” their chances of being recalled, according to general manager Neal Huntington.
“We want guys to make good decisions, on and off the field,” Huntington continued. “They did not put themselves in position to make a good decision. They made a bad decision and there was a punishment that corresponded to that. We felt seven games was appropriate. It just happened to coincide with them ending their season. We expect them to learn from that. Hopefully other guys will learn from that as well.”
There are some pitchers in Triple-A that have been performing well. Pitcher such as Frank Duncan and Trevor Williams have been both done well down the stretch. Their problem is that they aren’t on the 40-man roster.
“Williams continues to throw the ball well, we traded for Zach Phillips for a reason, Curtis Partch is throwing the ball well,” said Huntington. “Our challenge is we’re at 40 [players]. Unfortunately, or fortunately, we don’t have many 60-day DL [players], so it doesn’t give us the roster flexibility we’ve had in the past. We’ve got Kang and Cole, who will bring us to 32. Where is Feliz in his return? How is Cole doing in his return? What players do we want to take on and off the roster? What players do we risk losing? What players do we see in role for us down the road? Those are the some of the factors we’ll look into. Dealing with some typical August fatigue and trying to give guys a little bit of rest to keep them strong and sharp in September. After Indy season or maybe get creative later in September.”
It seems likely that at least pitcher Drew Hutchison will join the Pirates. He could be used as a spot starter to give some guys a break, in long relief or a sixth man in the rotation.
“It will be an easier question to answer once we know that Gerrit plugs in there,” Huntington said. “We have some guys that we’re monitoring their workloads. We’ve got some pitchers that want to go every fifth day. We’ve got some pitchers that may benefit from a pushed back start or a skipped start. It’s going to be an interesting puzzle for Ray to put together. A lot of it right now depends on Gerrit, with the day/night doubleheader thrown in for good measure on [Sept. 17], which always makes life interesting. It’ll be a mix and match. I don’t know that we’ll go to a pure six-man rotation.”
Jameson Taillon, in particular, is a player whose innings and pitches are being closely monitored by the Pirates’ staff.
“We’re in a good spot,” Huntington said. “We’ll want to monitor his workload. There’s a perfect-world scenario and there’s a real-world scenario. We want to make those match as closely as we can.
CAUSE FOR REST
The Pirates’ relief-pitcher rest program has come under fire recently after they lost last Monday in Chicago in an extra-inning game that saw Antonio Bastardo and Juan Nicasio go unused. I asked Huntington how they evaluate the success of that rest program.
“We have some behind-the-scenes metrics and valuations that we use, that we aren’t going to disclose here, that give us a strong feel for workload,” he said. “While the games [pitched] count may be higher and drive people to talk about overuse, there’s also a lot of rest that goes in there. There’s not a lot of up-and-downs going on in the bullpen. A pitcher gets up and is hot, we track a lot of variables. That’s where we believe Clint does a great job of protecting those arms while also putting us in position to win as many of those games late as possible. It’s where the bullpen depth has come in big for us. We’ve had many guys answer the bell without, in our minds, red-lining them or putting them in harm’s way.”
The injury to reliever Neftali Feliz (right arm discomfort) also brought the amount of rest relief pacer get into focus.
“You always take a look at what happens when someone goes town, even when it’s a soft-tissue injury,” Huntington said. “What’s the cause? What’s the result? More often than not, soft-tissue injuries aren’t the result of what happened over the past few days. It’s what happened over the course of a season, all things factored, not just pitches. We look to learn from everything and we’ll see where Neftali is. We look forward to getting him back out there when he’s ready, and that’s the other part of this. We’re in the middle of a playoff race. It would be tempting for most organizations to run a Gerrit Cole back out there, to run a Neftali Feliz back out there as soon as they feel like they’re ready to go. We need to put them in a position to win games and we have their personal aspirations in mind as well.”
