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Winter Leagues Preview: It’s Shaping Up to be a Slow Off-Season for the Pirates

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We usually post about 4-5 winter league articles per week here from mid-October until early January. When the off-season is busy, we have had as many as 70 articles during that time. This off-season is shaping up to be the slowest one for the Pittsburgh Pirates in quite some time.

Our preview usually includes a large group of players who are on rosters throughout the Dominican, Venezuela, Mexico, Australia, Puerto Rico, Colombia and occasionally the leagues in Panama and Nicaragua. While players join the leagues in progress throughout the winter, this is the first year that absolutely no one from the Pirates is on a Venezuelan league roster.

To make matters worse, Eduardo Vera is the only Pirate currently on a roster in Mexico. Two of the better leagues to follow and they have one player total. In fact, Vera is on a limited schedule and needed the permission of the Pirates to play. They have capped him at five innings in each start and he is only playing for the first half of the season, which ends around the last week of November. He is scheduled to make his season debut tomorrow.

Puerto Rico, Australia and Colombia all begin playing later, so they don’t have full rosters yet. As of right now, the only player who is certain for this winter is infielder Robbie Glendinning in Australia. The 21st round pick of the Pirates in 2017 played in Australia for part of the season last year and tore the league up. He split 2018 between West Virginia and Morgantown, hitting .268/.360/.381 in 59 games.

That leaves the Dominican, which is usually the busiest. Tyler Eppler will be a starting pitcher for Toros del Este for six weeks, leaving right before Thanksgiving. He’s trying to make a strong impression before the Rule 5 draft this winter. Eppler is scheduled to make his debut on Monday.

The Dominican rosters include a lot of Pirates, but some of them will only be playing on the minor league side, while others are on the Extreme Fatigue list, which keeps them from playing without permission of the Pirates. Not every player gets that permission. Starling Marte, Domingo Robles, Oneil Cruz, Richard Rodriguez and Oddy Nunez are on that list. Gregory Polanco would have been as well, but he is injured and unavailable anyway.

The Gigantes del Cibao have three Pirates on their roster. The aforementioned Nunez, along with relievers Jesus Liranzo and Joel Cesar.

Leones del Escogido has reliever Ronny Agustin available.

Estrellas de Oriente has infielder Alfredo Reyes, who is slated to become a free agent this winter, but it appears that the Pirates have an interest in re-signing him before that happens. Nothing certain yet.

Tyler Eppler is the only Pirate rep on Toros del Este.

Pablo Reyes is on Tigres Del Licey this year after playing for Escogido for the last two seasons. He is playing shortstop and batting fifth in the season opener tonight. At this point, Reyes is clearly the top hitter to follow this winter, but that could change.

Aguilas Cibaenas has Adrian Valerio, Rafelin Lorenzo and Lolo Sanchez on their roster, though their is a difference between the active roster and the full roster. All three were with the team recently. Valerio and Sanchez would make the winter much more interesting, but right now I don’t know if any of the three will be participating in games. At the very least, none of them are in Saturday night’s lineup.

There is word that Gage Hinsz could play winter ball in the Dominican this year, but as far as I know, he isn’t signed to a team.

As you can see from the known participating players right now, you’re talking about two starting pitchers on limited schedules, 2-5 position players (with another one starting in five weeks) and possibly three relievers. There should be Pirates playing in Colombia after they started signing a lot of players from the country recently, but we won’t have those rosters for a little while.

It’s going to be tough putting together 4-5 articles a week unless the participation picks up, but we will still cover everything that happens throughout the winter schedule.

John Dreker
John Dreker
John started working at Pirates Prospects in 2009, but his connection to the Pittsburgh Pirates started exactly 100 years earlier when Dots Miller debuted for the 1909 World Series champions. John was born in Kearny, NJ, two blocks from the house where Dots Miller grew up. From that hometown hero connection came a love of Pirates history, as well as the sport of baseball. When he didn't make it as a lefty pitcher with an 80+ MPH fastball and a slider that needed work, John turned to covering the game, eventually focusing in on the prospects side, where his interest was pushed by the big league team being below .500 for so long. John has covered the minors in some form since the 2002 season, and leads the draft and international coverage on Pirates Prospects. He writes daily on Pittsburgh Baseball History, when he's not covering the entire system daily throughout the entire year on Pirates Prospects.

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