Drafting and development. They’re two acts which will always be linked. You sometimes hear about each of them separately, and that’s typically when someone is praising or criticizing a team’s results in the area. But you usually hear them together, as it’s difficult to separate where one skill ends and the other begins.
The Pirates have been criticized for their drafting and development over the years. And when people decide to single one of those things out, it’s usually the drafting that gets the focus.
This makes sense. It’s easier to get a perceived result from the draft. You can just look up the cumulative WAR of each team for a draft, and compare how one team did to the rest of the league. But this doesn’t necessarily give you proof that drafting is the problem. It gives you proof that there is a problem. From there, you need to go further to confirm that drafting is really the issue.
I get the feeling that a lot of people discount development as being automatic. I don’t think that’s an active thought. I think there’s a full understanding that teams need to develop a player, and the player needs to move through each level. But that process gets simplified in ways that really shift the draft/development discussion to put more emphasis on the drafting.
You’ve probably heard an argument along the lines of “Yeah, Gerrit Cole had success with the Pirates, but that doesn’t count because he was a first overall pick, and this was expected.”
Nothing is ever expected when it comes to the future success of draft picks. There have been a lot of studies on the success rate of MLB draft picks. The success rate of a top five pick putting up more than 2.5 career WAR is typically around 30%. It gets worse as you go through the first round, and drops significantly after the first round.
That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to draft good players, and it doesn’t mean every team is going to see the same success rates. But the variable here is the development system for that team.
This is why you can’t say that a team passed up on [Insert successful MLB player] in favor of [Insert draft pick who didn’t reach the majors]. It’s not like every player who reaches the majors was destined all along to reach the majors. And that player wouldn’t have been destined to reach the majors with the same production on any team.
For that, we go back to Gerrit Cole.
Cole had success with the Pirates from day one of his career. He pitched like a number one from 2013-15, then fell off in 2016 and 2017. But he was still worth 2.5 and 3.4 WAR, respectively, during those years. The Pirates got 15.5 WAR from Cole during his five seasons with the team, which is well above the norm for top five picks.
But then Cole went to the Astros, and in two years he’s been worth 13.4 WAR, almost matching his total from the entire time he was with the Pirates.
The Pirates identified the talent with Cole, and that wasn’t a given, even if he was the number one ranked prospect in the draft that year. There were arguments to take Trevor Bauer or Anthony Rendon, and Danny Hultzen was even in the discussion for a while.
At their top upsides, Cole is probably the best of the group. But that’s the key — getting a player to his highest upside possible.
The Pirates clearly couldn’t do that with Cole, as we’ve seen with his breakout in Houston. They couldn’t do that with Tyler Glasnow. They might have been able to do it with Austin Meadows, but they didn’t give much of a chance to find out.
They didn’t turn Pedro Alvarez into a feared power hitter. They haven’t gotten number one stuff out of Jameson Taillon on a consistent basis, and it’s not all injury related. They took strong defensive catchers in the first round in Tony Sanchez and Reese McGuire, and got almost nothing of value for them, while also seeing the defensive skills decline in Sanchez’s case.
There are so many cases like this. There aren’t really any cases where the Pirates turned a top prospect into an elite MLB player. Andrew McCutchen is the only MVP they’ve had. McCutchen shows the flaw of crediting the drafting when a player performs well.
Yes, McCutchen was a great pick. That’s indisputable. But Dave Littlefield was not good at drafting, and the only reason he took McCutchen is because his scouts begged him to take McCutchen.
And then McCutchen opens up some of the mystery for the development process. He spent his lower level time in the minors under Littlefield, and the upper levels started with Littlefield and ended under Huntington. He then reached the majors and took a few years before becoming an MVP.
I don’t expect any player to be an MVP on day one. But how much of that MVP performance was due to the lower level development under Littlefield? Or the upper level development under Littlefield? How much was due to the upper level development under Huntington? How much is due to MLB coaching and adjustments once he arrived?
I don’t have the answers for any of these questions. It’s nearly impossible to quantify development in the same way that you can point to a cumulative WAR and use that to give thoughts on a draft.
I’ve been around the Pirates minor league system more than any other writer. I could go through and list all of the examples of why I think development is the problem, but I’m going to lean on my experience and the most common things I’ve heard and seen over the years.
The biggest evidence going against the idea that the Pirates are bad at drafting is the fact that they’ve drafted so many talented players. Drafting is all about identifying talent and upside. You can’t complain that the MLB playoffs included Gerrit Cole, Tyler Glasnow, Austin Meadows, or any other player drafted by Huntington, and then say that Huntington is bad at drafting.
Clearly the above is an example of how Huntington (or the Pirates, under Huntington) was bad at developing those prospects, and made good decisions in drafting them.
Another sign over the years? All of the drafted players who didn’t sign, then went on to be strong players elsewhere. The Pirates drafted Trea Turner out of high school. They drafted Walker Buehler out of high school. They drafted the third baseman for Arizona whose name I always forget out of high school. They even offered Turner and Buehler huge bonuses for rounds 11-20, and were turned down.
That is clearly more indication that the Pirates have been good at identifying talent in the draft. The problem in this case is they couldn’t get the players signed (not much they could do here). And then we fall into the trap of assuming the Pirates would get the same production out of Turner, Buehler, or Jake Lamb (I looked it up, but first I guessed Conor Lamb, who is a congressman from PA, and I don’t even know how I knew that name, but hell if politics doesn’t take over every aspect of our lives today).
You didn’t need to be covering the Pirates or spending a massive amount of time at Pirate City over the last ten years to know the above. But what I did learn and see confirmed the above.
First, I’ve talked with scouts over the years, asking them questions about the opinion inside of Pittsburgh that the Pirates are bad at drafting and development. The most common thing I heard was praise for the work they’ve done in the lower levels at developing pitching prospects. And that work is undeniable.
You can point out that most of those pitching prospects didn’t result in successful MLB players, but that ignores that the industry viewed a lot of them as future MLB talent, and possibly MLB starters. That’s the consensus from scouts and from the people who do the national rankings. I don’t know if that’s still the view, as MLB has changed so much in recent years, and the way the Pirates used to do things in the lower levels might not work now.
There was also my view of what I saw over the years. I was touting Tyler Glasnow and Mitch Keller since the GCL, and followed their big breakouts closely, with key details on what worked for each guy. I know for a fact that development played a huge role in turning those types of guys into future MLB players. The same goes for Gregory Polanco and some players with the Pirates who haven’t worked out as well (I know Polanco isn’t a draft pick, but we’re talking about development now, and how you got in the system doesn’t matter at that point).
I’ve got to be honest with you guys. The last few years, and especially this year, have been extremely frustrating as someone who has covered the Pirates’ minor league system so closely. The best way I can describe it is to paint a picture for you.
Imagine you’ve spent 10,000+ hours at the ballpark over the last decade. You’ve watched games, Spring Training workouts, bullpens, batting practice, and so on. You’ve talked with the players, coaches, the front office, the development team, and then talked with people outside the organization to confirm what you’re hearing on the inside.
You’re seen as too optimistic by a lot of fans in Pittsburgh, saying that the Pirates have a good farm system, can draft talent, and have a good track record developing talent into top prospects in the lower levels.
But the fans who are pessimistic keep pointing to the lack of MLB results. And they’re not wrong. You know what you’ve seen, and it conflicts with the idea that this is a system-wide problem. But you also recognize a problem, and it makes you wonder “Why are all of these top prospects not working out? Were they really top prospects to begin with? What am I missing? Furthermore, what was everyone else missing?”
And sure, not everyone agrees with you all the time. This is the ranking business, so you’re going to be on an island with some players. Sometimes you’re right and sometimes you’re wrong. But generally, everyone is on the same page for the big guys, and everyone was on the same page of the talent and upside with guys like Glasnow.
Then it all starts to click. Gerrit Cole goes elsewhere and immediately becomes the ace you thought he could eventually become. Austin Meadows goes elsewhere and immediately becomes the 30+ home run hitter you thought he could be since that first home run you saw him crush in the GCL. Tyler Glasnow moves on and starts to look like that dominant number one starter you were envisioning since A-ball.
Meanwhile, back in Pittsburgh, Gregory Polanco continues to struggle, despite having more tools than any prospect you’ve ever seen. And I’m saying this as someone who watched Jason Heyward in A-ball when he already looked like an MLB player.
Jameson Taillon has yet to be an ace, even though there was a point when he was on par with Gerrit Cole in the minors, and there were legit questions about which guy could be better. And yeah, Taillon has dealt with a lot of injuries, but when he’s healthy he hasn’t come close to the version of Cole we’ve seen the last two years.
You see Mitch Keller come up and struggle a bit, and while he shows some promise for the future, you’re now wondering if he’ll ever reach that upside with the Pirates. The same goes with guys like Ke’Bryan Hayes, Cole Tucker, Oneil Cruz, Cody Bolton, and anyone else in the organization who you think has a chance to reach the majors in a significant role.
That leads to a frustrating problem. You write about the Pirates prospects, and yet the feeling in Pittsburgh is that the Pirates have no prospects. You know that isn’t true, but you also know that their opinion is based on a reasonable assumption — if the Pirates aren’t getting MLB success from their prospects, then it stands to reason that they don’t actually have any good prospects to begin with, and everything we’ve heard about these guys was just overblown.
Even when the opposite is being shown in Houston and Tampa, the opinion doesn’t change. People still talk about the draft being the problem, as if the easy solution here is picking better players. And you see the conflict in that opinion when the next step is pointing out how good Cole, Glasnow, and Meadows — guys drafted by the Pirates — have been elsewhere.
Everything that you have seen over the last decade leads to an opinion: The Pirates are good at identifying talent in the draft, and they’ve got skills to turn that talent into top prospects, but for whatever reason they can’t maximize the upside of those prospects when it comes time for MLB production.
You then get evidence that helps support that opinion when some of those drafted and developed players go on to reach the upside you expected, only with other teams.
And yet you have no clue if the organization even thinks this is a problem, much less what they plan to do to fix this massive issue. All the while, you keep pounding the table that Development. Is. The. Problem. Not. Drafting.
This view you have is the culmination of your work over the last decade. Narrowing down a specific problem — development, specifically related to fixing whatever is preventing players from reaching their MLB upsides in Pittsburgh — helps to further identify what needs to change to fix this problem. It provides a much better starting point than just lumping the draft in and having to start sorting through the haystack all over again.
I might not be right here. But based on what I’ve seen, and thanks to this site’s unique position and focus, I think I’m right in identifying the problem. I have no clue how to fix this problem. That’s why I’m not running a farm system, and it’s why I have great respect for the extremely difficult job that anyone running a farm system for any team has to do.
But I don’t need to know how to run a farm system, or how to fix a development problem to be able to identify that a problem exists. I don’t know how to write a movie, but I can tell you exactly where Sony’s Spider-Man movies went wrong, I can tell you that Marvel didn’t have those issues, and I can even point out some of the things Marvel did to make it work.
This feels similar to the Marvel/Sony drama. The Astros are Marvel Studios. They’re highly successful, they have a system that works, and they’re clearly way ahead of the competition. The Pirates are Sony. We know what they’ve been doing doesn’t work. We see them send their top guy to Marvel and he instantly becomes better. And then Sony says “We still think we can do it better”, gives no indication of what they think the old problem was, and what they are doing to fix that going forward, all while the fans are begging “PLEASE! Marvel knows what they’re doing! Let them handle this!” And every Pirates prospect might as well be Spider-Man here, because they’re going to be better off with Marvel controlling their future than Sony.
Of course the Pirates can’t just send their players to Houston to get better, and collect the World Series trophies that result. They need to figure out what teams like Houston and Tampa are doing so well. The first step is identifying what they’re doing poorly, and why the poor results are happening.
And I’m saying that the thing they’re doing poorly lies totally on the development side.
SONG OF THE DAY
DAILY QUIZ
You’ve got to click over for this picture find quiz, naming as many Spider-Man characters as you can.
THIS DATE IN PIRATES HISTORY
By John Dreker
There have been 14 former Pirates born on this date, including the man who caught the last out of the 1979 World Series. We start with him first, then work our way down from youngest to oldest.
Omar Moreno, outfielder for the 1975-82 Pirates. In eight seasons in Pittsburgh, he batted .255 with 412 stolen bases, which ranks third in team history. He led the league with 77 steals in 1979, while scoring a career high 110 runs, then batted .311 in the postseason with seven runs scored. He set a Pirates record with 96 steals in 1980, while leading the league with 13 triples. Moreno ranks 42nd all-time in career stolen bases.
Chris Bootcheck, pitcher for the 2009 Pirates. Bootcheck played seven years in the majors and posted a 6.55 ERA in 91 appearances. In his brief time with the Pirates, he had an 11.05 ERA in 13 appearances and 14.1 innings.
Rafael Belliard, infielder for 1982-90 Pirates. In 484 games with the Pirates, he hit .218 with one homer. He went to Atlanta, where he finished his career by hitting .223 in 670 games with the Braves, hitting one home run.
Junior Ortiz, catcher for the Pirates from 1982-83, and then again from 1985-89. Served as a backup for most of his time in Pittsburgh, topping out at 91 games played in 1989. Batted .336 in 49 games in 1986, and hit .264 over 299 games with the Pirates. Spent a total of 13 years in the majors.
Dave Johnson, pitcher for the 1987 Pirates. He debuted in the majors with the Pirates, posting a 9.95 ERA in 6.1 innings over five appearances. He pitched another four seasons in the majors over the next six years.
Reggie Walton, outfielder for the 1982 Pirates. He batted .200 in 13 games, in what ended up being his last big league experience. Walton played 56 games over three big league seasons during his 12-year pro career.
Johnny Jeter, outfielder for the 1969-70 Pirates. He hit .310 during a brief trial as a rookie in 1969, then batted .238 in 85 games the following year. He spent 1971 in the minors, before being traded to the San Diego Padres for Bob Miller. Jeter was a .244 hitter over six seasons in the majors, despite batting over .300 in three of those seasons. He turns 75 today.
Bill Bell, pitcher for the 1952 and 1955 Pirates. He debuted at 18 years old, posting a 4.60 ERA in 15.2 innings over one start and three relief appearances. His only other big league appearance was one early season relief outing for the 1955 Pirates. Bell played seven years in the minors after signing at 17 years old in 1951. Passed away tragically at age 28 due to a car accident.
Cal Hogue, pitcher for the 1952-54 Pirates. He saw regular time as a rookie in 1952 and then didn’t play much during the next two seasons, making three appearances each year. Hogue had 4.91 ERA in 113.2 innings with the Pirates, which was his entire big league career. He spent ten seasons in the minors.
Pete McClanahan, pinch-hitter for the 1931 Pirates. He batted .500 with two walks in six plate appearances without getting into a game on defense. That ended up being his only big league experience in six seasons as an outfielder in pro ball.
Heinie Smith, second baseman from Pittsburgh, who played for the 1899 Pirates. Smith played 15 games with his hometown team, hitting .283 with 12 RBIs. He played six seasons in the majors and 16 seasons in the minors, while also spending nine seasons as a manager.
Phil Routcliffe, outfielder for the 1890 Alleghenys. His only big league game was April 21, 1890. He went 1-for-4, with a run scored, RBI and a stolen base, while making all three plays in left field. He played seven seasons of minor league ball.
Jay Faatz, first baseman for the 1884 Alleghenys. Made his big league debut late in August with the Alleghenys, finishing the season as their everyday first baseman. He hit .241 in 29 games. Faatz played three more years in the majors (1888-90) playing in three different leagues.
Bill Kuehne, infielder for the Alleghenys from 1885 until 1889. He hit .240 with 251 RBIs and 298 runs scored in 558 games for the Alleghenys, splitting his time mostly between shortstop and third base, though he saw time everywhere else except catcher and pitcher. Kuehne hit .299 in 1887 and led the NL with 138 games played in 1888. He played ten seasons total in the majors, seeing time with six other clubs during his five seasons not spent with the Alleghenys.
