Offseason pitching decisions doomed 2016 Pirates
The Liberty Bridge in Pittsburgh went through some troubling times a few weeks ago, with a support beam under siege by flames.
The Pittsburgh Pirates’ self-imposed “bridge year” has befallen a similar fate.
General Manager Neal Huntington was the first to coin that term in the middle of an offseason that followed a 98-win season. After fans and observers predictably raised eyebrows at the verbiage, Huntington backpedaled somewhat, claiming that he identified 2016 as a “bridge year” between his current core and the next wave of young players. He repeatedly and forcefully claimed that the Pirates would be built to compete in 2016, but the club’s actions resembled those of a team with eyes on 2017.
As the team now faces a near-insurmountable deficit in the NL Wild Card chase, fans are left to pick up the pieces and wonder how the fire began.
The answers lie chiefly in the front office’s half-measures during the hot stove season and beyond.
They would have to start at the beginning. With Jameson Taillon and Tyler Glasnow on the horizon, Huntington felt comfortable leaving 60 percent of the team’s starting rotation in the hands of Jon Niese, Jeff Locke and Ryan Vogelsong.
Vogelsong was a 38-year-old veteran who has not had a season with an Earned Run Average under 4.0 since 2012. Locke is, well, Locke. The club had a comfort level with the enigmatic left-hander that belies his career-to-date. Fellow southpaw Niese was brought into the fold ostensibly because of his above-average groundball rate, but it was the long flies that did him in. Niese’s 21 home runs are still the highest total on the team, despite his departure back to New York at the end of July. They were long; they were varied; they spelled his doom.
It is easy to criticize and debate these moves in retrospect, but established hurlers had their issues as well. No one could have predicted the ineffectiveness that Francisco Liriano and Gerrit Cole exhibited in the season’s early going. Cole may be off the hook after an abbreviated spring training due to a minor injury, but Liriano has no such out.
The team was not completely unresponsive as spring training broke. Juan Nicasio’s excellent spring training rightfully put him into the starting rotation. However, the team was less than nimble when Nicasio’s pitch selection proved too limited to withstand the rigors of a starting pitching workload. He meandered in the rotation, and the pitcher he replaced in Vogelsong soon went down with a frightening orbital injury.
Normally a focus of Huntington’s, the bullpen was also haphazardly thrown together. Though Neftali Feliz proved to be an effective signing, the front end of the relief corps was manned by pitchers such as Kyle Lobstein, Eric O’Flaherty and Cory Luebke, all career journeyman with no clear claims to a spot in what is traditionally one of the best units in the National League.
A 15-9 April begat a 14-13 May, but these Pittsburgh Pirates truly bottomed out in June. It was then that the club reaped what those half-measures sowed. The team’s starting pitching posted a crooked 6.06 ERA during that month, and walked 3.5 batters per game. The ineptitude of the Pirates starters put increased pressure on an already thin bullpen. Pirates’ relievers have logged 534 innings in 2016, the third-most of any club in Major League Baseball.
Though there are a myriad of other issues on the offensive side that also caused the Pirates to fade out of contention — the continuing odyssey of Andrew McCutchen’s struggles, the reluctance to call up Josh Bell, Jung Ho Kang’s on and off-field issues — the chief culprit has been the pitching. Though the current state of the staff is trending up with excellent debut seasons from Taillon and Chad Kuhl among others, the half measures taken by the club towards its pitching in the offseason created a constant tightrope atmosphere that often saw the Pirates fall off rather than close out the tight wins that were a staple of the 2015 team.
With a talented core in place for 2017, Neal Huntington may have in fact achieved his goal of bridging to 2017.
For the club to live up to what’s on the other end of that bridge, he would do well to avoid the half measures and truly give this club the necessary pieces that a contending team needs.