FanGraphs Top 43 Pirates prospects blogs.fangraphs Vote 3 comments Best Add a Comment Robert_roberts82 14 min. Jerez has above-average power and a 70 arm. Anthony began writing over 10 years ago, starting a personal blog to cover the 2011 MLB draft, where the Pirates selected first overall. Oneil Cruz, SS Video Signed: July 2nd. Samaniego looks like a typical second lefty out of a bullpen, sitting 92-94 mph with a deceptive, whippy arm action, and locating his fastball with precision on the arm-side part of the plate. If you want to read me wax poetic about that you can check out my end of year review. Bins is athletic for a catcher and has a good arm, but his receiving and contact skills are both 30s. A double-plus hit tool leads the way for Termarr Johnson, a 5'7" 175 lb left-handed hitter who calls Jose Ramirez to mind on a quick visual evaluation. Defensively, Nunez has transitioned from full-time third baseman to mostly first base, with a handful of innings in the other corner of the infield still mixed in. Pegueros lack of throwing accuracy from shortstop is concerning. It could stand to have more consistent depth, but the flashes are there, and remember that Kennedy is barely 18. He commands it consistently enough to his glove side to project as a starter. This FV grade is commensurate with a mid-first round high school infield prospect. Pittsburgh Pirates: FanGraphs Add 2021 Draft Picks to Prospect Board So compact and short to the baseball is Rodriguez that he can wait an extra beat to diagnose pitch types, which enables him to make in-flight adjustments to breaking balls, spoil the well-located ones, and crush the hangers. Barcos long, low arm slot creates a flat approach angle, but hes not really inclined to climb the ladder and pitch at the top of the zone right now, instead living on the arm-side third of the plate with sink and tail. This is the third year were delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which youll see in the position column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. We. On defense, Rodriguezs size is both a feature and a bug. His range, footwork, ability to bend, and overall athleticism are all plus, and it made sense to try to develop him as a shortstop for as long as possible, but Peguero finally saw time at second base in 2022 and a permanent move there will hopefully help him throw more confidently and accurately. . To that point in the season, his mid-teens walk rate had inspired guarded optimism regarding an improved approach, though Nunez also may have become intentionally passive, as his raw swing% was a minuscule 40%. Pittsburgh Pirates 2021 Top 50 Prospects January 1, 2021 Kyle Brown General, MiLB, NL Central, Pirates, Top 50 Lists 2 Graphic design by John Stewart, @jonance on Twitter The Pirates had a woeful time in 2020 once the season got going. In his time at Bradenton, Chandler struck out 33 batters over 26 innings, and while his walk rate was an unacceptably high 15.8%, thats actually down a notch from what he was allowing over a larger sample on the complex. The depth-focused style of their rebuild in which the Pirates often got many mid-tier prospects back in trade rather than just one key piece has had some profound positive impacts on this system (its arguably why they have Cruz, Endy Rodriguez, Contreras, and four of their 40+ FV prospects or better on this years list) even as many of the pro departments targets have started to fizzle out at the upper levels. Jimenez has a very good sweeping, upper-70s curveball and creates plus action on a changeup that he sells with fantastic arm speed. But given his age and the amount of runway still afforded to him, this was seen as a speed bump for his development rather than being of great concern at the time. 2022 Top Prospects | THE BOARD | FanGraphs His carrying tool is still his defense, especially his receiving, which is crafty and advanced. D-backs Dodgers Giants Padres Rockies: Offseason Tools. Thats something to watch as Jones continues to progress through the minors. FanGraphs released their top 100 prospect rankings on Wednesday. In some ways, this makes aspects of De Los Santos data even more impressive, because hes turning around soft DSL pitching with ridiculous pace. Most of his swings and misses over the last few years have been on fastballs running away from him, but in 2022, he displayed a more advanced ability to poke the barrel at balls on the outer edge of the plate, extending his short levers in an effort to slap outside pitches the other way. Hernandez sat 93-96 mph in 2021 and when seen prior to Dodgers list publication last season, then kept throwing harder throughout the summer and ended up averaging 95-97 and touching 101 while with Double-A Tulsa. Defensively, he has mostly played second base so far in his professional career, with just a handful of starts at short. Before he was drafted he was considered, at least at FanGraphs, a more likely reliever due to the quality of his stuff. He went 2-for-4 with two singles, two runs and an RBI on Friday night against Kansas State. These rankings are now available on The Board on the 2023 Fantasy Rankings tab, where you can also see the Top 120 Dynasty Rankings!. Even if sliders are a chronic issue for Davis, hell likely still get to enough power to produce better than the average everyday catcher. He was one of the younger players available in the 2022 draft and yet at a listed 205 pounds, Kennedy is more physically mature than most of his peers, even some who are a year or two older than he is. After the season, he again played winter ball, this time in Puerto Rico with Carolina, where Cheng struggled. Reports, tool grades, . His delivery evokes Madison Bumgarners long, slingin lefty arm stroke, and Solometos east/west feel for location is Bum-ish, but dont mistake this for a true comp, as Bumgarner had already made 24 big league starts at Solometos age. So the question is, was there actual improvement in his ability or is this just noise in the signal? Every once in a while he will show you the power, and hes very good at hitting pitches out away from him to the opposite field with authority, but you can get him out if you can execute location against Gonzales, and big league pitchers often do. None of his other pitches are above average in fact most of them are currently below average but Chen has plus command projection and a plus changeup, so hes pretty likely to pitch at the back of a big league rotation or as an innings-eating spot starter. His range and footwork are great, while his actions and arm are fine. Like his other stuff, his feel for location is better than the movement hes creating on the pitch. DSL data is noisy, in part because pitchers there dont yet throw enough strikes or with much velocity compared to more advanced levels of the minors. White was a multi-sport star in high school and after initially making a verbal commitment to Clemson solely for baseball, he eventually became a two-sport commit to Penn State to play wide receiver and center field. It shows above-average arm-side action on occasion, but hes only throwing it 12% of the time. by Handedness, 25th on the Pirates list at the end of 2022, Effectively Wild Episode 1966: Joe West, Young Man, Ben Cherington on Pittsburghs Two Top Prospects. After pitching well at the U-18 World Championships and at a Nike showcase in Asia, he signed for about $1.25 million, which is pretty sizable for a late-market signee. Swaggerty matched the nine home runs he posted in 2019, but this time, he did so against better pitching, in fewer at-bats, and in a much less hitter-friendly park, and he improved on his walk rate by a couple of ticks. ago Burrows had success as a starter throughout a 2022 season split between Double- and Triple-A before shoulder inflammation effectively ended his season. Indeed, of his offerings, only his four-seamer had a whiff rate above the big league average, and he struggled to keep that pitch competitive, only throwing it for a strike 57% of the time. As for the top three prospects on all six lists, their average rankings: Termarr Johnson - 28.2 Endy Rodriguez - 38.5 Henry Davis - 52 John Dreker + posts John started working at Pirates. as compiled by Ben Clemens and the FanGraphs staff. Sunday Notes: Born To Brits, Harry Ford Could Be - blogs.fangraphs.com Now 24 and neither protected from nor claimed during the 2022 Rule 5 draft, its imperative for him to start throwing strikes more consistently in order to find his way to a big league bullpen. Pirates Reds: NL West. Whether his ability to go get it in center field bounces back is the X-factor that will determine his ability to play a long-term big league role. His size creates some stiffness and imbalance during his swing, which can lead to him putting suboptimal contact in play. After spending most of the year at Triple-A, where he hit .289/.362/.430, Bae spent the last couple weeks of the 2022 season as an everyday member of the big league club, where he seems likely to stick throughout the coming season as a lefty-hitting 2B/OF. Back with former Astros pitching coach Brent Strom in Arizona . Scott, Siani, and Campana all have big physical tools and have all struggled badly from a bat-to-ball standpoint. He will be an unmistakable fixture on Pittsburghs backfields for the next couple of years and is a power-hitting corner prospect of extreme variance. He still has a pretty exciting hit/power combination for a player his age, showing a proclivity for big contact to dead center and the opposite-field gap, the latter in part due to his length, which causes him to be late. He sits in the upper 80s right now but has promising underlying traits and plenty of time to develop. Davis was on the IL multiple times in 2022 with issues stemming from a small nondisplaced fracture of his left wrist that he suffered when he was hit by a pitch in May. Top 42 Prospects: Pittsburgh Pirates | FanGraphs Baseball As FanGraphs sourced TrackMan/Hawkeye data from team personnel after the season, De Los Santos hard hit rate and peak exit velocities stood apart from most of his peers, especially when limiting the sample to the DSLs age-appropriate players. 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. Don't Count Quinn Priester Out Due to Low Strikeouts Aside from the persistent Bryan Reynolds trade rumors, the general industry sentiment is that the team is shifting from prospect collection mode and into a phase where those players start to arrive. He practically straddles the plate and was hit by 20 pitches during an injury-shortened regular season, then was somehow beaned seven more times in just 17 Arizona Fall League games. Hunter Stratton, RHP Cederlind, 27, spent 2022 recovering from Tommy John, and he had renewed soreness during his rehab, which is part of why he missed the whole year. Pirates Draft Prospect Watch: Big Weekend for LSU's Dylan Crews His fastball remains in the mid-90s but continues to underperform in terms of its bat-missing ability due to its hittable line. Sergio Campana, CF Both feel like high-floored backend or long relief types who need to walk an atypical path to an impact role. Here are the Pirates' 2023 Top 30 prospects March 1, 2023 Pirates' Chandler going all in on pitching February 28, 2023 Pirates return No. Andrew McCutchen / OF 3. Nunez started 2022 at St. Louis Double-A affiliate before being dealt to Pittsburgh as part of the Jos Quintana deal at the trade deadline. A two-way high school player, Jones was clearly a superior prospect as a pitcher, as he was one of the most electric on-mound athletes to roll through the high school ranks over the last decade. He could get a cup of coffee in 2023. When an opposing pitcher releases the ball, the scoop in Johnsons bat head is pointing at the mound with his back elbow hiked way up above his shoulder in a position that seems to defy the rules of normal human physiology. He hit his stride in mid-August with back-to-back scoreless starts in which his four-seamer averaged over 96 across a combined nine innings a high water mark for the season and a true glimpse of his upside. RotoGraphs. De Los Santos contact metrics are a hair south of average, and thats the biggest indicator that theres real risk here, but boy, there is also real ceiling. Instead, Triolo looks like hell be a superutility guy. In August of 2022, Jun-Seok announced he would skip the September KBO draft in order to sign with an MLB club right away. His on-mound athleticism enables plus long-term command projection, though for right now Harrington really only locates his fastball to his arm side. He spent more of his big league time in the outfield than at his native second base. Reports around his once-stellar defense have dimmed, and were hoping its due more to rust and lost time than to an actual regression in ability. He projects as a quick-moving no. Brennan Malone, RHP. Scouting reports are. document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function () { Despite all of that, Priester took a hit in a lot of the national prospect outlets, dropping off quite a few Top 100 lists. Oliver Mateo, RHP Scouting reports were. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Harry Ford is one of the top prospects in the Seattle Mariners organization, and he is also unique among his peers. Terrero is a compact outfielder with a well-rounded skill set and strong rookie-level line. After bouncing around many websites covering hockey, he . Still right on the cusp of graduating from prospect eligibility, Kranick made four appearances in the minors to start the 2022 season before being called up to the major league bullpen. Amid a couple of short IL stints in 2022, Selby put up impressive numbers split between Double- and Triple-A and then looked great in the Arizona Fall League. When we last saw Swaggerty for a full season of play, he was a 21-year-old whose nine home runs in 120 games was far lower than youd expect from someone with so much raw power playing in a hitter-friendly park. You can see the power and athleticism in Davis lower half throughout other aspects of his game, and its an indication that he has the ability to polish this stuff up and control the running game. Martin has plus-plus raw power and a 30-grade hit tool, not enough for first base but maybe enough for consideration overseas. From that point on, however, Triolo walked more and struck out less, such that both rates sat in the mid-teens, while flipping the slugging switch on to the tune of 13 doubles, five triples, and eight home runs over the course of the same number of games. Cheng entered 2022 coming off an incredible season in which he slashed .311/.449/.492 with twice as many walks as he had strikeouts. His delivery also creates an odd angle on a mid-80s cutter/slider, which Solometo commands to his glove side. But at other times, he had difficulty maintaining the velocity as the innings wore on, which was compounded by his ongoing command inconsistency. He maintained his patient approach in Altoona, and when the Double-A season ended, he was sent up to Indianapolis for the last five games of the Triple-A season. Its a shorter, less natural looking delivery than what Flowers had as an amateur, but hes been able to throw strikes with it. His arm action looks longer and looser than it was in his injury-shortened 2021, and his upper body appears more closed, which might be helping him hide the ball longer than before. As a high schooler, his ultra-low spin splitter seemed like the more promising pitch, but his feel for it has regressed. Injured Arms 4/5 starter. If this were a high school draft prospect, you would already know his name based purely on how explosive De Los Santos is in the batters box. Matt Gorski, OF That fact isn't apparent on his Baseball-Reference or FanGraphs pages, but for about 48 hours, Maggi, who homered to break up the Yankees' shutout bid in the ninth inning of the Pirates' 9-1 split-squad loss on Thursday, enjoyed life in the Majors. His footwork on throws to second is clunky and variable, which often impacts his throw times and accuracy, but the pure arm strength is in there. Ercolani, an 18-year-old righty from San Marino, had a velo spike during the winter and has been up to 97 mph in the bullpen recently. Spotty command and limited fastball utility push Mlodzinski into a multi-inning relief role. The pitch has natural tailing action, but Ortiz can also blow it past hitters at the letters when he wants, and his TrackMan data shows hes mixing in four- and two-seamers in the locations where theyre most effective.