2024 Team Previews: Pittsburgh Pirates
Going through all 30 teams, looking back at 2023 and ahead to the 2024 season through a fantasy baseball lens.
Welcome back to the 2024 team-by-team previews and rankings series! Become a paid sub today to get the full series along with 2024 season-long projections, dashboards, tools, rankings, and so much more!
Introduction & Links to All Teams Here
If this is your first time visiting the MLB Data Warehouse, learn more about it here.
Pirates Intro
We waste a lot of time in modern culture. It seems like for a lot of people, the main goal of life is just to enjoy yourself as much as possible. And a lot of the enjoyable stuff in life is completely meaningless.
The meaningless thing that I’ve wasted the most time on in my life is undoubtedly the Pittsburgh Pirates. I grew up just about 20 miles outside of the city, and for whatever reason had an early interest in baseball. Many a night as a kid I spent watching those awful 1990’s and 2000’s Pittsburgh Pirates teams.
Quite fitting and hilarious, the song that is playing on Spotify right now is “Wasted On You” but Morgan Wallen.
Wasted on you, all of this time and all of this money.
He’s talking about a girl that dumped him, but I’m talking about the freaking Pittsburgh Pirates.
That said, I did make the most out of my Pirates problem. I started a Pirates blog senior of high school and ran that for four years through college, which was quite a lot of fun and kept me active in researching and writing stuff while continuing to feed my love of baseball stats which eventually would turn into this successful blog! So it’s all good.
Here I am at 2009 Opening Day:
Here is a horribly blurry picture of the Jolly Roger I hung in my college dorm room.
You’ve gotta love growing up with social media, you have access to all of these super lame and embarrassing memories!
So here we are, it’s 2023 and I’m still highly interested in the Pirates. As I talked about in the White Sox intro, you can never really escape something like that, but luckily for me I’ve been able to detach my emotional state completely from the team. It’s setting up to be another year where I’m really into them in April and May and then by June I’ll just completely stop paying attention to them after they’re in the pits once again.
There is always room for negativity, but I will say that that team enters 2024 in much better shape than they have since probably around 2017. For awhile there, there wasn’t anything resembling a younger core of players, but now we can see something here with Cruz, Reynolds, Hayes, Keller, and then hopefully Davis and Skenes prove to be solid big leaguers at some point this year or next. So there’s reason for interest, and this is probably the most interesting year for Pirates fantasy players in quite some time as well. Let’s get into it!
Hitters
Oneil Cruz
Age: 25
Pos: SS
He made it only 40 plate appearances into 2023, which was a huge blow to a Pirates team that had an outside-shot at the division early on. So we’ll have to just look at his 2021-2023 sample, here it is:
410 PA, .237/.302/.449, 19 HR, 33.7% K%, 8.5% BB%, 14.3% Brl%, 49% GB%
Power and speed are certainly not a concern for Cruz, who was near the top of the max boards in both facets of the game in 2022. He’s a freak of an athlete with an easy 20-20 floor to his game if he can stay healthy.
The downside, as is so often the case, is the strikeout rate. His 65.2% Contact% since 2022 is near the worst in the league, and only 14 players have worse strikeout rates than him when filtering to 400+ PA.
In the short sample of 2023, he did show an improved 70% Contact% and 20% K%, but we’re talking about just 40 PAs there so it’s extremely hard to trust that those marks are meaningful. Regardless, it’s better to have improved on something in a small sample than to have not. It’s not ridiculous to think he get the strikeout rate around or under 30%, and that would be huge for him and his statistical output.
There are plenty of question marks with this guy, and given the frame it wouldn’t be surprised if he’ll end up being an “injury-prone” type guy. But even with the question marks, like I said, I think 20-20 is a legitimate floor if he can play 140+ games, and that makes him a pretty clear top 70 or so pick.
Upon further review here, Cruz is usually going in the 80-100 range, so it’s a pretty appealing price to me.
He certainly has the upside to turn in a 2024 season that makes him a first-rounder in 2025, so we have to bake that into his projection and rank.
I think we’re deep enough into this series (about 10 teams in) to start doing the comps and rank-arounds, so at the end of every write-up I’ll give you names of a player or two I’m ranking them next to.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: C.J. Abrams
JA Projection: 586 PA, 89 R, 27 HR, 65 RBI, 29 SB, .236/.303/.449, .752 OPS
Bryan Reynolds
It was an extremely hot start to the season for Reynolds after he got his big contract extension, and then he did basically nothing for a couple of months, but he had a nice second-half and finished the year with a more than respectable line.
640 PA, 85 R, 24 HR, 84 RBI, 12 SB, .263/.328/.460, 21.6% K%, 8.0% BB%
There is ~nothing~ fantastic in the profile, but there is also ~nothing~ bad in the profile. He is above average across the board.
A dozen steals aren’t going to make your day in the current climate, but it’s not a total that hurts you either.
He makes a fine amount of contact and has very good bat skills to keep his barrel rate up despite that the fact that he doesn’t swing the bat overly hard.
He’s not a guy you look at physically and expect 25+ homers, but again - the bat skills are very good, and he lines up pretty nicely here:
So you see the consistency in what I’m saying here, this guy is just very solid across the board without being amazing at anything.
I think the price will drop a bit further on Reynolds this year, and you might end up being able to get him outside of the top 100 picks.
He’s a safe pick, and is absolutely locked into the #2 or #3 hole in an improving Pirates lineup. If Cruz stays healthy and some other young guys step up, we could see a 180 R+RBI season for Reynolds with another homer total in the mid-twenties and double-digit steals. That’s a solid outfielder. He’s not someone to reach for in drafts, but he’s a perfectly solid pick if you’re in need of an outfielder after round six or so (depending on league size, of course).
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Lane Thomas, Nolan Jones
JA Projection: 674 PA, 100 R, 26 HR, 86 RBI, 13 SB, .273/.351/.471, .822 OPS
Jack Suwinski
Age: 25
Pos: OF
Suwinski had one of the most interesting seasons in the league last year. The word “interesting” here has a connotation that is about 40% good and 60% bad.
He’s a Nolan Gorman-type hitter, so think back to the Cardinals write-up. When Suwinski is at the plate, he has one thing in mind - hit a ball very hard in the air. And boy did he get the ball into the air:
His 36% FB% was seventh-highest in the league, his 15.7% Brl% was 14th-best, however it came with a 32% K% which was seventh-highest among qualified hitters.
The one thing that separates him a bit from the other swing-for-the-fences types is he stole 13 bags, so he didn’t hurt any fantasy teams there. He didn’t play every day, and sat a lot against lefties, and went through some absolutely dismal streaks - but when the dust was all settled he got to a pretty decent counting stat line:
534 PA, 63 R, 74 RBI, 26 HR, 13 SB, .224/.339/.454, 32% K%, 14% BB%
The other thing that we don’t usually see from the empty power guys are high walk rates, and he was one of just 17 players with a walk rate at or above 14%.
So lots of walks, lots of strikeouts, but a good amount of homers with RBI & steals total that don’t tank your team by any means.
You can do a lot worse than Suwinski, and that’s assuming there’s no further improvement in 2024 for a guy in his age-25 season. I think the ceiling is 30 homers with 90 RBI and a dozen steals, but there’s probably no hope for a decent batting average. He could be a platoon guy again if he continues to really struggle with lefties (.564 OPS, 37% K% career against lefties), which makes him less appealing in those weekly lineup leagues.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Luis Rengifo, Brandon Nimmo
JA Projection: 476 PA, 61 R, 24 HR, 66 RBI, 11 SB, .225/.335/.454, .788 OPS
Henry Davis
Age: 24
Pos: OF
The main question that we need answered for fantasy purposes is if/when Davis will get catcher eligibility. If he had catcher eligibility right now, he’d be someone that should be drafted in all situations - but as an outfielder, he’s a bit more borderline for shallow leagues.
Edit: The news out of Pittsburgh was that the plan is for Davis to play a lot of catcher in 2024, and that was even before the Endy Rodriguez injury. Davis will almost surely gain catcher eligibility in April or early May depending on your league settings.
He obliterated minor league pitching last season:
250 PA, .306/.454/.561, 12 HR, 10 SB, 1.015 OPS
But, of course, he struggled with the transition to the Majors:
255 PA, .213/.302/.351, 7 HR, 3 SB, 27% K%, 10% BB%
The contact rate wasn’t awful at 73%, but he couldn’t find the barrel zone with great frequency:
Overall there wasn’t anything fantastic in the profile, but he handled himself well enough to avoid looking terrible in any of our preferred categories.
He has very good swing speed (max velo 113, 41% hard-hit%), so I feel pretty good about him being an above-average home run hitter at some point, but it’s hard to say if that can happen in 2024 with less than a half season of Major League PAs under his belt.
I don’t think the upside is super high on him, but I do think he has a higher floor than a lot of these rookies/second-year player.
Davis gaining catcher eligibility will be huge for his fantasy stock. He’s probably not a top 50 outfielder, but to me he’s a top 12 catcher, which makes him draftable in most leagues.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Logan O’Hoppe (catcher comp), Taylor Ward (OF comp)
A note on the projection here. The toughest players to project are the ones who have about a half of a season in the Major Leagues. It makes it really tough to trust their Major League data, but it’s also not wise to ignore it. With Davis, most of this projection is powered by what he did in that small Major League sample. That leaves it to be a pretty poor projection, but given the minor league track record and the clear talent he has, I expect him to beat this projection pretty easily.
JA Projection: 466 PA, 49 R, 12 HR, 51 RBI, 10 SB, .228/.330/.374, .703 OPS
The rest of the post is behind the paywall. Subscribe today to get this full series along with my 2024 projections, rankings, and much, much more!