2025 Team Previews - Pittsburgh Pirates
As part of my 2025 team previews series, I go through all fantasy-relevant players on the Pittsburgh Pirates ahead of the 2025 season.
Check out the intro and team links page here.
Intro
It’s time for the Pirates preview. You probably know that I’m a Pittsburgh kid, and I got my start in baseball fanhood with the pathetic Pirates franchise. I was a bit of a lonely kid. I grew up going to a small private Christian school, so I didn’t have friends in my neighborhood. And I lived on a busy street, so I couldn’t really venture out to make neighborhood friends, either. So I spent a lot of time watching the Pirates, Penguins, and Steelers. Baseball was always the sport I was most into. I started a Pittsburgh Pirates blog my senior year of high school (luckily, I did end up moving and going to public school for high school, so I was able to make some local friends, so I wasn’t a loser much past 9th grade).
That blog began on this thing, which I’m sure nobody else remembers - MLBlogs. It was a blogging platform that MLB set up where individuals could go on and start to write about their favorite team. It would group all the blogs by team, and it would even have a leaderboard for the most popular and whatnot. It was a really cool hobby for me. I took it off that platform and ran “The ‘Mc” Effect” at mceffect.com through my college years. The “Mc” thing came because the team’s two best players were Nate McLouth and Andrew McCutchen. In 2012, something very lucky for me happened, and the Pirates brought McLouth back and ended up with seven different “Mc” players on the roster:
Andrew McCutchen
Nate McLouth
Casey McGehee
James McDonald
Michael McKenry
Kyle McPherson
Daniel McCutchen
By my counts at the time, that was an MLB record, all occurring just a couple of years after I started a blog with that name. Call it luck; call it divine providence. Whatever you want to call it, it led me to a nearly $20 per month revenue in ad dollars. I was rolling with pretty deep pockets in college.
I quit the blog just before graduating college. I figured it was time for me to focus on getting and keeping a job. And, of course, the Pirates went on to make the playoffs three consecutive years immediately after I closed the blog. I probably could have made about $30-$50 per month during that time!
The love of baseball writing stayed with me. A handful of years later I started it up again, but with a focus on fantasy baseball. And we ended up here.
The point is, the Pittsburgh Pirates are very likely the reason for this whole thing! That’s my intro.
Roster
Things have been pretty bleak for the Pirates since that 2013-2015 run (which I doubt many people even remember now), but 2025 sets up as probably the most exciting season since that time. That’s mostly just because of one man, Paul Skenes. There’s only so much one guy can do, but there are a few other exciting young pitchers around him, and at least a couple of very capable bats in the lineup.
There aren’t any World Series aspirations, or anything like that, but I don’t belive it would be shocking to see the Pirates make a playoff appearance in 2025. For that to happen, they’ll have to bulk up this lineup, at least a little bit:
By the projected wRC+ from Steamer, there are three “good” bats here (Cruz 115, Reynolds 114, Horwitz 123), and one other guy above 100 (Nick Gonzales). They will also very likely bring Andrew McCutchen back for another season. He’s a well above-average Major League hitter, but for a DH he’s pretty mediocre.
If they do find a way to acquire a 30-homer threat for the middle of the lineup, you could see them doing enough to have a good season, given the strong rotation they’re setting up with:
Those final two spots are likely to be filled by prospects during the season. There are some exciting arms that we’ll talk about at the end of this. I could see the Pirates having one of the better team ERAs in the league, so there’s not a ton of pressure on their offense.
But now, we shift to fantasy baseball, the stuff that everybody reading this is most interested in.
Hitters
Oneil Cruz
Age: 26
Pos: SS/OF
There are probably only two hitters on the Pirates that you’ll have to know for your standard leagues. Oneil Cruz is certainly one of them. He had some ups and downs in 2024, but the final line was pretty solid:
595 PA, .259/.326/.451, .775 OPS, 30% K%, 8.6% BB%, 21 HR, 22 SB
The most encouraging parts of the season were that he managed a decent batting average even with that K% and that he got the steals over 20 after swiping just five in the first three months.
Over those last two months:
.285/.372/.436, .808 OPS, 4 HR, 13 SB, 24.6% K%, 11.6% BB%
The home run pace wasn’t there in those final two months, but the steals were through the roof, and the strikeout rate came way down.
If you don’t know about Cruz, I will tell you that very few living human beings hit the ball harder than this man.
There is a clear top four in the league in exit velocity stuff, and it’s Cruz, along with Stanton, Judge, and Ohtani. He hit the four hardest balls of the 2024 season and seven of the top ten.
I have gone to one Pirates game in the last two seasons, and I was at that May 21st game when he hit two balls over 120.
The next step for him would be to get more balls into the optimal angle range. His sweet spot rate was just 34%, a pretty low figure. He also didn’t pull many of his barrels (40%), so he hit a lot of balls extremely hard that didn’t go for homers. Because of that stuff, he ranked seventh in the league in non-homer barrels:
A lot of that will likely carry over to 2025, so the correct homer projection is not 35-40, as some will want to say. That’s not to say it’s impossible; the guy clearly has that kind of power, but there are a lot of things that have to change for that to happen.
As long as he’s healthy, the floor is 20-20, and he should manage at least a .240 batting average to keep him afloat there. The team context isn’t great, but Cruz is clearly a top-50 fantasy pick again this year, and the ceiling is awesome.
One other thing you might not have noticed is that he was moved to be a centerfielder in the second half of the season, so he’ll have SS/OF eligibility for 2025 - which is very nice for a lot of different league types.
Rank
He is very similar to James Wood, who is at the top of the outfielder list right now. I also value him similarly to Brenton Doyle.
Most of the fantasy studs find themselves on good teams, so we have hardly gotten to any of the top names, so Cruz finds himself right near the top of the list for now.
Projection
639 PA, 84 R, 27 HR, 90 RBI, 21 SB, .247/.316/.454, $12.05 roto value
Bryan Reynolds
Age: 30
Pos: OF
We have seen a lot of B-Rey over the years. Since 2021, he ranks 11th in the Majors Leagues in plate appearances. He has also been quite consistent in his fantasy production.
2021: 93 R, 24 HR, 90 RBI, 5 SB, .302 AVG
2022: 74 R, 27 HR, 62 RBI, 7 SB, .262 AVG
2023: 85 R, 24 HR, 84 RBI, 12 SB, .263 AVG
2024: 73 R, 24 HR, 88 RBI, 10 SB, .275 AVG
He’s still right around the prime years, so we should not be expecting a decline due to physical factors. The expectation for Reynolds is pretty clear.
The way things could change is if the Pirates finally put together an above-average lineup. We could then see Reynolds flirt with the 175 R+RBI mark, which he has been short of in recent years. There’s a little bit higher of a chance they spend some money for a big bat or two this offseason, with their pitching staff shaping up extremely well, although I doubt anything big happens.
You don’t draft Reynolds for league-winning upside, but he is a very safe option to take as your second or third outfielder.
I don’t think I would be adding anything useful by going any further into it; we know who Reynolds is - and the projection will likely be pretty accurate.
Rank
Projection
679 PA, 91 R, 25 HR, 80 RBI, 11 SB, .264/.340/.451, $11.67 roto value
Joey Bart
Age: 28
Pos: C
Bart signed on with the Pirates early in the year after an injury to Yasmani Grandal, and he earned his keep. He forced his way to being the team’s primary catcher and even made some starts at DH late in the year.
278 PA, .265/.338/.466, .804 OPS, 13 HR, 0 SB
That was a 21 PA/HR, which would be good for a homer total in the mid-twenties for a catcher. It was good.
But how believable is a < 300 PA sample from a guy who hasn’t been able to keep a job prior to last year? Let’s take a look at some of these advanced numbers from his last three seasons.
2022: .210 xBA, .291 xwOBA, 38% K%, 10% Brl%, 62% Cont%
2023: .201 xBA, .230 xwOBA, 24% K%, 6% Brl%, 72% Cont%
2024: .247 xBA, .332 xwOBA, 26% K%, 9% Brl%, 74% Cont%
The guy has never seen even 300 PAs in a single season, so you can’t say he’s been given a full shake and failed. I would call that a good sign for him since we don’t have a long history of him failing and a half-season worth of success to depend on.
The raw power is for real. His bat speed was way up there, above the 75th percentile, and he posted a super high 107.6 90th-percentile EV. The biggest positive aspects of the profile above might be the improvements in contact rate and strikeout rate.
There’s little doubt that Bart will be the Pirates’ opening day catcher. If he struggles early on, there’s a small chance he could lose the job to one of these young guns (Endy Rodriguez or Henry Davis). I would not call him a safe pick by any means, but I do think he has legitimate 25-homer potential, and you can’t say that about many guys at the catcher position.
Rank
I’ll say it again: the toughest part of this whole process for me is integrating catchers into the rest of the player pool. The closest catcher comp I have right now is Keibert Ruiz. At a per-game level, I would take Bart, but Ruiz has playing time locked in, and Bart surely does not.
Projection
474 PA, 49 R, 14 HR, 56 RBI, 2 SB, .231/.305/.377, $5.34 roto value
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