Are the Pirates Wasting Their Incredible Young Starters? If So, How Much?

I went to the Pirates’ RosterResource page this morning and thought the following thought: “Man, is Isiah Kiner-Falefa really going to lead off for this team? God, that’s depressing.” Not that I have anything against IKF; it’s just symptomatic of a Pirates team that seems built to do little more than participate in the coming season.

The Pirates being an afterthought is nothing new; on the contrary, it’s been the default state of affairs for most of the past 45 years. But recent developments have made this a particularly frustrating time for Pirates fans.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, there are two kinds of good players: Players you can get and players you have to have drop out of the sky for you. Like Willy Adames is a really good player, and worth the monster contract the Giants just gave him. But if he’d signed elsewhere, the Giants could’ve found another player like him.

Not so Paul Skenes.

Skenes is a demigod. And full credit to Pittsburgh for recognizing it and picking him; the top of the 2023 class was absolutely loaded, and any one of three or four players might’ve gone no. 1 overall. The Pirates brought the big right-hander to the majors some 10 months after they drafted him, and from the moment Skenes’ spikes hit a big league mound he’s been one of the best pitchers in baseball.

The best compliment I can pay Skenes is that after less than a full season in the majors, people are talking about him the way they talk about Connor McDavid or Joe Burrow or Victor Wembanyama: in terms of wasting him. If the stars align to put a player like this on your team with the first overall pick and you don’t win a title — or at least come damn close — you’ve screwed up.

So what are the Pirates doing to capitalize on this once-in-a-franchise-history break? Well, they’re filling bench spots with free agents you thought had retired years ago. I haven’t seen a Pirates team with this many holes since Lieutenant Robert Maynard’s men shot up Blackbeard’s ship off the coast of North Carolina in 1718.

As currently constituted, the Pirates are wasting their messianic pitcher. (And Skenes went to LSU, so he’s probably seen a lot of people get wasted.) And it’s worse than that; the Pirates actually have three good young pitchers under team control, with Jared Jones and Mitch Keller taking up the next two spots in the rotation.

But even if you look at this as the Three Musketeers, and not just one Musketeer, there’s a limit to how valuable a bumper crop of young front-end starters can be. A franchise pitcher just doesn’t have as much impact as a franchise quarterback or a franchise center (either kind). And unless the Pirates body-swapped Bailey Falter with prime Randy Johnson this winter, their rotation looks pretty ordinary after their top three.

Still, how good is this big three? Just for a quick-and-dirty estimate, I went to next year’s ZiPS projections for starting pitchers and picked out a three-man rotation for each team. Usually, that meant the three guys with the highest WAR totals, but occasionally I overrode that number because of injury or some other consideration.

Limiting each team to three starters cut out a lot of good players: 2024 All-Star Ranger Suárez, 2024 AL Rookie of the Year Luis Gil, Bryan Woo, Merrill Kelly, the list goes on. The Pirates did pick up both Chase Shugart and Carson Fulmer this offseason, so it’s comforting to know that Ben Cherington and I have similar taste in feisty undersized college pitchers from the mid-2010s. But that does little to reinforce their rotation.

Even if you don’t ding the Pirates for their lack of depth, their front three compares favorably to other rotations, but not as favorably as you’d think.

Skenes-Jones-Keller is good, but that trio is 10th in the league in projected WAR, and eighth in projected RA9-WAR. Let’s call it a win and a half advantage over an average top-three, and a similar deficit to the top three-headed monsters in baseball: Arizona, Philadelphia, Seattle, maybe Atlanta.

A win and a half is not a trivial thing. Staying on that quick-and-dirty path, it’s worth about $12 million. But neither is it transformative. Hey, since we have playoff odds out now, the Pirates are projected to win 78.3 games this year. If they had the median top three starters, they’d be in line to win 76.8 games.

But hey, what if ZiPS is underrating these young pitchers with little track record? Skenes projects for 3.7 WAR, which is just the seventh-best figure for any no. 1 starter in the league. Unless he gets hurt, I’d bet on him to blow that figure away, which he did in only 133 innings last year.

So let’s goose the numbers and make Skenes, Jones, and Keller the best top three in baseball. If this trio was worth the expected production of the Phillies’ top three of Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola, and Cristopher Sánchez, Pittsburgh would be in line to win 80.7 games.

How big a difference is that, really: 76 wins to 78 to 81? I guess 81 gets you to .500, which would be something of a moral victory. Is that worth spending a year of Skenes and Jones on?

This is kind of a poor man’s version of the Angels never making the playoffs when they had Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout. One or two stars don’t get you that far in baseball. We just did weeks of Félix Hernández Hall of Fame discourse; surely that should reinforce how bad a team can be even with a total stud of a young ace.

Skenes and Jones aren’t Trout and Ohtani, but they’re good enough to push an average team from the muddy middle into the Wild Card picture. What if the Pirates were merely average outside their young stars? Imagine if they were an 81-win team without Skenes instead of somewhere in the low 70s, which is what they would be without him now. Dropping Skenes in for an average pitcher would be enough to push them into the true-talent 83- or 84-win range. That’s the edge of the Wild Card picture. If Skenes is replacing a replacement-level starter, that’s NL Central favorite territory.

The advantage conferred by a rotation like this is not that big: a few wins over the course of a season. Skenes and Jones are not McDavid or Leon Draisaitl, or Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase. That’s just not how baseball works.

But the frustrating thing about the Pirates is how easy it is to get to a point in the win curve where a few wins make all the difference. You don’t have to be smart or rich — you just have to be mediocre everywhere else. When the baseball gods bestow a player like Skenes onto a team, that’s the gift: Build something unremarkable around him, and you’ll become a contender. Instead, the Pirates are relying on their savior to drag them to mediocrity. What a pity.