I’ll admit that I thought a lot of the off-season conversation about Jeff Locke was a bit misguided. Locke is not a great Major League pitcher, but in his three full years in the Pirate rotation he made 81 starts and threw 466 innings with a 3.98 ERA. That’s quite an output from a fifth starter, and while Locke could sometimes nibble around the strike zone and walk too many hitters, he could also occasionally throw games like the gem he spun on the Fourth of July last year. My thought, prior to the season beginning, was that the Pirates’ problem was that it was unclear whether Jeff Locke was their third-best starter or fourth-best starter or fifth-best starter, and that his general presence in the rotation could be tolerated if bolstered by strong performances from Niese and Nicasio/Vogelsong.
Obviously his last two starts make it much harder to support that position. Locke has walked 11 batters in 7 2/3 innings those last two times out, digging himself and the Pirates holes that were much too deep to climb out of. It’s true that he got absolutely no help from his defense last night (in the disastrous four-run second inning, three of the Padres’ hits were officially listed as ‘1B to [insert infielder here]’ thanks to poor defense around the horn, from Freese to Mercer t Cervelli’), but he heaped four walks on top of that bad defense, and he couldn’t settle in after that second inning and at least eat innings from the overworked bullpen. That necessitated five innings of work from Kyle Lobstein and AJ Schugel, and combined with a long outing from Ryan Vogelsong on Monday, the Pirates will probably need to make a roster move today to deepen their bullpen to cover for their struggling rotation.
The Jeff Locke that pitched for the Pirates prior to this season could occupy a back-end rotation spot. This Jeff Locke can’t. Let’s not mince words: this is big problem for the Pirates. Up until last night’s disaster, I had the thought that swapping Juan Nicasio and Ryan Vogelsong would solve a lot of the Pirates’ problems. Nicasio, for a variety of reasons, really doesn’t look like a fit for the rotation to me through three starts; his durability isn’t great, his pitch repertoire is limited, and every trip after the his first through the lineup makes me really nervous. He might work his way into form as a starter over time, but that’s not the sort of project the Pirates do with their pitchers and it’s not really something they should be forced to have the patience for right now. Vogelsong has thrown the ball really well in the early season and he is a starter, for all of his recent faults. Nicasio’s stuff is overwhelming when it’s at its best, and the Pirate bullpen is lacking a swingman to play the role Joe Blanton did down the stretch last year. That swap has the potential to help a couple of rotation spots; it’d shore up the looming problems in the Nicasio slot, and having Nicasio in the bullpen could help Locke and Liriano when he’s in one of his funks (which he’s in right now).
They can’t make it Vogelsong has to start for Locke. That puts Locke into a horrifying swing-man combo with Kyle Lobstein, and it leaves Nicasio in the rotation to try work his issues as a starter out in front of hitters. Honestly, thinking this over last night, a Vogelsong for Locke swap is more of a patch than anything and I don’t know if it solves the club’s larger issues. Actually, if Locke isn’t a viable rotation option, then I don’t know if the Pirates have answers to their larger issues at this point in time. There’s a lot of talk about Tyler Glasnow and Jameson Taillon for obvious reasons, but I think they’re a tough sell this early in the season, even if you set the super-two issue aside. Glasnow’s career high in innings is 124 1/3, and it was set two seasons ago. He threw a total of 109 1/3 innings last year, missing some time with his ankle injury. If you try to use Gerrit Cole as a guideline for how many innings Glasnow might be able to throw this year (which is a fool’s errand, since no two pitchers are identical), Cole threw 132 innings in the minors in 2012, then 185 total between Pittsburgh and Indianapolis in 2013. Even if Glasnow were able to throw 185 (which, OK, he might be; that’s how they were building up him up prior to last year and his injury wasn’t an arm injury), Neal Huntington has said in the past that they left Gerrit Cole down until they knew they could call him up with no restrictions. That was early June. I know a lot of people think that’s a lie from Huntington to cover for a super-two decision, but I think that it’s much more likely that the Pirates build and stretch and condition their players around the super-two deadline, as opposed to just letting guys sit in the minors until a service time clock says that they’re ready (this is a fine distinction, of course, but it makes sense from the Pirates’ perspective for a number of reasons). Taillon is an even more complicated situation; I have literally zero idea how many innings he might be able to throw this year after two years off. Presumably the Pirates have a number in mind, but I don’t see any way we could guess it.
Assuming that Taillon and Glasnow can’t pitch until June and not just that the Pirates won’t use them before then, this leaves the club with precious few options. They could ride with the six they have (Cole, Liriano, Niese, Nicasio, Locke, Vogelsong) and hope that Nicasio adapts to being a starter and Liriano settles in and Niese stays solid despite questionable early peripherals. This might work, just like it seemed like it might have worked back in February, though I’m more skeptical of both Locke and Nicasio now than I was then. There are a few other guys they could give chances to; AJ Schugel was a starter in the Diamondbacks system, and has thrown the ball well in a few relief appearances with the Pirates. Kyle Lobstein is, in theory, able to start at about a fifth starter level in the same way that Jeff Locke is, in theory, capable of doing so. The Pirates also signed Justin Masterson to a minor league deal last week, but I have no idea how close he would be to being capable of pitching in the Majors. He’s been awful pretty much everywhere he’s been recently and while I won’t rule out that the Pirates could help him, I can’t imagine it’s something that would happen quickly.
Of course, when thinking about Schugel and Lobstein and Masterson, it’s worth remembering that the Pirates don’t need the back of their rotation to be Gerrit Cole. They need it to be a functional back end of the rotation. That means that they can’t walk the leadoff hitter every inning and they have to pitch out of the third inning. No matter what happens, they need the middle of their rotation to be functional, too; even if they replace Locke with a functional fifth starter, they’re going to have issues so long as Liriano and Nicasio have problems pitching deep into games.
It is, finally, worth mentioning that the season is only 15 games old. The Pirates are not fun to watch right now and I don’t see an obvious solution to the rotation problems other than, “Hope that people that look like they suck can manage to not suck between now and June,” but the calendar hasn’t turned too far and the season isn’t even 10% past us. At the very least, maybe they’ll start to score some more runs.
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