In the immediate aftermath of the Neil Walker trade last week, I wrote that I thought that a straight comparison of Walker to Niese was not necessarily a fair assessment of the trade. Walker, after all, will be replaced on the field and in the lineup by (mostly) Josh Harrison, while Niese will be filling a hole in the rotation. That’s important because it means that, if we use plausible-but-made-up round numbers, the Pirates trade a 2.5 win player (Walker) for a two-win player (Niese), and then replace that 2.5 win player with a different two-win player (Harrison) in the lineup, and then plug their two-win acquisition into a rotation spot that would be otherwise filled by a replacement player, the Pirates come out ahead in the win ledger, despite perceiving downgrades in comparing Walker to Niese or Walker to Harrison.
I thought this was an important point to make because by shifting the perspective slightly to team building, as opposed to player trading, it’s easy to see how you can view this as a trade that improves the Pirates, even if you accept in stone the fact that neither Harrison nor Niese will be quite as good as Walker in 2016. I would go a step further and say that I don’t think it’s written in stone that both Harrison and Niese will be worse than Walker in 2016. Harrison came back to Earth at the plate in 2015 as compared to his insane 2014, but his wRC+ was still exactly average (100). That’s not an awful year at the plate given that he dealt with both a thumb injury and the loss of a regular lineup spot. His glove is better than the increasingly immobile Walker’s at second, and so if you guess that an everyday lineup spot will improve Harrison’s numbers a bit in 2016 and that Walker’s declining 2015 numbers were indicative of an aging player (both of which are certainly guesses, to be clear, though I don’t think that they’re baseless ones), then factor in the defense, it’s not immediately clear to me that Harrison is certain to be a worse every day second baseman in 2016 than Neil Walker. If you take that, then add in the Searage affect with Niese, I think the Pirates’ strategy behind the trade becomes more and more clear, though there’s obviously some risk that any part of the trade could blow up in their faces as Niese and Harrison are both rolls of the dice, and Walker certainly could have another season like 2014 still in his tank at age 30.
There is a less apparent affect that the Walker trade has, though, and it’s on the Pirates’ infield depth. Despite all of the hand-wringing that we’ve all done about Brent Morel and the like the past two seasons, the Pirates have had incredible infield depth. They didn’t miss a beat in 2014 when their cleanup hitter/every day third baseman lost the ability to play defense, then broke his foot, because they had Harrison in the middle of a breakout season. They got better last year when Jordy Mercer and then Harrison suffered injuries, in part because they’d brought Jung Ho Kang into the mix before the season started. Trading Walker and replacing him with Harrison may not have a huge effect on the day-to-day inner workings of the ideal Pittsburgh Pirate lineup, but it makes it harder to put Kang at short if (when) Mercer struggles. It means that Harrison can’t occasionally spell Gregory Polanco in right field. It means that Pedro Florimon is the first injury replacement in the infield instead of Harrison. It creates a real depth issue in an infield that’s changed at least one starter during the season in each of their three wild card runs, and that’s a bit worrisome.
Because of this, the first thing that really caught my eye when going through the Pirates’ 2016 ZiPS projections at FanGraphs was Alen Hanson being projected as a two-win player. A lot of this value is tied up in Hanson’s defense, which is a questionable conceit (on top of the Sisyphean task of trying to apply a future UZR or DRS value to a minor league player based on minor league data in general, there’s also Hanson’s reputation for making easy plays difficult in the field, but it does sort of bring forward what the Pirates’ plan is this year.
If Hanson can play solid defense at second and third (it’s unlikely they’ll ask him to play short again, given his path through the minors and Kang’s presence on the team) and provide the Pirates with some pop (he’s projected for 44 extra base hits in 550 plate appearances), that could outweigh what’s almost certain to be a painfully low OBP to provide some value to the team. At the very least, it’d be more than we’ve seen from utility players like Sean Rodriguez and Pedro Florimon, or the replacement-level Quad-A stopgaps like Brent Morel.
At the very least, you could read the Pirates’ willingness to trade Walker as a slight tip of their hand on their opinion of Hanson. If you’ll recall, he and Gregory Polanco broke out at the same time with West Virginia in 2012, though is road to the Majors has obviously been a bit longer than Polanco’s. At the same time, he’s about a year younger and he’s coming off of a solid-if-unspectacular Triple-A debut season. That ZiPS projection for him looks awfully optimistic to my eye and the thought of Hanson being the primary back-up infielder all year makes me a bit nervous, but having only seen Hanson in person once (and being more focused on Tyler Glasnow and Josh Bell that night), I don’t want to jump to any conclusions, either.
At the very least, Hanson will be worth watching this year if the Pirates don’t sign a utility player better than Sean Rodriguez before the season starts. One of the things that bugs me every winter is pretending like rosters are set in stone at a particular date, be it December 15th or April 1st or whenever. That certainly won’t be the case for this year’s Pirates, and while a lot of focus is on Josh Bell and Tyler Glasnow, Alen Hanson may end up being just as important.
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