As seemed apparent earlier today, the Neil Walker trade market developed very quickly this afternoon: Joel Sherman is now reporting that the Pirates and Mets have a trade done pending medical reviews, and Ken Rosenthal is saying that it’s Walker to the Mets for Jon Niese, who popped up early this afternoon as a likely target.
This seems like a bit of an obvious deal trade to me. Niese is the odd man out in New York with their incredible pitching riches, and he’s coming off of a bad year that probably wasn’t as bad as his numbers indicate. He’s signed through 2016 for $9 million, but the Pirates will hold two team options on him at $10 million and $11 million for 2017 and 2018. Walker is in his final year of arbitration and the Pirates have a bunch of infield depth already, with Josh Harrison/Jordy Mercer/Jung Ho Kang at the big league level, Alen Hanson in AAA, and a bunch of recent middle infield draft picks from 2014 and 2015 that are going to start filtering through the minors. We can speculate all we want about how Walker’s skill-set ages both in 2016 and long-term and what sort of player Josh Harrison is, but really, putting Niese into the rotation and getting him on track fills a pretty big need for the Pirates in 2016; it gives them five starters (which is important!), and it now means they only need to add one more pitcher to cut the contribution of Charlie Morton/Jeff Locke in half for the first part of next year.
Niese is coming off of a bad year (4.13 ERA, dropped from the playoff rotation), but all of the normal things that apply to the Pirates acquiring a pitcher apply to Niese here. The Pirates’ defense is shift-heavy, which favors pitchers, and Francisco Cervelli is a great framer, which favors pitchers (though Travis d’Arnaud is a good framer, too). Niese had a 54.5% ground ball rate last year, which we know the Pirates love, and that career-high ground ball rate makes his home run spike last year (1.02/9 vs. 0.63 and 0.84 in the previous two years) look really unusual.
There is a bit of a red flag with Niese, though, since his strikeouts cratered last year (5.76/9, down from ~6.6/9 in the previous two years, and 14.7%, down from a ~17% career rate). His fastball velocity sat around 90 mph for most of his career before dropping to 88 mph in 2014, then recovered some to 89 mph last year. That’s to say that while there’s some positive signs in his ugly numbers from last year, there are also some reasons to think it might not have been a fluke. I tend to give the Pirates the benefit of the doubt in pitcher acquisitions — the one time I didn’t (JA Happ) was maybe their best reclamation project of all — so I’m happy to assume that the Pirates see things they like with Niese and feel like they can work with him, I just feel like all of this is worth pointing out. There is plenty to parse through with this deal, and obviously I’ll try to get to that over the next couple of days.
As Charlie points out, Niese is a bit like a Jeff Locke with a better track record, and I’m perfectly happy to think of him in that role. I also suspect this is a domino; hopefully putting Niese in the rotation is the first step towards not needing Locke AND Morton, and if that’s the case then maybe one of them can be moved to Texas in a Mitch Moreland trade. Matt Gajtka is reporting that the Walker trade may allow the Pirates to make a move for Scott Kazmir, which would be a very good thing. I said earlier that I had a hunch that this trade would be a domino; now all we can do is sit back and see if that’s true.
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