When I got to Bradenton last Sunday for my first spring training game, I assumed that the biggest impression that anyone would make on me all week would be Josh Bell. I saw Bell last August when Indianapolis came to Durham and barely wrote about him the next day; he squared a few balls up and hit them hard, but he sort of looked like a wire reference frame of a baseball player. He was tall, but his upper body hadn’t quite filled out and he still looked quite a bit like an awkward teenager (this picture from last year’s Futures Game captures it about right). None of that is meant as a criticism, of course; Bell was only 22 (when I was 22 I looked like someone who had, uh, taken advantage of being 21) and he was hitting, but he wasn’t hitting for much power and he didn’t look much like a first baseman.
Well, that changed this winter. When the team would walk from the Pirate compound in right field to the first base dugout, Bell was more or less all anyone would talk about. “Look at the size of that guy!” “He’s almost as big as Morse!” (false, no one could tower over The Mountain That Swings) and so on. Several people who saw him around the time I did last year or before were as staggered as I was. If you were excited by Bell’s career .305/.371 AVG/OBP split and concerned that he’s only hit 30 homers in four minor league years, well, I have a feeling that’s about to start changing.
On my last day in Bradenton, though, (Thursday), something else happened. In the first inning, John Jaso stood in against Masahiro Tanaka and made him throw a bunch of pitches, working the count full and fouling off at least six pitches. He flew out, but Andrew McCutchen stepped to the plate in his first game as a #2 hitter and drilled a pitch over the left field fence. Later on in the game, Jaso hit two line drive singles through the Yankees shift into right field. On Sunday, Jaso lead off the game with a walk, and McCutchen homered again. All of this has come paired with discussion about McCutchen batting second (you can find discussion about this anywhere, so I’ll link to Beyond the Box Score’s summary of Tom Tango’s optimal lineup in The Book, which is the basis for the Pirates considering this).
It’s hard to think of a change in approach more obvious than moving from Pedro Alvarez to John Jaso at a position. Alvarez has one season with more than 600 plate appearances in his career, and he struck out 186 times that year. For his career, he averages 177 strikeouts and 57 walks per 162 games (608 PAs). Jaso has struck out a total of 272 times in his career (1857 PAs) and his 162 game averages are 69 walks and 80 strikeouts (547 PAs). Alvarez has power that Jaso doesn’t, though; in that 2013 season in which he struck out 186 times, he homered 36 times. Jaso has 37 career homers.
It would be easy to characterize the Pirates’ offseason shift being towards contact and away from strikeouts (moving Neil Walker to the Mets and giving Josh Harrison more playing time also accomplishes that, among other things) due to the success of the Royals, but I don’t think that’s quite right. The Royals did have the best contact rate in baseball last year, but the second, third, fourth, and fifth best contact teams in baseball missed the playoffs in 2015. The Cubs had the worst contact rate in baseball and they might have ended the season as baseball’s best team. The Cardinals, Pirates, Dodgers, and Mets all wound up right around average. What the Royals did with their team contact rates was spectacular and it helped them to a World Series, but saying that strikeouts are bad and contact is better is a broad and unhelpful generalization; it’s true if you’re built like the Royals, but not if you’re built like the Cubs.
The Pirates did not have a bad offense in 2015; they scored the fourth-most runs in the National League and they had the fourth highest OBP. They did, however, strike out a decent amount (1322, fourth in the NL — note that that link above in which the Pirates are described as having an averagish contact rate normalizes the factors, and involves all 30 teams and not just the 15 NL teams) without hitting many home runs (140, ninth in the NL). The Pirates have been striking out quite a bit during their Wild Card years, but the 140 homers was a three-year low. Qualitatively, I think that more than anything contributed to the general feeling of helplessness against certain good pitchers at various points in the year. If you strike out a lot and rely on power, you’re susceptible to high strikeout pitchers, and if you don’t have as much power, the bad games can feel much worse than the team’s overall performance actually is.
In other words, Pedro Alvarez (131 strikeouts and only a .318/.469 OBP/SLG in 491 PAs) stands out as a huge contributors to the big strikeout/low OBP/not quite enough power dynamic (I’d argue you can lump Walker in here, too, though his strikeout rate wasn’t all that high last year). Alvarez specifically and the Pirates in general made it work in the past with more power and a lower OBP, but the general build of this Pirate team (the best hitters are McCutchen, Marte, and Kang, all of whom are gap power hitters and not home run hitters, and if Harrison and Polanco contribute, that’s how they’ll contribute as well) pushes the strategy in the opposite direction. On a team of doubles, you don’t necessarily need a home run to drive them in, you need a single on base in front of the double.
A lot of the discussion this winter about Alvarez and Jaso has centered around where the Pirates’ home run power will come from and if they’ll hit enough home runs. Looking at how the lineup works with Jaso at the top and McCutchen behind him in a small spring training sample though, I’m not sure they need 140+ home runs to work. Jaso aside, the Pirates aren’t really built on guys that need to walk to be useful offensively. They are, generally, built on guys that get on base because they can hit.
I hate making big predictions in these sorts of pre-season previews, but I have a hunch that the Jaso signing is going to work out quite well for the Pirates. As I’ve said a few times this winter, switching from Alvarez to Jaso (and from Walker to Harrison, to a lesser extent) is a pretty clear shift in offensive strategy, and the Pirates rarely make that sort of course-change without serious consideration first (read: Jayson Stark’s excellent article about batting McCutchen second and the Pirates’ thought process behind it).
And if it doesn’t work? Well, there’s always Josh Bell. The Pirates will probably find a first baseman eventually.
Image credit: Elsa, Getty Images
