The best problem in baseball, general manager Neal Huntington remarked earlier this month, is a surplus of starting pitching. He concluded, “I don’t think anybody ever has that.”
That certainly was the case in 2016 when the Pirates deployed 14 starters. This season is a different story. Six starters have covered 130 games. All were on the Pirates’ opening-day roster.
Problem or not, the Pirates have a bottleneck in their system. They have had starting depth stored at Class AAA Indianapolis, where Steven Brault and Tyler Glasnow possessed sub-2.00 ERAs while Nick Kingham, Clay Holmes and Drew Hutchison stayed sub-4.00, but have not needed much. The Pirates rotation has not shifted since Glasnow was bumped in June.
“It’s a good lesson in humility and patience,” said Brault, a 25-year-old left-hander who made seven starts for the Pirates in 2016 but has been summoned to the majors three times since mid-July yet pitched sparingly, and only in relief. “You’re going to build maturity. You have to realize it’s not what you’re doing that’s wrong. Sometimes there’s just not a spot.”
Opportunities exist elsewhere, not in the rotation. The bullpen is in constant flux, with Angel Sanchez’s addition Wednesday marking the 17th reliever to join the ranks this season. The Pirates promoted Brault this past week. They plan to park him in the bullpen for now, working as a lefty long reliever. Will that remain his role down the road? That’s a decision for a later day.
One decision of many.
Forecasting the future of the Pirates rotation seems a fool’s errand. With the five current starters — Gerrit Cole, Ivan Nova, Jameson Taillon, Chad Kuhl and Trevor Williams — all under club control through the 2019 season, Huntington sorely needs solutions for this wave of pitching prospects, because another wave, led by Mitch Keller, is close behind.
Among the options are trades and shuffling starters, such as Brault, to the bullpen. The logjam could be alleviated if the Pirates deal Cole, whose salary will soar these next two seasons, to shore up other positions, but that would undoubtedly weaken the 2018 rotation. Out of options, Kingham could be traded or could crack the opening-day roster next season. Hutchison, earning $2.3 million this season, is a prime candidate to be non-tendered this winter.
There also is a chance the situation will settle itself. Clarity may come in September, when Glasnow likely will receive a few starts to gauge the progress he made in three months.
“We’ll figure it out,” Huntington said. “When that day comes, that’s a great theoretical question. The practical answer is we’ll figure out when we get to that point in time.”
For the pitchers, the waiting game will continue. When Brault was traded to the Pirates as a player to be named later in the Travis Snider deal in 2015, he joined a stockpile of starting pitching prospects. He began the 2016 season in the Indianapolis rotation alongside Taillon, Glasnow, Williams and Kuhl. A year later, those four were on the Pirates opening-day roster.
The trick is to reframe your mindset, Brault said, and “you’ve got to be resilient.” He admitted he wasn’t right for a rotation spot during spring training, and so he made use of his starts at Indianapolis to adjust and improve. Despite the fixes, he was blocked, stuck in Indianapolis.
“It’s a weird dynamic to get around,” Brault said. “It’s just where we’re at. It’s a good problem for the organization. The truth is baseball has made it so there’s only so long it can hang around. Options run out. Right now, that’s what it’s going to be. Something is going to give.”
Cole remembers that feeling. Now nearing his 27th birthday Sept. 8, Cole has made 121 starts in his Major League career, already almost three times the number of starts he made in the minors. But there was a time when the former first-overall pick was on pins and needles, anxious for his chance to break onto the Pirates roster and, ideally, into the rotation.
Back then, Cole still was fresh off a high-profile, high-stakes college career at UCLA. In the minors, Cole said, he couldn’t wait for baseball games to “carry some weight” again.
“I just wanted to be up here so bad,” he said. “I didn’t really worry too much about performance. I was trying to focus on getting better, understanding that whenever there was an opportunity, it would happen. It’s important to keep that in perspective, because you’re so hungry. I was just really looking forward to pitching and to wins and losses actually mattering.”
Cole smiled, thought briefly and restated the last sentence.
“You know what I mean ‘mattering,’ ” he said. “It matters to them down there because you would much rather win than lose in the minor leagues. But winning, selling out all the time, being in a position to be in a postseason pennant-race type deal. That’s what I wanted.”
When Cole debuted in 2013, the rotation was steered by veterans A.J. Burnett and Francisco Liriano. Something Cole drew from them, as well as Edinson Volquez and J.A. Happ down the road, is their consistency. Cole is still young, so it’s that example, rather than words, he hopes to pass on to the young pitchers climbing and waiting patiently in the Pirates organization.
“I remember every time A.J. took the ball it was six, seven innings and a chance to win every time,” Cole said. “More often than not, he dazzled. … It was like no matter what, whether it was going to be an exceptionally good game or just an all-around good game, [the veterans] did their job every single time. I was just enamored by the consistency. That’s what I shoot for.”
Stephen J. Nesbitt: snesbitt@post-gazette.com and Twitter @stephenjnesbitt.
First Published: August 27, 2017, 10:00 a.m.