Previewing the Pirates: Despite departures, focus of starting rotation is on build up

While the Pittsburgh Pirates spent the offseason in teardown mode, parting ways with three starters from their 2019 rotation, their focus has been on building their pitching staff back up.

After parting ways with their past two Opening Day starters in Joe Musgrove and Jameson Taillon and their leader in games started last season in Trevor Williams, the Pirates are revamping their rotation.

And proceeding with caution.

“The priorities for the Pirates, in a perfect world, we’re going to need innings,” manager Derek Shelton said. “That’s not isolated to the Pirates. We’re going to go into a 162-game season and most starters last year, if they threw a lot, they threw 60 innings, 65 innings. The jump back up to 32 starts is a ton. Monitoring workload is extremely important. I know it’s not sexy to talk about but it’s something we have to be extremely thoughtful with this year, not putting guys in harm’s way, especially on the pitching side moving forward.”

Shelton saw firsthand the setbacks can have on a starting rotation when Taillon was out while rehabilitating from Tommy John surgery and Musgrove and Mitch Keller spent six weeks on the injured list. Keller finished with more walks (18) than strikeouts (16) but finished strong by throwing 11 no-hit innings over his final two starts.

On the flip side, the Pirates slowly ramped up the innings for Steven Brault and Chad Kuhl, who were coming off injuries but ended up combining for 19 starts. They began by pitching piggyback until their arms got stronger, a strategy that ultimately was successful.

Brault bounced back from a shoulder injury to make 10 starts and throw his first career complete game in a 5-1 victory over St. Louis on Sept. 17. The lefty tossed 10 hitless innings over his final two starts, and won the Steve Blass Award as the team’s top pitcher. After missing two years with Tommy John surgery, Kuhl celebrated all nine of his starts and allowed only two hits in seven scoreless innings in his final start.

“My biggest concern coming into this year is monitoring volume for our starters because I think we’re going to see a bunch of injuries happen,” Shelton said. “Because guys are going to feel good, they’re going to want to get pushed, they’re going to want to go. We have to try to think ahead of that as much as possible. You’re never going to prevent injuries. There’s things that are going to happen that would have happened regardless. But the more innings you can accumulate, probably the better situation you’re in.”

The Pirates also slowly built up JT Brubaker from a relief role to making nine starts — he ended up pitching more innings (47 1/3) than Brault (42 2/3) or Kuhl (46 1/3) — and called up Cody Ponce from their alternate training site in Altoona to make spot starts in doubleheaders.

That leaves Keller, Brault, Kuhl, Brubaker and Ponce as the returning starters. Wil Crowe, a 26-year-old right-hander acquired from Washington in the Josh Bell trade, started three games for the Nationals last season. Chase De Jong, a 6-4 right-hander signed to a minor league deal, made a pair of starts for the Houston Astros last summer.

The onus is on Pirates pitching coach Oscar Marin to come up with a plan that protects the pitchers from injury, and Shelton said it’s “100%” a possibility that the starting rotation will go at least seven or eight pitchers deep to account for doubleheaders and injuries.

“That’s probably where most managers and pitching coaches are spending a ton of time on this winter, in terms of their conversations not only with internal people but outside by asking, how do we manage this? What is our volume?” Shelton said. “Because no one knows. We’re dealing with such an unknown world. The more depth, the more inventory you have there, the better off you are.”

Despite dealing away several starters, Pirates general manger Ben Cherington emphasized the need to build depth on the pitching staff. Cherington continues to search for veteran arms to add to a staff where the average age is 26.6 years old. Cherington hasn’t ruled out trades or free agency as a way to add more depth to his starting rotation.

“Look, if we’re sitting here at the end of March and — knock on wood,” Cherington said, tapping on wood for emphasis, “we’re at a normal spring training and Shelty and Oscar are pulling their hair out because they’ve got eight to 10 good options for the rotation, then I’m going to be really excited about that. That would be a really good outcome for us. So that’s my hope, that we have lots of good options for starting games next year with the Pirates.”