Were you not complaining about Super 2 stuff with Davis in the first place when he was held down in 2023? So rushed or not rushed?
I agree, he is at this point a failure of the FO. The FO sucks. Cherington sucks. But the actual reason why Davis is a bust is because he hasn't displaced a 38-39 year old Mccutchen as DH. That has nothing to do with a 3 month misadventure in the field and everything to do with missing dead red fastballs in 2024.
I don't remember saying that, but if you want to keep pressing and pressing and pressing and pressing on the same exact point about adjudicating old discussions about Henry Davis: congratulations, Henry Davis isn't good.
Whether to place blame on Davis or not on Davis is irrelevant. It is a non-issue. Saying that the Pirates don't seem to have a plan and have poor player development has nothing to do with getting Davis off the hook for not succeeding in MLB. I don't know what that would even mean, or why it would be interesting to talk about.
It also seems like it should be uncontroversial to say that sticking a player out of position while they are transitioning to MLB pitching is not exactly setting them up for success. The fact that other players in other situations did something similar is sort of besides the point, because 1) a player like Merrill specifically is an exceptional situation and an outlier and 2) it doesn't tell us anything else about the Pirates and the Pirates bad player development.
None of that amounts only to making excuses for Davis in my eyes. Similarly, the point you bring up about Davis being late on fastballs as an overriding problem is something that we can attribute to Davis so far not proving he can hack it in MLB, but also and more importantly (I would argue at least), exactly indicative of the Pirates' bad development and their mishandling of Davis in a long list of others that includes at least half a dozen other players.
They threw him into the fire of MLB pitching both having not identified the hole in his approach to high fastballs and having him play a position defensively where he clearly was not prepared or comfortable (he has innings recorded there in the minors, but a chunk of those were him moving around in games; Endy is admittedly a bit different here). Since I seemingly need to state this again to avoid misunderstanding or like I am trying to call back to old discussions I have forgotten (I was not ever trying to do this...): does this mean Davis does not deserve any blame for his current less than stellar track record in MLB? Obviously not. But I don't see how that is something worth dwelling on, given that Davis is simply one of the more loud examples of player development failure in a regime marked by basically nothing else other than a phenom pitching prospect and some nice young arm talent. At some point the player becomes a moot point.
It's too early to call a catcher a bust in their age 25/26 season. There are countless examples. He may well be a bust, but he may also have the raw tools (bat speed, power) that another player development group would be able to unlock. Things may also fall into place somehow in another 2-3 seasons, which happens a lot for catchers. Even if he took a Bart-like route, it's a failure for a number 1 pick, even one as a qualification given the BS jockeying in drafts.
The larger issue in my eyes is that we're now barreling towards the eventuality of new sweeping changes in the front office and the financially self-imposed need to trade Skenes and recoup different prospects. Davis being bad currently is a Davis problem, but it's also one cog in a broader Pirates problem, which started before Skenes even got here, and now combined with a total indifference in investing with the team, has the 2025 team bracing for a bad three weeks meaning not only no vague WC chase, but rather a shift in attention to another draft lottery and pipe dreams about how they'll have learned their lesson and truly take building seriously for 2026.
Sorry, I know that most everyone agrees with the cynical jabs at Cherington and the organization that I am including. But I don't know how else to say it regarding Davis. He has not performed well, which falls on him. But very little about his development is something that can even be described as a neutral way to pave the ground for an MLB debut. The more important thing to stay focused on in my opinion is what the development group did and didn't do as a part of setting him up to not be among the solutions for the current team, which is something that would have been possible if the front office had instituted better player development promises as their main selling point was supposed to be.
