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OT: Pirates Talk: That Skenes guy is okay at teh baseball

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They did just turn Luis Ortiz into Horowitz from an international perspective. Is he the best recent guy?
 
ChaosAgent said:
They did just turn Luis Ortiz into Horowitz from an international perspective. Is he the best recent guy?
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Yeah Ortiz is the best recent international guy that they've signed. Ortiz, Bae and Castro are the only international guys who they signed and also had an impact (even a small one) for the Pirates in the past couple of years.

pistolpete11 said:
Not disagreeing with you, but remember Kang? He did kill it for those couple of years.
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Kang wasn't really an international prospect, he was an established KBO hitter that came over to the Pirates. Not quite the same.

The international prospects being mentioned here are more referring to guys like Marte and Polanco, guys they signed at like 16 and developed. Since Polanco, they'd only gotten very short stints of effective play out of their international prospects. Ortiz last year and Castro in 2022 is really about it.
 
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ESPN ranks the Pirates system 20th.

www.espn.com

Ranking all 30 MLB farm systems for 2025: Which team is the new No. 1?

How bright is your favorite team's future? Here's how every organization in baseball stacks up.
www.espn.com www.espn.com

i

20. Pittsburgh Pirates ($179 million)​

Last year: 14th, $222 million

Top 100 prospects: 4

The whole organization has a different feel after the emergence of Paul Skenes. Oneil Cruz might be the only other potential star on the big league roster, but that's two more than some teams have, and Bubba Chandler could make it a trio by the middle of 2025. Konnor Griffin is arguably the prospect with the highest variance in the top 100, so he certainly could turn into a superstar; however, this system is in a brief down cycle as the big league team is full of the last couple of years of graduates. Pittsburgh might have to now start to balance competing in the short term and long term, a welcome change after six straight losing seasons.
 
I'm just trying to figure out how a guy who's played for 7 teams the last 3 seasons and is a known cancer in the clubhouse managed to get $4M from anyone. Just comical mismanagement.
 
Atrocious. Might as well have just run it back with BDLC or what I had come to prefer, which is just let Cook play every day and spell him occasionally/pivot to something else from the scrap heap if he sucks.

Pham is old, bad defensively, and would only be a kinda ok player who doesn't at all move any needle if he magically replicated his 2023 season. His projections are trash and unless I am completely misremembering, I think the cherry on top is that he's a known disliked locker room guy?

We're staring down the gun of beginning to talk about what Jones and Skenes will net in a trade for the next GM. I'll never speak another bad word about Neal Huntington in my life (as if this already wasn't basically true...).
 
Yeah Pham is projected to be about a 95-97 OPS+ guy next year, so about what he has been for the past few years. Maybe he outperforms it but it's still probably around a 100 OPS+ at best.

They really just need Yorke or Cook to break out and claim one of the OF spots. Or have a Suwinski resurgence and have him platoon with Pham or Cook. I like Yorke as a hitting prospect but I'm unsure how well his defense in the OF will be.
 
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