Pirates Insider Podcast, Episode 44 (7/17 first-half offense)

The turnaround enjoyed by the Pirates offense has been impressive. What has keyed it? And how stark have the differences been? Jason Mackey breaks down that, as well as some incredible individual player changes that we've seen.

Transcript

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All right, good morning, everybody. Welcome into the Pirates Insider Podcast. I am your host, Jason Mackey. 10 to 15 minutes of Pirates Talk coming your way in this space every single day. Thanks so much for finding us. The Pirates Tonight started a series against the Cleveland Guardians. Finally, we have baseball back, progressive field. Been a while since I've been here. Love this park. Cleveland's such an underrated city. Ricky Vaughn makes me think of Major League all the time, every time I'm here. But uh not going to talk about pitching, actually gonna talk about offense. Maybe I should have referenced Pedro Serrano. Um, but true story, and you can read this story at pirates.com right now, and it's 10 numbers that highlight the Pirates' massive offensive turnaround. Um, and that's what I spent most of the all-star break thinking about. I know Paul Skeens and Braxton Ashcraft represented the Pirates, and that's great. Um, it was wrong, and we can say that now. Um, somebody from we we said that before, actually, that's a lie. Uh, but somebody from the Pirates offense should have represented the team. They should have had an opportunity. It's it's Major League Baseball dropping the ball. In my opinion, every market should have somebody playing in the game. Um, it's nothing against Ashcraft. I'm glad that he got to go and his first half was was rewarded, but um, they should have had somebody there playing. And it's also an opportunity to talk about things. It's an opportunity to talk about Brian Reynolds back to his all-star form, if that's what you pick. Or, you know, maybe Brandon Lau. He would have been a great selection. But uh anyway, true story on Tuesday. I'm there with some time to kill between media availability and the field opening for batting practice, and uh just kind of hanging out in the press box. And, you know, my mind kind of is wandering to some of the stark differences that we've seen offensively, knowing that the Pirates have scored 516 runs at the break. That's the most they've ever scored at the break ahead of 1999, and I think it's 56 more than that group scored. Um, I this offense, in my lifetime, we've not seen anything like it. Now I'm 42 years old. Um, you know, people who watch the lumber company may have a different opinion, and that's great. But um, in terms of Pirates teams that I grew up really following, I got nothing. And what we're seeing this year, the turnaround from last year, let's not lose sight of this. This has been really good. And on a lot of fronts, Ben Charrington deserves a lot of credit. I know when I was in my old job at the Post Gazette, uh, my job was to criticize where appropriate. And I was critical of their offense because it wasn't very good. Um, so if you're gonna criticize, praise, where warranted. And it warrants it right now. I in a way I can't even believe what we're seeing. The Pirates in 92 games match their home run total from last year. That's crazy. Uh, but anyway, I wanted to go through a little bit and kind of audio form some numbers and trends that we've seen so far this season with the Pirates. It it will blow your mind some of these numbers. And this isn't a comprehensive list, it's not all of them. There's a lot out there. If you can dig on one, find it, that's awesome. Um, but the things that stand out to me the most, um, OPS Plus is a stat that I cite often. Um, I use OPS Plus and WRC Plus. It's one of those, you know, makes me think of Moneyball a little bit where you say we're trying to get something down to one number. And that's kind of what you're trying to do with OPS Plus. 100 is considered league average. So if somebody has an 82 OPS OPS plus, I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but um, if it's like 82, that's considered about 18% below average. Let's say it's 111. Uh that's 11% above league average. So you get the idea of what I'm saying. So last year the Pirates had one player with an OPS plus that was considered above average. That would be Spencer Horwitz. And the line I drew there was 100 plate appearances. Um, this year they have 10. It's and that's that's sort of the point in of what I wrote. Like every one of these stats, except for maybe one or two where it's just like good. You know, it really makes you think, like, my goodness, how did this even happen? Um, but where I skipped ahead a little bit, WRC plus is another one, and that's a way to look at what the offense has done writ large, you know, talking about every player, it's all baked into something. If you have an exactly league average offense, you're at 100. The Pirates had a WRC plus last season of 82, 18% below league average. This year, it's 111. That's a 29-point swing. That's the biggest in Major League Baseball. Go figure. I took the numbers from last year, compared them to the numbers from this year. The team that's second, Colorado Rockies, plus 18. And I'm not sure anybody's confusing them with an offensive juggernaut. They also play in course field. Uh, we were always going to see some inflated numbers, but a 29-point swing in WRC plus. That's nuts. Um, I knew Brian Reynolds was hitting heat this season. I didn't know he was hitting it this well. Um, I looked at his performance against four-seam fastballs this year, and that's one of those stats that just sort of starts out anecdotal. It's no, you know that it's something that you've seen, but then the numbers back it up. There's a run value of 13 for Reynolds when facing four-seam fastballs. Uh, that's very good. And here's a little bit of context. Last season, he had a run value, and this is according to baseball savants, one of those fancy sites that has a bunch of stats that older people get mad when we cite too much, but um, he had a run value of negative two. He basically performed very, very poorly against four-seam fastballs. That number was ranked tied for 215th. That's how bad Reynolds is. This season, his 13th, or his run value of 13, only seven hitters in all of Major League Baseball have been better against any single pitch. Think about that. Reynolds is absolutely annihilating fastballs. Loves it, loves to hit heat. This isn't as much of one. This is one of the minor ones, but I've noticed the Pirates swinging more, being more aggressive. That's part of the plan with Matt Haig and the hitting group. They're swinging at the first pitch 34.1% of the time. That's up from 31.6 last year. That ranking, they're the fifth most aggressive team on first pitches this year. They were 17th last year, but that is just kind of bearing out some of that aggressiveness we've seen. So they've hit balls harder too. That's another point to make. The Pirates have hit 1,015 balls at 95 miles per hour or harder in 2026. Only five teams have more. Last year they hit 1,625 balls at 95 or more to rank 25th. So when you talk about quality of contact, aggressive contact, hard contact, the Pirates are night and day better. And it's not just two guys. Last year they basically had two guys, you know, making consistent hard contact, at least compared to the rest of the league and Brian Reynolds and O'Neill Cruz. This year they have five players in the top 103. Reynolds is 31st, Lau is 43rd, O'Hearn is 76th, Nick Gonzalez is 86th, and O'Neill Cruz is 103rd. Obviously, O'Neal would be a lot higher if he wasn't out with injury. I mentioned this on yesterday's podcast, but talking specifically about O'Neal Cruz, I've been impressed with what he's done against left-handed pitching. We've made a lot about that. Hit 102 against it last year. He's hitting 312 this year. His slugging percentage has jumped up over 500. He's also around that 506 against breaking balls. And that's something O'Neill Cruz, who's criticized a lot, left-on-left matchups, but also swinging wildly at breaking stuff. He's gotten a lot better. Now they're still swinging missing in his swing. There's still too much strikeout. I get that. Um, it's not a perfect finished hitter, but he has made a lot more hard contact this season and just slugged a lot more on breaking stuff. This next one, this is my favorite stat of anything that I looked up. I couldn't believe it. So the Pirates since 2020, they've had 11 players with an 800 OPS or better. And that's of guys with at least 100 played appearances. Seven of those have come this season. Isn't that nuts? Seven of 11 times they've had a guy with an OPS of 800 or better since 2020 have come this season. As Marilyn Valdez, Reynolds, Andy Rodriguez, Spencer Horwitz, Ryan O'Hearn, O'Neill Cruz, Brandon Lau. I'll give you a dollar if you can guess the other ones, you probably can't. I couldn't. Brian Reynolds twice in 2021 and 2022, Adam Frazier in 2021 with a short amount of played appearances, and Yoshi Setsugo was the uh the deep dive there. But uh players with an 800 OPS or better, the Pirates currently have seven. That's pretty nuts. Here's another one for you. As we work down our list, these are numbers that'll make your eyes pop whenever looking at the Pirates' offensive transformation. They're currently averaging 5.3 runs per game. At that current pace, they're going to eclipse their 2025 total and runs scored by July 1st. Or July 30th. Excuse me. We already passed July 1st. Um so basically the Pirates are going to eclipse last year's total in terms of runs and home runs by August. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. Their OPS, this is tougher to rank, but it's jumped over 100 points, 655 to 768. That last number is second. Another number that I cite often is wins above replacement. I go back and forth between baseball reference and fan graphs on that, but I was looking at fangraphs specifically. The Pirates have accumulated 15.5 war from position players this season. That's very good. It's a fifth most in Major League Baseball, extremely respectable. Last season, their position players totaled just 6.6 F war. That was the third fewest. It is absolutely crazy. They have an entire lineup, nine players worth at least one more. That's more than twice as many for last year. So I'm throwing a whole bunch of numbers at you. Maybe you want to listen to this podcast back. I don't know, but it just is crazy to me how much we've seen that has changed. The last one, it's home run based. The Pirates currently have six players with at least ten homers. They have two more with eight. That's Henry Davis and Marcelo Zuna. If those guys get to double digits, I mean, and Connor Griffin's there with five, he probably would be if he was healthy. You're talking about nine guys, an entire lineup with double-digit home runs. Last year they just had five the entire year that Goppel got to double digits. They should also have four with twenty or more homers. If you look at 20 or more homer seasons over the past three years combined for the Pirates, they've had five. They could have four in this year alone. So anyway, you've watched it. Um now you listen to a whole smattering of numbers. Read the story, pirates.com. Uh, but the offensive turnaround has really, really been something. We'll hope the Pirates continue that this weekend in Cleveland, next week in New York. Thanks so much for listening to this podcast. Thanks for listening all week. Really appreciate it. We made it through the All Star Game. We have baseball back. Very excited. Hope you can uh check this podcast out. Like it, download it, build it into part of your routine. And I'll talk to you Monday. Pirates Insider Podcast. I'm Jason Mackey.