Bucs on Deck: What we are watching for in 2025

Headlines to follow in 2025

Over the last few days, we have been taking a final look at 2024 with some of our favorite moments and articles from the past year. With today being the last day of the year, it seems as good a time to start looking towards the 2025 baseball season.

There will be plenty to watch in the upcoming year, but I tried to highlight some things I will be keeping my eye on over the next 365 days.

What’s the encore look like for Paul Skenes? After a historic rookie season for the first overall pick of the 2023 draft, Paul Skenes made his major league debut less than a year after signing, started the All-Star, and walked away with some hardware.

The reigning Rookie of the Year will look to top things in year two. What will that look like?

One thing to watch is his usage. Skenes never pitched on ‘normal’ days rest, costing him a few starts by the end of the season. Will they approach things the same in 2025? With the pitching depth they have added, it makes it a possibility if they get creative.

Realistically, it looks hard to repeat what he did in 2024, but the talent is there to do so, perhaps more.

Curtain Call for Andrew McCutchen? After signing to play in 2025, Andrew McCutchen is set to embark on his 17th season in the majors. He crossed the 300 home run platform this past year, belting 20 total in 2024.

Some of the metrics took a step back, which is more alarming now that he is 38 and is still limited to designated hitter duty, which might not even be on a full-time basis.

Could this be the final time we see McCutchen in a Pirates jersey? If so, it could be the last run for the most popular and best player of a whole generation of Pirates fans.

Make or Break Seasons for Lonnie White Jr./Anthony Solometo. Calling it a make-or-break season for either may be a little on the dramatic side, but it’s not far off.

This probably applies more to Lonnie White Jr. than Anthony Solometo. One has been riddled with injuries and has yet to make it out of High-A. The other will still be on pace, starting his second full season in Altoona (he played in part of a third as well).

White flashed some of the raw power and plus defense, but strikeout issues have plagued him when he’s been on the field. This past year would have been his draft year had he gone to Penn State, so he likely would be beginning in Greensboro if they had taken him in 2024.

So, it’s not bad that he is starting there, but if he were a college draft pick, you’d want him to hit his way out of there relatively quickly.

For Solometo, he has hit a wall since making it to Altoona, and 2024 was a disaster. A bounce-back year would be huge for him in 2025, when he will be 22 for the entire season.

Endy Rodriguez back from Tommy John. We saw a bit of him to close out the 2024 season, but his season ended early when he felt a tweak in his elbow while catcher.

The return rates for catchers returning from Tommy John are the lowest of any position, but it’s not unheard of. If he can return to how he was during his rookie year, that’d be huge for a team that struggled to throw out runners the previous season.

He’ll have to compete with Joey Bart for playing time, but a healthy Rodriguez should be able to beat out Henry Davis and Jason Delay for the backup spot.

Who wins the fifth rotation spot? The fact that Johan Oviedo had Tommy John right after the 2023 season ended should help him be ready to compete for a rotation spot in spring. He’ll have some heavy competition in Bubba Chandler, Mike Burrows, Braxton Ashcraft, and Thomas Harrington—arguably the four best pitching prospects in the system.

All four are or have been Top 100 prospects at one point or another. The Spring Breakout game may be a little boring if they are all fighting for a rotation spot, but it will be a healthy and fun competition to watch.

Who is the next pitching prospect to emerge? There is a chance that a massive chunk of their top pitching prospects graduate this year. So, who is in line to step up and continue things? Hunter Barco and Zander Mueth immediately come to mind. With some consistency on it, David Matoma may have a 70-fastball. It will be up to the secondary pitches.

Levi Sterling will likely be eased into things at the FCL level, but he’s a strike thrower with a plus change-up, he could move quickly up to Bradenton. Michael Kennedy would have been a sleeper pick of mine, but he was sent to Cleveland in the Spencer Horwitz trade.

You could make a case that Carlson Reed could jump straight to Double-A. With a couple of added ticks on his fastball, it could help it play even more to go along with his two strong secondary pitches.

WTM

Will Matt Hague make a difference? Obviously, the Pirates’ most pressing priority by far is to address the putrid hitting they’ve gotten throughout the organization since Ben Cherington became GM. There’s no way to say how Hague will do as a hitting coach, but as a minor league hitter, he was close to the antithesis of the wait-all-day-for-a-meatball approach the team pushed under Andy Haines. Hague was a contact-oriented hitter who had only a modest walk rate but who didn’t strike out very much and hit for gap power. What probably kept him from making it in the majors was being a corner player with only modest over-the-fence power.

It’s also impossible to say whether Hague’s hiring signals a change in approach throughout the farm system. After spending three years watching Bradenton hitters struggle with swing decisions, I certainly hope it does. It can’t be a coincidence that Hague, if he’d made it as a major leaguer, probably would have been very similar to Spencer Horwitz.

Can the Pirates develop their pitching prospect depth into pitching? The hardest step in developing players is that last one, getting them successfully to the majors. Anthony Murphy did a thorough survey of their pitching depth the other day, and it certainly looks promising.

How the Pittsburgh Pirates pitching depth currently stands

They took a big step with their rotation in 2024. In 2025, with so many pitchers on the doorstep, we’ll get a clearer idea of whether this was an actual skill or just a blind squirrel moment.

Will the Pirates’ 2024 draft focus on prep bats pay off? The Pirates took prep players with four of their first five draft picks in 2024, three of them hitters: Konnor Griffin, Wyatt Sanford, and Eddie Rynders. Termarr Johnson notwithstanding, this is the first time they’ve focused to this degree on prep bats — although, to be precise, Sanford is more of a glove-first player. The team’s track record with hitting prospects generally, and college bats specifically, is dismal. They have, however, done very well in developing prep arms. Hopefully, the change in focus, if that’s what it is, will help.

Note: To save time, I combined if we had anything overlapping. The Pirates had an aggressive approach in the 2024 draft, going prep with four of their first five picks. It will be interesting to see how he hits the ground running in their first full pro season. I expect three of the four (adding Levi Sterling) to begin in the FCL.

But with their struggles developing hitters, it is going to be interesting to see how they do.

Who will get promoted from the DSL to the FCL? I guess this isn’t one of the great events of the season, but I always look forward to finding out which players are moving up from the Dominican Summer League to the Florida Complex League. DSL stats tell us little, if anything, about the likelihood of future success, so it means more to see which guys the Pirates think are ready to move up than which guys put up nice stats at age 17 or whatever. You used to have to wait until mid-June to find out, but the FCL season has been moved up to start in April.