Morning Rundown: Baseball is back! Brandon Woodruff returns to the Milwaukee Brewers
First Spring Training game of the 2024 season takes place on Thursday, Brewers bring bck Woodruff
With the San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Dodgers set to start the 2024 season in Korea, they also get to kick off the Spring Training schedule.
The two divisional rivals will face off in Arizona, with the game expected to start around 3:10 pm ET.
Gavin Stone and Joe Musgrove are the current projected starters for the game.
10 more teams play on Friday, including the Dodgers facing the Padres again. The Boston Red Sox and Minnesota Twins will play local colleges, Northeastern (Boston) and the University of Minnesota.
The Pittsburgh Pirates open up their Spring schedule on Saturday against the Minnesota Twins in Fort Myers. There is no current broadcast available for the game.
Sunday will be their first game at Bradenton, where they will face the Baltimore Orioles at 1:05 pm ET.
After being non-tendered earlier in the offseason, the Brewers have brought back right-handed pitcher Brandon Woodruff on a multi-year deal featuring a buyout and mutual option.
Most of the money will be tied up in that final year, as he will be paid $2.5 million this year and $5 million in 2025.
Woodruff, 31, has spent his entire professional career with the Brewers, getting drafted back in 2014.
He has a 46-26 record in the majors, which includes a 3.10 ERA that spans 680.1 innings pitched.
The Athletic released an article on Wednesday on the Pirates, entitled “Why the Pirates keep losing: ‘Comfortable being mediocre’“
A couple of quick thoughts on the article;
A lot of this stuff isn’t new.
That doesn’t make it better or mean we should completely ignore it as ‘old news.’
If you’ve watched the Pirates enough over the last couple of years, you can see certain areas in which they’ve struggled, such as the draft and getting players acclimated to the majors being among them - both addressed in the article.
It doesn’t paint the kindest of pictures, and a lot of it is fueled by a topic that most are area of.
On the plus side, there’s still time to turn things around.
This off-season has been the most ideal one coming off a 75-win season, and it seems like the team will have to rely on a large number of players either taking a big step forward in their development or re-finding their game they’ve struggled with recently.
But they do have some incredibly talented pitchers on the way that could help.
Things aren’t over yet, but since much of this feels the same, we will have to see it translate on the field first.
With Spring Training games right around the corner, here’s a quick reminder that you can get 20% off of a yearly subscription until the end of the month.
Not only does a subscription get you access to our top 25 prospect list that comes with full player write-ups, but it also gets you access to my video breakdowns throughout the season and as any of my live coverage of the minor league affiliates.
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Every Monday during the off-season and Spring Training we run our weekly mailbag article, where I answer all of your questions. If you want to participate, you can comment below with ‘mailbag’ written at the top or email me at bucsondeckqa@gmail.com.
Either way I will get to you, but email is easier to track and not get lost in the shuffle.
I look forward to answering your questions!
5 Year Extension for Keller! (Jeff Passan)
Problems cited as "the draft and getting players acclimated to the majors" is hard for me to understand. The Pirates are absolutely loaded with excellent prospects who we have drafted and developed over the past 4 or 5 years. Of our top 4 infielders to start 2024, 2 were drafted by the Pirates (Hayes and Triolo) and 2 are IFA's who we got in Trades (Cruz and Peguero). Hayes and Triolo have been fully developed by the Pirates and Cruz and Peguero were almost fully developed by the Pirates. In our OF Suwinski and Reynolds were received in Trades, but their development was finalized by the Pirates - IIRC they both came as AA players. Henry Davis drafted and fully developed by the Pirates to date, and Endy Rodriguez (injured) an IFA in trade almost fully developed by the Pirates.
In the last 4 or 5 years the Pirates have drafted and developed pitching that is the envy of the other 29 MLB teams. We have others drafted early - Gonzales is a good example of a player who has issues, but is still working at getting better. With the infield set (IMO), and TJ to be at AA in 2024, Gonzales at age 25 needs to be used possibly in a trade to help get this team a CF. Possibly the same with Bae, but he is a VG leadoff hitter with base stealing speed, and can also play CF. Gorski is another example, but I doubt he has any trade value at this point.