Morning Rundown: Pirates sign catcher Yasmani Grandal
Pirates sign potential back up catcher in 11+ yeaer vet Grandal.
With just a couple of days until pitchers and catchers report, the Pirates have made a free agent signing to help boast one of those two positions by adding former All-Star Yasmani Grandal to a one-year deal.
A former first-round pick back in 2010 by the Cincinatti Reds, Grandal has over 11 years of major league experience that’s seen him hit a career .237/.347/.426 with a 113 wRC+, 185 home runs and 565 RBI.
He put up a career year when it comes to wRC+ back in 2021, putting up a 157 with the Chicago White Sox. He drew walks over 20% of the time, hit 23 home runs and had a 3.6 WAR.
Since then, it’s been rough sledding, posting wRC+ of 68 and 80 in each of the last two years, respectively. The defense has also regressed, he was in the first and second percentile when it comes to pop time and caught stealing above average on Baseball Savant.
He was an excellent framer, however, ranking in the 72nd percentile.
While it isn’t the flashiest of signings, Grandal certainly looks to be past his peak when it comes to production, he does provide over 1,000 games of experience at catcher.
Henry Davis will try to establish himself as the everyday catcher this year, but the Pirates do have a more proven back-up/insurance policy if things go south.
There were 222 players with at least 700 PAs combined in 2022-23. Of those, Grandal ranked 213th in fWAR.
By the look of things, the Pirates seem to be screaming out that the real issue right now is catching, not pitching.
They seem to be bringing in an old pro to insure Tank and, after what I've seen that one year when they went through -like- 11 catchers, I'm okay with it.
I think Tank will catch close to half the games this year unless he does very well in which case he will catch slightly more than half. I still believe he is the second coming of Ryan Doumit.
The other thing the team seems to be saying is, we're taking a home grown approach and we have a lot of strong pitching in the system and we're not wasting money on expensive rentals when we have guys in the system who can perform better and bring the team more value.
I mean, someone has to do a comparison between what the value of a Gerrit Cole is when he comes up IN your system to what his value is when you have to acquire him. It may be that the Pirates were too cheap to even get the full value of such a pitcher.
Skenes
Chandler
Jones
Solomento
Harrington
Priester
Ashcraft
Shim
Burrows
Kennedy
Mueth
Barco
Wolf
Nicolas
Kellington
That's 2/3 of your top 25 prospects, all with good upside and most of them at AA or higher. I feel like there is enough there that SOMEBODY is gonna break through. If only 5 of the 15 do, we're still in the bonus round.
So the answer is, you need quality receivers so these guys are not suffering from an iron glove behind the plate.
Furthermore: I like this team around the diamond... I mean, Rowdy was not my idea of what we needed at 1st, but I think the team emerges from spring training with a solid starting nine.
Often, the difference between the bottom and the top is the flick of a switch. I am not suggesting that THIS much young pitching will come up and make their mark this year, but I think inside two years, we're gonna be pretty good.
Standing by my prediction: Pirates finish with more wins than last season. I say they break .500.
Go on and laugh, smart ass!
Much love to the whole crew here at BOD. Enjoy the chat very much!