Pittsburgh Pirates 2023 Service and Option Breakdown

Ethan breaks down service time and remaining options for the Pirates after the 2023 season.

With the season officially in the rearview mirror, it’s now my favorite time on the baseball calendar—the offseason. That means one of the first items on my personal agenda is updating my spreadsheets, with service accrued and options used the first aspect to roll over into 2024.

I’m including my personal count of service time here, as official counts are more granular and require knowing when a transaction is entered into eBIS to get the counts exactly correct. Typically, the difference is just a few days here and there, so it doesn’t matter one way or the other—unless the count is right around a whole number, which happened for one particular player that I will point out.

Here are the complete lists:

Players who accrued a full year (172 days), along with their career service time to date:

Next, here are players who accrued a partial year, along with how many days and their career service time to date:

Just a few notes regarding service for the season:

As I mentioned, Borucki’s official count is actually over 5.000 years of service, meaning he has one year of contractual control remaining, not two.

At 2.135, Joe is safely in Super 2 range. Actually, I recently calculated what the Super 2 cutoff is likely to be, coming up with 2.118 and 26 players qualifying, with Joe obviously falling into that bucket.

The rest of the Pirates’ arbitration class figures to include Keller, Brubaker, Bednar, and Andújar, even though he’s probably the most likely nontender candidate.

Finally, two players who accrued service this year but aren’t listed—Chase De Jong and Duane Underwood Jr.—have already used their right to declare Article XX(D) Free Agency—the opportunity to hit free agency early as players who turned down the right to elect during the season after being outrighted multiple times in their career or having more than three years of service at the time of an outright. De Jong was the former, while Underwood Jr. was the latter, and Owings should be joining them at some point soon.

Options

For the uninitiated, any player that was optioned for 20 or more days—in total, not necessarily consecutively—by rule use an option year. The following is a list of players who qualify, along with how many options they each have remaining:

Here are a few notes on this list to close us out:

Marcano (16 days), Delay (15 days), Palacios (11 days), and Williams (6 days) all spent less than 20 days on optional assignment. Therefore, by rule, those days will count as major league service time and no options are used for 2023.

As for fourth options, Kranick has used three but should receive a fourth, as he only has full seasons in 2018, 2019, and 2021, less than the requisite five before exhausting a third and final option that disallows for an extra.

Contreras is an interesting case. He has two years that are close, accruing 92 days in 2017—90 constitutes a full season—despite spending much of the season in the DSL, a league where it’s basically impossible to accrue a full season. A late season promotion to the GCL pushed him just over. He only accrued 83 days in 2021; however, he was active for more than 30 days before hitting the injured list, meaning that time on the shelf counts as active days anyway, pushing him well past 90. Therefore, he has full seasons in 2017, 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2023, or the five required where a fourth option shouldn’t be granted in 2024. That makes next season a make-or-break year for him, of sorts, as he can’t be sent down if he hits any more bumps in the road.

Despite being released by the Houston Astros and signing a minor league contract with the Pirates, Perez used an option while with the Astros.

As mentioned, this is just the first action in what is a busy time in the offseason. Final payroll for 2023, payroll projections for 2024, Rule 5 Draft, minor league free agency—there is plenty upcoming on the docket, so be sure to continue to follow along.