Pittsburgh Pirates 2024 Service and Option Breakdown

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 2025.

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.

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:

With a cutoff that I believe will be 2.132, both Colin Holderman and Bailey Falter should be Super 2 eligible, qualifying for arbitration for the first time.

The rest of the Pirates’ arbitration class figures to include Dennis Santana, David Bednar, Ben Heller, Connor Joe, Johan Oviedo, Bryan De La Cruz, and Joey Bart.

Finally, a handful of players who accrued service this year but aren’t listed—Ryder Ryan, Jake Woodford, Edward Olivares, Justin Bruihl, and Billy McKinney—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 option 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. Domingo Germán should be the final player 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:

Hunter Stratton (10 days) and Jared Jones (2 days) both spent less than 20 days on optional assignment. Therefore, by rule, those days will count as major league service and no options are used for 2024.

As for fourth options, Liover Peguero has used three but should receive a fourth, as he only has full seasons spanning 2021 through 2024—four total—less than the requisite five before exhausting a third and final option that disallows for an extra. Fourth options shouldn’t come into play for anyone else unless you want to count Oneil Cruz, who should lose the opportunity at his, as 2024 counted as his fifth full season.

As mentioned, this is just the first action in what is a busy time in the offseason. Final payroll for 2024, payroll projections for 2025, Rule 5 Draft, minor league free agency—there is plenty upcoming on the docket, so be sure to continue to follow along.

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