The Pirates of promise
The No. 1 prospect in baseball is about to join Paul Skenes in Pittsburgh. Will it matter? Plus: Framber Valdez, bidets and ... insurance?
In Pittsburgh, big baseball games are scarce. Like Super Bowl scarce.
And the fans rise to the occasion with the sort of coordinated, vaguely menacing roar of the fall’s native sport.
Pittsburgh fans are conditioned for football. The Steelers have made the NFL playoffs seven times since the Pirates’ last postseason appearance, in 2015. Often, it seems they clamber into the field in spite of the roster, on gut and guile and a sense that the franchise, the city, is just supposed to be there. Like fries on a sandwich.
The Pirates have spent decades signaling to their fans that they aren’t supposed to stick around for October. They aren’t supposed to compete regularly. They shouldn’t worry about those Week 7 Steelers tickets. It takes a special brew of conditions to summon playoff baseball to the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela. Since winning the 1979 World Series, the Pirates have made the postseason in two spurts of three consecutive seasons, both runs sparked by employing the National League MVP. That’s what it takes, apparently, with team owner Bob Nutting clutching the pursestrings.
Whether this ownership group deserves an ounce of joy or not, the Pirates look like they are primed to deliver one of those precious eras of excitement. With Paul Skenes having rapidly established himself as a top two pitcher in the game, Pittsburgh now has a much-needed star approaching to lift the lineup.
His name is Konnor Griffin. He plays shortstop at 6-foot-4 and 225 pounds, a strapping athlete — something like a beefed up Bobby Witt Jr. He walloped 21 homers and swiped 65 bases while blitzing three levels of the minors in 2025. He will turn 20 years old in late April. He is the No. 1 prospect in baseball by the estimation of every public evaluator who has released their 2026 list.
At Baseball Prospectus, Jarrett Seidler explained Griffin’s triumph over competition such as Detroit’s Kevin McGonigle, a batting champ in the making, like this:
He answered basically every question in a season where he hit .333/.415/.527 between Low-A, High-A, and Double-A while turning 19 midseason. Would he make enough contact? A 76% contact rate isn’t great, but it’s above-average—and if this guy has a 55 hit tool he might well be the best player in the game. Would he get his power into games? A 108-mph 90th-percentile exit velocity actually is great for anyone, but especially for his age, and as the season went on he went from beating the ball into the ground to elevating it pretty consistently. Where would he end up defensively? Sure looks like shortstop now.
Griffin simply checks all the boxes. He could be a superstar and is likely to be a star.
We don’t currently know the limits of what Griffin can do on a baseball field, ranging from being the most talented player in his age group since early in high school to fixing what some swing gurus thought was a fatal flaw to his game in a matter of months.
And The Athletic’s Keith Law said this:
“I think he’s the most exciting prospect we’ve had in the minors since Mike Trout, and I think he’s going to end up one of the best players in baseball once he gets established.”
Skenes + Griffin (+ at least one more difference-making young talent in pitcher Bubba Chandler, who debuted late in 2025) should equal winning.
Noted Pirates fan Alex Kirshner summed up the weird brew of optimism and dread by invoking the Angels of Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, the years of Tungsten Arm O’Doyle. “If Griffin is the burgeoning superstar he looks like, it should be very hard for the Pirates to continue to stink,” he wrote. There’s a chance this doesn’t work, but it would require historic, farcical levels of incompetence around them.
The front office, helmed by Ben Cherington, spent this winter making noises about being “aggressive” and “active.” They haven’t put much money where their mouth is. As chronicled by FanGraphs’ “We Tried” tracker, the Pirates were reportedly “primed” to commit more than twice franchise record free agent spend to Josh Naylor, who went back to Seattle. They were interested in Kyle Schwarber. They got spurned by Eugenio Suarez, who took a one-year, $15 million deal with the rival Reds. They were reportedly aggressive in pursuing lingering free agent starter Framber Valdez who, spoiler alert, didn’t sign with them.
Ultimately, the Pirates did swing trades for lineup additions, adding power-hitting second baseman Brandon Lowe and outfielder Jake Mangum from the Rays and young outfielder Jhostynxon Garcia from the Red Sox. They also signed Ryan O’Hearn, a first baseman with good contact skills and a strong 121 wRC+ since 2023, to a two-year deal worth $29 million. And whew, you have no idea how (pathetically) momentous that is. Somehow, it’s the first multi-year free agent deal the Pirates have inked since they signed pitcher Ivan Nova in 2016.
FanGraphs’ early projections have the Pirates scraping to .500, with a 36% chance of reaching the playoffs. That’s an improvement over recent years, powered largely by that exciting starting rotation that projects among baseball’s top 10, and by Griffin’s anticipated arrival. Yet in its penny-pinching, half measures, this franchise is again daring its great players to defy the odds instead of providing backup.
With any luck, the fans will get a new era of Pirates baseball to thunderously support anyway. Because the promise of Paul Skenes and Konnor Griffin is real, even if the promises of their club aren’t.
The Bullpen
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So Framber Valdez, who didn’t sign with the Pirates, landed with the Detroit Tigers.
This was a pleasant surprise! The longtime Astros starter was, for my money, the clear top option in this winter’s pitching market. A lefty whose 767 innings are second-most in baseball since 2022, Valdez obsessively induces ground balls. Combining him with Tarik Skubal, the Tigers boast an elite rotation and can lay claim to a clear differentiating advantage in the AL Central with an interesting prospect crop of their own on the way.
Valdez found a softer market than expected for his services, with no great reasoning clear to me. The buzz on the negative centered on the weird incident where Valdez crossed up his catcher, perhaps intentionally beaning him after a grand slam — a pretty anomalous concern to truly affect a proven player’s market. He’s 32, which always made a shorter deal likely, but he took a trampoline deal for three years and $115 million, with the opt-out coming after 2027. Just about every team would sign up for that if he maintains anything like his career form.
Among the teams that I’d assess as having an even more urgent need for Valdez: The Orioles, Diamondbacks, Cubs, Padres, Giants, A’s … I could go on.
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The White Sox are installing a bidet in the clubhouse for new signing Munetaka Murakami. Which is fantastic.
Memo to White Sox beat writers: Please set a calendar reminder for mid-May to ask all the other players whether they’ve used it and what they think.
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Phillies reliever Orion Kerkering’s moment of panic ended the Phillies’ season. But the young hurler, who felt the weight of such a glaring error over the offseason, still has a bright future ahead of him. The Athletic’s Matt Gelb got Kerkering to open up in a great story about the aftermath of the error and how he dealt with it.
I will also take this opportunity for a plug: Kerkering’s painful memory sets the stage for my Phillies essay in the 2026 Baseball Prospectus Annual, which absorbs both that moment and a much wider moment through the (lightly fictionalized) eyes of Nick Castellanos.
That’s just one essay out of 30 or more — Hannah wrote the Yankees one, for instance — and it’s an honor every year to be included in such a great book. If you read this newsletter, it’s worth ordering it.
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The upcoming World Baseball Classic is being hampered by insurance woes. I can’t think of a topic I want to consider less as part of following an entertainment venture, but here we are.
Team Puerto Rico has been especially hamstrung by the issues, which stem from a process that has reportedly become more stringent. In a nutshell, teams take out insurance policies on the value of players’ salaries. The league’s insurer has become less willing to commit to paying for stars in a variety of positions, such as those who had an offseason surgery (such as Francisco Lindor) or those advancing into their late 30s (like Miguel Rojas), even if the players are currently healthy.
Rosters are slated to be announced today. We’ll see how much headway the teams made in winning some concessions.
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Jeff Bezos and his team gutted the The Washington Post yesterday in an infuriating move that history will excoriate.
They essentially eliminated the fantastic sports section, including national baseball writer Chelsea Janes and both Nationals beat writers, Andrew Golden and Spencer Nusbaum, were laid off. They are all worth following wherever they land.
Also cut loose was friend of the newsletter Jesse Dougherty, a former baseball writer who has taken his literary journalism talents to the college sports beat.
He tracks that topsy turvy landscape as well as anyone, and for now I’d recommend subscribing to his Substack to follow his work.
"The White Sox are installing a bidet in the clubhouse for new signing Munetaka Murakami. Which is fantastic."
most of them will think it's a funky water fountain.