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THE TRANSCRIPT
Remember Neal Huntington's infamous remark a couple of years ago about the 'bridge year?'
Yeah, I thought you did. Huntington didn't mean it exactly the way it came out. That was the case for a lot of his misstatements that would end up getting him in hot water. same as Frank Coonelly. They both had a real knack for pushing the wrong buttons in a place like Pittsburgh that really requires you to just say things like they are.
Also, that was a bridge year for the Pirates, they should have had more bridge years, and bridge years are a real thing. But the reason the comment was taken so badly is that here was the lead baseball executive of the organization telling everyone that what they were about to witness that season didn't matter. It was irrelevant.
Kind of a hard sell, wouldn't you say?
'Hey everyone, it's all cool, this is decent entertainment, but the games, the outcomes, they really don't matter. They're just not a big deal. They'll matter maybe in a year or two, but they don't now, so don't worry about it. We're just going to go through this 'bridge year' for you.'
Yeah, that just wasn't gonna fly.
So what would you call 2021 for the Pirates, which in reality will be more of a bridge year than anything we've seen in our lifetime as I was laying out here for you Monday on the show?
This is without precedent, what the Pirates are doing. This isn't Huntington trading, Gerrit Cole for three semi-major-leaguers and one prospect. This is a general manager, Ben Cherington, moving out pretty much every asset that he has, at a certain age or older, for high-ceiling, very young prospects. This is gonna take a while. That's not comparable to what Huntington did. This will be the bridge year of all bridge years.
So what is there to watch?
I mean, I can say it and they can't, you know, but there will still be things within that I'd argue that do matter.
One of them is really obvious, and that's the maturation of Ke'Bryan Hayes. He's not going to be Ted Williams every month of his career, as he was in the first month of his career in 2020, but watching him grow, for entertainment purposes, yeah, that's gonna be awesome. From the organizational standpoint, it's enormously important. He has to be a star. He can't just become an ordinary guy. Not after what he's shown already.
He also can't do what Bryan Reynolds and Kevin Newman did.
If there are two things you want to see reverse themselves in 2021, that make the biggest difference for the organization, it's going to be those two guys becoming real live, National League everyday-type players all over again. That's not to say that they're the most important pieces of the equation. I don't believe they are. Hayes' is the most important, and I would put Mitch Keller right there behind Hayes. But if these two kids get it together, and get back to where they were in 2019, when Reynolds was one of the better hitting left fielders in all of baseball, when Newman was one of the better hitting shortstops in all of baseball, and their defense was plenty good enough to keep them out in the field every day without worrying about it. If you have that, then you're building up necessary depth, and you're accelerating the clock on pretty much everything. Because now you don't have to go look for a left field or you don't have to go look for a shortstop. And you have a core that you can begin believing in a lot sooner than you would otherwise.
I could throw Cole Tucker into this, as well, mostly just because I really like him. We all love Tucker, don't we? He's impossible to not love. But he's got to hit the ball. His splits were .220/.252/.275 in 2020, and that's been pretty much the pattern other than a handful of blips.
But Reynolds, and Newman are the ones who most have to find something more than a happy medium between 2019 and 2020. Because the reality is the 2020 for both of them was, wow, just disastrous. Reynolds' .189 batting average and .632 OPS still showed a little bit of pop, but you can forget about everybody's pop going into 2021 with the changing of the baseballs. He's going to have to get on base. He's going to have to regain his command of the strike zone from both sides of the plate. He's going to have to stop flailing outside the zone, which he almost never did in 2019. And he's gonna have to overcome whatever it was that caused him to visibly start beating himself up because that's not his personality either. He's Joe Cool. He's the guy who can't be fazed. He's the guy who never ever goes into a slump. We can put all the burden we want on Rick Eckstein and Derek Shelton, anybody else who's instructing him, but this ultimately comes down to Reynolds. He's enormously important for the future of this franchise.
Newman, maybe not so much because he he overachieved in 2019. He'd never hit like that before at any level of baseball. So there's going to be more skepticism about what he did. But by the end of 2019, especially with how hot he was at the finish, he ended up having just as good a season as Reynolds. It just wasn't as noticed because it happened later in the year when a lot of people will rightly tune out the Pirates. But he dropped to ... man, a .224 batting average in 2020, and a .556 OPS. He was almost never making hard contact, even solid contact. He had better looking at-bats than Reynolds did. He wasn't doing the flailing thing. But he also wasn't striking the baseball. He's got all the intangibles to just like Reynolds does. And he still has a major-league ceiling. They were both rookies in 2019. They both took a nosedive in a very strange, shortened season, that never allowed either of them a realistic chance to climb out of the holes that they dug for themselves.
One of my favorite theses that anyone's offered about players who struggled a lot in 2020 -- and remember, there are some great ones who did, notably Christian Yelich -- was this: When you get off to a lousy start in a normal season, you just say, 'Well, it was a tough April, you know, I'll start getting out of it in May, and things will be all good by the All-Star break, and then I'll take off and really find my stride.' Well, that that was never going to happen, obviously, for anyone. And that knowledge alone weighed guys down. I can see where that would have had an impact, in particular, on a young guy,
Maybe they can write it off, maybe they can just chalk it down to a fluke, come into Bradenton with a whole new attitude and a whole new slate. If they do, that's a really, really big deal for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2021. And beyond, whether it's a bridge year, or it's called a bridge year or not, there are things that matter this season, and I don't know that anything matters more than the guys that I've just mentioned.