How a Spinning Pitching Staff and ‘Good Vibes’ Fueled the Pirates to a Winning Record

Though Pittsburgh has become known for its amusing clubhouse celebrations, there’s more behind its winning record this season.

If you didn’t know the Pirates’ record, you could easily guess it from the mood in the clubhouse.

Outfielder Connor Joe handed out T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “Good Vibes Only” last week, and his teammates have seemingly taken the message to heart, boosting the energy with all kinds of inspired fun. A home run is now rewarded not just with a pirate-inspired cutlass celebration but also with a custom blazer. The night’s best performer is greeted at his locker with a stuffed Pikachu. And their play on the field has been just as strong as all of this would suggest. The Pirates are currently 16–7 (third best in MLB), recording their hottest start since the team won its last division title in 1992.

So, is it fair to say the Pirates have been cruising? Sure. But their pitching staff might prefer a different term.

“Man, we’ve been spinning,” Pittsburgh starter Johan Oviedo says with a grin.

The Pirates are throwing more breaking balls than any other club in baseball. An incredible 43.8% of their pitches this season have been curveballs, sliders or sweepers—not just the most in baseball right now, but also more than any team has ever recorded in a season since the implementation of Statcast. (The current league average for breaking ball use is 31.7%.) That’s part of a larger, ongoing trend away from reliance on the fastball. But no one is doing it right now quite like the Pirates, and so far, it’s come with success.

Last year, Pittsburgh finished as one of the weakest pitching staffs in baseball, with a team ERA+ of 89. This year? Its ERA+ is 122. It leads the majors in quality starts (14), and its rotation is going deeper into games than all but three others. There’s more to that beyond its breaking ball usage. But it’s certainly part of the story.

There wasn’t an orchestrated, staff-wide movement to lean on breaking stuff more, says Pirates pitching coach Oscar Marin. (Though he’s happy it turned out that way: “I love spin,” he says.) Instead, as the coaching staff looked at potential adjustments early in the offseason, they kept seeing the same thing pop up. While figuring out how to best play to their pitchers’ strengths, Pittsburgh found the answer often looked like using its existing breaking pitches more, or developing new ones.

For 23-year-old righty Roansy Contreras, that meant upgrading his slider from a secondary pitch and beginning to use it more than his fastball for the first time. For reliever Wil Crowe, it meant ditching his little-used curveball in favor of a new sweeper that could better complement his slider. “If we eliminated the curveball and added a sweeper, a bigger moving horizontal pitch, it would give me another weapon, since I’m really good at already turning the ball over that way,” Crowe says. And for veteran acquisition Vince Velasquez, Pittsburgh suggested leaning more on his slider, believing he would be more effective if he threw the pitch far more frequently. In Velasquez’s eight major league seasons before 2023, his slider made up just 14% of his pitches. Now? He’s throwing it 42% of the time as his primary secondary pitch in his first season with the Pirates.

Velasquez signed to a one-year contract with the Pirates in December after spending the majority of his career thus far with the Phillies.  :: Isaiah J. Downing/USA TODAY Sports

“The commitment part of it is probably the biggest thing from our pitchers,” Marin says. “But when you show them the evidence behind it, it gets easier to go along with the plan.”

There’s perhaps no example better than Oviedo. Acquired last year in a trade with the Cardinals—who had been using him primarily out of the bullpen—he’s shone in the rotation so far this year for the Pirates. In four starts, he has a 2.22 ERA with the highest strikeout rate of his young career. And that’s come with a slew of changes to his arsenal. The Pirates have him using his slider more than his fastball for the first time in his career, and they’ve doubled his curveball usage, from 11% last year to 22%. It’s a lot of change. But Oviedo was on board. He believed in the numbers the Pirates showed him, and so far this season, he feels like he’s seeing them play out.

“Hitters right now, especially with the clock, are really aggressive on fastballs,” Oviedo says.

He’s right. The league’s weighted on base average on fastballs is .350, up from last year’s figure of .337—and this is still April, before offense traditionally heats up in the summer. Compare that to the league wOBA on breaking balls: .278. And the Pirates are outperforming that, even while leaning on breaking balls far more than anyone else, by allowing a wOBA of just .245.

“All the guys that are throwing way more spin than they have before, they’ve worked really hard at it,” says Pirates catcher Austin Hedges. “You wouldn’t be able to tell that it’s a new pitch for them, because they all seem pretty polished.”

The Pirates’ hot start comes after a few long, hard years in Pittsburgh, with a team that has seemed to be terminally rebuilding and starved of serious investment. (Their last winning season was in 2018 and last playoff appearance in ’15.) While this winter brought some modest upgrades, the roster didn’t necessarily look set to take a major leap forward in its third season under skipper Derek Shelton and general manager Ben Cherington. But the Pirates’ early success has come with at least one vote of confidence: Shelton was awarded a contract extension this weekend. Their start may not ultimately represent a real turning of the corner, but it’s at least a sign of a step forward—for the pitching staff and beyond.

“The whole thing with timelines is that everyone figures it out at their own rate,” Marin says. “The only thing we try to do with our guys on a timeline level is—how can we get them the most informed that they’ve ever been? And that probably takes a couple of years.”

So, yes, the Pirates know it’s early. They understand their schedule has not been especially tough yet. But they’re pleased to be where they are right now. They have their celebrations, their new pitching strategy and the T-shirts with their motto: Good Vibes Only.

And, for now, a winning record to go with them.

“It’s a winning atmosphere. That’s what we talked about creating in spring training, and we’ve been able to do that,” Hedges says. “The cool thing about it, for a lot of guys who haven’t really experienced that before, is nothing needs to change. Exactly what we’re doing right now is what we can try and do for 162. And if we do that, I believe we’re a playoff team.”