Pirates Must Improve in Crucial Area
While having a plethora of pitching depth is never a bad thing, it won't matter much if the Pittsburgh Pirates can't score enough runs to support them.
How the Pirates go about improving their offense in the majors and throughout their minor league system is among the burning questions their regime faces heading into the 2025 season. MLB.com's Alex Stumpf broke down where the franchise stands with its minor league system and noted the gap that currently exists between their pitching and hitting prospects.
"The Pirates don’t have many bats they can turn to next year that haven’t already made the Majors," Stumpf wrote. "That’s a problem for a team that finished 24th in MLB in runs (665) and 27th in OPS (.672). General manager Ben Cherington has hinted that the team could use its pitching depth as trade pieces for hitters, but the Bucs also need to produce and grow those young bats, too. It’s an unbalanced farm system at the moment, and the hitters are going to need to break out to fix it."
The Pirates are the only team in baseball with three pitching prospects in MLB Pipeline's top 100 prospects with top prospect Bubba Chandler at No. 15, Braxton Ashcraft at No. 85 and Thomas Harrington at No. 91. The trio of right-handers anchors a Pirates farm system that MLB Pipeline ranked as having the best pitching prospects in baseball.
By contrast, middle infield prospect Termarr Johnson is the team's only Pirates position player in MLB Pipeline's top 100, ranking at No. 75.
"Pittsburgh needs hitters, too," Stumpf wrote. "The Pirates have just four in their Top 30 Prospects list who finished with Double-A Altoona or higher (Cook, No. 3 prospect Termarr Johnson -- who's ranked No. 75 overall -- No. 6 Nick Yorke and No. 18 Tsung-Che Cheng). Yorke and Cook are newcomers to the system, having been acquired at the Trade Deadline."
Given the Pirates' depth on the mound, using one of their pitching prospects to add a more established hitter or two would be one of the smarter ways to improve an offense that ranked in the league's bottom 10 in nearly every major category. If Pittsburgh can't find a way to get more out of its hitters in the big leagues and throughout its minor league system, it could be facing another lost season in what's shaping up to be a make-or-break year for the Pirates regime.
