Zach Thompson, Dan Vogelbach, Jacob Stallings discussed on Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
Also tall. He's not quite so quite so wide. And I guess now that I think about it vocal block isn't tall. So Zach Thompson not very much like Dan vogelbach. But he might be their best pitcher right now. And I worry a little bit that he just happened upon the Marlins machine that makes people good for three months. Like, they did it with sandal contra, although it seems like he's just good, a bit of a popular Lopez. And I do worry a little bit if that won't pan out because we didn't think he was much of a prospect, heading into last year. Yeah. But, man, he looked the part, I thought. He threw 75 major league innings last year and he's really tall. He gets the right plane for his pitches somehow. He's kind of cut her forward. I don't know if it's a cutter or slider. It's one of those in between pitches, and he just throws it a lot. It's basically its primary pitch now. And it just works like batters didn't do very well against it. He didn't overly struggle with command, which I think was always something we worried about with him, that prospect evaluator is worried about with him overall, but it looks like he's just gotten better at that. Like even in the miners in the past few years, his walk numbers have just been trending the right way. It's weird to think that you could trade Jacob stallings and get your team's best picture, but maybe that's an indictment of the pirate the starting pitching. It's good. He's a good player. I think that that trade. He's not the only player they got in that trade. They got two other prospects back too. I think that was a really good trade for them. It was a Kyle Nicholas and Connor Scott. I don't actually know as much about them. But I think that's their biggest off season acquisition. It was a pretty good one in my opinion. All right, well, we started on a positive note. Strengths and weaknesses? So I'm annoyed because I wrote this before they sent O'Neill cruise down. But they're going to call him up after he works on his defense for enough days to miss the super two deadlines. That's good. Although, if that defense is in the outfield, that would be sort of sad too. When he comes up, he's going to play shortstop. Yeah. A 100% sure, basically. 95% sure if they played him a short stop last year. The O'Neill cruise story works a lot better if he's a shortstop and he's a lot more of a special talent if he can play short. But the left side of their infield crews getting there in a few months or whatever. It's just great. Brian is another one of my personal favorite players. He's like, that's what you should do in your head when you're trying to think of who he most resembles. He is, I think, the best young third base defender of the game. It's really fun to watch. He's just perfect reflexes out there, canon arm, really great. I kind of doubted all the defensive reports I heard on him before he came up. Because I was like, I don't know. Like, it's so rare that you have so many good defensive third basemen all at once, and maybe there's just some creep. And no, like, he's just the real deal. Yeah. If it weren't for the fact that Ariana kind of has the prestige stranglehold on an old loves he's actually never lost one. I think Hayes might have topped him last year. I guess he also missed some time. So that may be holding back. But he's really good defensively. And offensively, when he puts the ball in the air, he's great. He's one of these guys who doesn't have like a perfect swing plane and approach tailored to his strengths, but he's got a lot of bat speed. He walks enough. He doesn't strike out too much. If he could put the ball in the air more often, he would be like a MVP candidate type guy every year, I think. And he kind of was, right? Like when he played 20 games in 2020 and was incredible, he had a 200 WRC plus. Okay, probably he won't do that. But he has a chance to be really good and he has a chance to be the foundation of the next great pirates team. And that's third base, O'Neill cruise at shortstop. They could have a really good left side of the Enfield once everybody up. That's a big change from the pirates of a few years ago when they were kind of in the early stages of tanking and had no exciting players. And I didn't even mention Brian Reynolds if he's playing left field, then the whole left side of the diamond is good for them. He's maybe going to get traded, but he's awesome and he's another guy where I was kind of doubting of the, of whether this package would work out for an offensive player being good. And yeah, it is. It works. It's far really hard. It doesn't check out. It all kind of plays together. For a team that is really bad, and the pirates are really bad. They have some really good players. And I think that gives them hope for how good they'll be in the future. Yeah, and they also have a great farm system, which makes sure you do. The strength for 2022, necessarily, but it's a strength in that it gives pirates fans some solace and something to dream on and watch for a while and think about all of those guys getting good and then leaving because nothing will pay them. Right, so I don't know what's going to happen there, but this is for a team that is kind of down and out. But I'd be more interested in being a pirate fan this year than a reds fan because there's a lot of fun players here and you can kind of see the direction they're going. Yeah, I was more optimistic as I looked through the pirates than I thought I would be based on the pirates. So for biggest weakness, I just said yes. I think we could skip that one. They're not trying to win a bunch of games this year. And so they have a lot of players where you're like, huh. Yeah, gosh. Well, in pirates fans didn't have to edit the pirates list, so they get to enjoy the farm system without having done any of the work. Let me just say that roster resource has googlebot leading off for them. Yeah. It'd be fun. Yeah. Prototypical lead author. Oh gosh. Yeah, and I had not grappled with Ben gamel is still on this team. That's fine, you know? Even some of their players who aren't good on the big league roster are at least seem like fun guys, like colt Tucker seems like a good hang, so you at least have people you can like, but yeah..