I admit it: maybe being optimistic about the Pirates in 2023 was a bit off. Moments after I published a post in early December saying that the Pittsburgh Pirates spending habits thus far through the 2022 offseason were awesome, it was announced that Bryan Reynolds, their star left fielder who is under team control for another three seasons, had requested a trade out of the Steel City.
Mea culpa, alright?
The timing was epic. I was so proud of my post and didn’t think anything of it. Then, the same afternoon, Twitter blows up with speculations as to where Reynolds would go, and obviously all Yankees fans said he was coming to the Bronx. Look, I’m not going to retcon my post because of one (very valid in some circles) trade request, but I’m not going to speculate what Bryan’s uniform in 2023 will be, either. In fact, I don’t think he should be traded at all.
In my latest post all about Steven Kwan and the new age of contact hitting, I talked about Kwan’s plate discipline and how his approach to batting has led to his early success. Well, why don’t we analyze the same sort of stats with Bryan Reynolds, this time over a four-year career? Hopefully that will yield similar results and we will determine that he is the greatest left fielder in baseball, correct? Not so fast.
Reynolds burst onto the scene in 2019 with an unbelievable rookie season that saw him bat .314 in 134 games. Talk all you want about how batting average will not survive baseball’s analytical wave, but I’ll stay with the old-school stat, thank you very much. However, his strikeout rate, walk rate, whiff rate, and chase rate were all pretty average in the height of the Juiced Ball Era. 2020 saw an increase in walk rate but a sharp increase in strikeout rate as well. Then came 2021, undoubtedly Reynolds’s best year offensively, a year in which he was a plate discipline machine in all aspects. But 2022 saw a regression of a lot of those plate discipline stats to his rookie season or worse.
What am I trying to say here, exactly? You can look at the Pirates’ left fielder and say that his best seasons at the plate were unbelievable, but you can also look at his mediocre seasons and say that he doesn’t deserve the trade rumors he’s been receiving at all. I’m somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. Like I said before, Reynolds only has three years of service time under his belt. He’s not in the prime of his career yet, even though his 27 years on Earth might say otherwise. Baseball is a hard game to master, and keeping a consistent approach to batting is something that even the greatest hitters take years to perfect. Reynolds simply isn’t at the point where you can guarantee that he will hit like it’s always 2021 or like it’s 2020, and I honestly believe that this is okay.
Getting traded might do more harm than good in terms of his player development, especially considering that type of instability and inconsistent training could curtail his progression; the Pirates shouldn’t want to trade him because his stock isn’t at its highest point yet and they only just entered the three-year arbitration period with him; and teams should be hesitant to trade for him because he isn't truly the Bryan Reynolds that his output stats might indicate.
I love Bryan Reynolds, who, much like Steven Kwan, is a contact hitter who purports to have more power than he actually has because of his bat-to-ball abilities. But he’s no Juan Soto. For his sake, the sake of the Pirates (even though the Pirates have the reputation of being dysfunctional for decades), and the sake of other 29 organizations in Major League Baseball, let’s give the Bryan Reynolds experiment a season or two before we make a rash decision.
But you know who also just hit arbitration who actually has his plate discipline locked up? Sorry, Mets fans, but with all that’s going on with the Carlos Correa fiasco, who knows where Jeff McNeil plays by the end of 2023. I’m just saying, anything is possible…
Comments