With the trade deadline now just about a month away we are going to read and hear a lot of talk about what areas the Pirates are weak in and how they can go about improving those areas. Over the course of the next month names of right fielders, shortstops, bench bats, bullpen arms and probably even a few starting pitchers will be tossed around and rumors will start but the Pirates and fans will ignore one area because it is generally viewed as just not that important.
Looking through the stats you can probably fairly easily point to the Pirates weak spots. The team's starting pitchers have the 11th best FIP in all of baseball and while the bullpen has been excellent the numbers don't necessarily bear that out as they have only the 19th best FIP in baseball. ERA is a bit kinder as the Pirates rank 2nd and 7th respectively. Generally speaking the pitching has been ok but like always could use a tweak or two.
Moving on to the hitting side I'm going to focus on sOPS+ which is essentially a measure of a team's or player’s performance relative to the rest of the league. I'm only going to use the NL for this comparison below are the Pirates sOPS+ by position and their rank in the NL.
C: 109 sOPS+ (4th in the NL)
1B: 109 sOPS+ (6th in the NL)
2B: 114 sOPS+ (Tied for 2nd in the NL)
3B: 112 sOPS+ (2nd in the NL)
SS: 64 sOPS+ (Tied for 14th in the NL)
LF: 113 sOPS+ (5th in the NL)
CF: 120 sOPS+ (3rd in the NL)
RF: 74 sOPS+ (15th in the NL)
PH: 82 sOPS+ (11th in the NL)
Looking at those numbers it is rather obvious the Pirates biggest weaknesses are shortstop, right field and the bench (pinch hitters). Most of us probably already knew that though. Looking at other parts of the game the Pirates have been the 5th best fielding team this season by UZR and have been the 11th best base running team by BsR (a metric that doesn't take in account stolen bases). So essentially the Pirates are doing just fine at what I like to call the two hidden areas of baseball.
So what does that leave us with as this not talked about weakness. The Pirates will probably do nothing to address it and to be fair I am not sure there is anything they could really do about it even if they wanted to. It is not an ultra important part of the game but it is something that is always overlooked and dismissed as essentially meaningless but in reality it really isn't. What I'm talking about might sound silly but bear with me here. This not talked about weakness is pitcher hitting.
Pitchers are bad hitters we know that much but Pirates pitchers in general are terrible. NL pitchers as a whole this season are hitting .134/.161/.179. Pirates’ pitchers are hitting .071/.085/.071. Going by fWAR Pirates pitchers have cost the team -1.0 WAR already on the season. That means because of how terrible are pitchers are at hitting the Pirates have already lost one game and are on pace to lose another one. That is 2 losses on the season caused entirely by the lack of hitting ability of our pitchers. That is definitely significant and should not be ignored so easily.
To be fair 9 of the 15 NL teams have a negative WAR from the hitting ability of their pitchers but the only other team to have a WAR below -0.4 is the St Louis Cardinals at -0.7. Also to be fair the only good team to be benefiting from pitcher hitting are the Braves and they are the competitive team the Pirates probably should be the least concerned about as the chances of them directly competing for a playoff spot with the Pirates are very slim right now.
I'm not really sure how the Pirates can go about improving that. The only pitcher we have that has proven to be able to hit some is James McDonald and due to his awfulness as his primary job we are unlikely to see him getting many more at bats this season. The majority of the at bats are probably going to fall to Burnett, Locke, Rodriguez, Liriano, Cole and Morton moving forward and there is nothing in any of their track records that suggests any of them can hit. Obviously it makes no sense to trade for a starting pitcher based purely on hitting ability either.
Much like the Pirates had their starters ignore base runners last season I think they largely allow their pitchers to ignore their hitting duties and I believe that is a mistake. Our pitchers don't have to hit well but asking them to get a hit 1 out of 10 times and occasionally get an extra base hit (like 4 or 5 a season) is not asking for too much. Pitchers hitting may not seem like much and it isn't going to be discussed anywhere else but that doesn't mean it isn't a weakness the Pirates need to try and address.