The Pittsburgh Pirates’ big move at the 2023 winter meetings was acquiring former Mariners and Cardinals pitcher Marco Gonzales after he was salary dumped to the Atlanta Braves last week along with Jarred Kelenic and Evan White. The appeal of a Marco Gonzales type of player is that he is a major league pitcher that we essentially got for free, as the Pirates will be paying a meager 2.75 million of his 12.5 million salary in the upcoming 2024 season. Coupled with giving up a small player to be named later, the Pirates have assumed basically no risk in giving him a spot in the rotation. So we should talk about how Marco pitches and what we can reasonably expect from the journeyman lefty for his one season as a Pirate.
Ben Cherington certainly has a type of pitcher that he loves to acquire. Specifically, he is absolutely in love with left-handed pitchers who sit at low 90s and upper 80s with their fastballs. Since he took over the team we have seen him bring in veteran pitchers like Tyler Anderson, Jose Quintana, and Rich Hill who all fit the mold and have had varying levels of success in Pittsburgh (Quintana being his prize jewel). He has also shown this trend with younger pitchers he has brought in with trades at the trade deadline last season; acquiring Jackson Wolf from the Padres and Bailey Falter from the Phillies. When asked by Jason Mackey about the Gonzales acquisition, Cherington even referenced these previous pitchers as a means of what they want to do.
Marco Gonzales is this archetype of pitcher, never blowing people away with fastball speed but instead relying on creating soft contact to get hitters out. At the very least, pitching coach Oscar Marin has lots of experience working with lefty pitchers of this style of play. The Pirates are probably anticipating they can squeeze 3-4 months of solid pitching before shipping him at the deadline to make space for Jared Jones or Paul Skenes who will have finished up their development right after the Super 2 date.
Gonzales is a pitcher who at this stage of his career relies heavily on his breaking pitches to remain effective. His fastball has fallen off a cliff in terms of effectiveness over the course of the past four years and I am dubious about the Pirates’ ability to fix said four-seamer. His fastball from 2019-2021 was brutally effective despite never being a flame thrower, but in the past 2 seasons, it has seen a dip from a run value of 13 all the way to a run value of -7 in 2023. The hard-hit rate on his fastball has skyrocketed from 32% to 40%, and the results from getting hammered more often are predictable. In admittedly limited innings in 2023, opponents slugged .556 against the fastball but this problem has been looming for the past 3 seasons now. Marco seems to be a smart pitcher because his usage of the fastball has dropped by nearly 10% over the years, an admittance that he doesn’t quite have his best stuff with the heater anymore. Luckily for the Pirates, we can look to pitchers like Vince Velasquez where we halved his fastball usage in half and he became a much more effective starting pitcher before his elbow exploded.
A bad fastball has never deterred the Pirates from acquiring someone, and it’s clear that the Pirates do not shy away from telling a pitcher to focus on throwing their breaking pitches primarily. So we should look at his changeup and curve, which he used 54% of the time in 2023.
I imagine this is what the Pirates were looking for when they picked up the phone asking for Marco. A healthy mix of fastball/change up/curveball to keep batters honest and use precise location on breaking pitches to get strikeouts and weak contact. Both his change-up and curve sit around 80 mph on average, allowing him to confuse hitters with similar off-speed pitches down in the zone and then pepper in some fastballs upstairs. His change-up is his money pitch and by far what opposing batters struggle the most to deal with. It’s the pitch he uses to get the weakest contact of his four-pitch mix and he uses the change-up almost as frequently as he uses his fastball. However, the Pirates will need to find a way to fix this location because it was deteriorating last season. We will never know how much the injury truly affected his pitching last season, it will be mostly speculation. But the strikeout rates for Marco have been going down the last 2 seasons and we saw walk rates start to spike.
Another way the Pirates may see an advantage to having Marco Gonzales is his home run issue. The Pirates pitching staff was not good in any real metric, rating solidly in the bottom 10 of all of baseball. But what the Pirates were good at doing was preventing the long ball. The Pirates were bottom 5 in home runs given up as a team; and for someone like Gonzales who has been averaging about one home run a start, it might be a good match. In his last 67 starts, he has conceded 64 homers, which simply isn’t sustainable if you want to be a good consistent starting pitcher. Especially as a guy who will not be getting heavy amounts of strikeouts and depends on weak contact in order to get outs, the Pirates must patch up this problem. However, with their success last year to prevent other teams from hitting home runs Oscar Marin and company are probably feeling very confident in their ability that limiting the long ball will make Gonzales a really effective pitcher. It doesn’t hurt that lefties by nature pitch better
The biggest elephant in the room for me personally, however, is the question of how will he pitch after the nerve injury. Nerve injuries by their nature are trickier than a standard Tommy John surgery, just because it’s harder to repair nerve damage. The injury doesn’t necessarily concern me in terms of his pitches and how effective they can be but instead, it concerns me about how much of a pitching load he can reasonably assume. The Pirates need innings badly, as Marco Gonzales is currently their number 2 option and only Mitch Keller has as much experience pitching deep into seasons. The Pirates brass have spoken at length at the winter meetings about their need to fill the rotation and have innings eaten, and they are hoping Gonzales is a key part of this. and here is what Ben Cherington had to say about Gonzales’ health (also from Mackey):
Hopefully, for all of us, and especially for Marco’s sake, he has fully healed from surgery and will have no issues pitching his normal workload in 2024. But unlike Tommy John, we don’t have a whole lot of information about how this specific nerve injury truly affects pitchers in the future. We also just don’t have a lot of data about this specific type of injury because most pitchers just don’t have the procedure. What we can surmise is that it has been very rare for pitchers who go through the procedure that Gonzales went through to return to their previous workload. The best example we have to work off of is Brandon Morrow, who pitched from 2008-2017. Connor Williams (@Wins_Williams) on X (formerly Twitter) had a very nice find looking into this surgery, and this is what he found.
Morrow was never the same pitcher after having this nerve-repairing surgery. I bring this up because a big positive people have been talking about when discussing the Gonzales trade is that he will eat lots of innings for the Pirates. It is entirely possible that he will go out and eat 170 innings but for now, because of the lack of data, I don’t think him returning to a full workload is likely.
Conclusion:
For 2.75 million and no real prospect capital I completely get why we went and got Marco Gonzales with how desperately we need starting pitching. There are some intriguing things I can connect with how the Pirates treat veteran pitchers and their pitch selection which can lead to a path that is a successful season for the 31-year-old veteran. It’s just going to take a lot of work in my eyes, just because you have quite a bit to fix and the Pirates have yet to show an ability to fix fastballs entirely. If the Pirates can bring his cutter to life (it’s been a pretty bad pitch in his arsenal for most of his career) then you’re looking at a pitcher who has 3 plus breaking pitches. He’s your definition of a mixed bag, but when you’re the Pirates fixing those misfit toys is how you earn playoff berths.
North Shore Nine 
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