Pirates trade JT Brubaker, improve to 2-0

Photo by Pirates on Twitter.

One of the problems with holding Opening Week over Easter weekend is that I have a lot of family commitments and not a lot of time to watch the Pirates or write about them. I missed big chunks of the thrilling Opening Day game on Thursday and barely got to see any of Friday’s 7-2 victory over the Marlins. Since I didn’t really follow the game much, I don’t have a ton to say about it, which is why I paired my recap with the big Pirate news from Friday: the Bucs have traded 2022 Opening Day stater JT Brubaker to the New York Yankees.

I’ll start with Friday’s game, since that’s relatively straightforward. Martín Pérez had an okay debut, allowing just one run but only pitching for 4.1 innings. He had 2 strikeouts and allowed 6 hits and 3 walks. Whenever I was checking the score, it always seemed like Pérez was pitching with men on base; part of this was due to an uncharacteristically rough night in the hot corner by Ke’Bryan Hayes (he had 2 errors, plus another play he probably should have made), but the defense also bailed him and the bullpen out with 4 double plays turned.

Pérez was staked to a quick 4-0 lead after 3 innings, thanks to Miami starter AJ Puk (who was wild) and Hayes (who doubled). The Pirates kept adding on in the late innings en route to a relatively easy win, even though this was hardly a mistake-free game (along with from Hayes’ errors, the Bucs once again made several dumb decisions on the basepaths). A gold star goes to Josh Fleming, who vacuumed up 3 scoreless innings in relief and helped save the bullpen after Pérez left the game in the 5th inning.

If that was all that happened on Friday, it would have been a nice day for the Bucs. But a couple hours before game time, a baffling report emerged from the team’s beat writers that JT Brubaker was being traded to the Yankees for a player to be named later. It was later revealed that the Bucs were also kicking in some international bonus cap space, tilting this deal even further in favor of New York.

Unless that player to be named later is a prospect of value and not Bobby Hill, this trade doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for the Pirates. Yes, Brubaker is still making his way back from undergoing Tommy John surgery last April, and he was hardly an elite pitcher. But Brubaker certainly was a major league pitcher; in 2022, he posted a 4.69 ERA and 3.92 FIP across 144 innings — good for almost 2 fWAR. That is exactly the kind of pitcher the Pirates could use this summer, and the expectation I had until Friday afternoon was that Brubaker would come back later this year to help shore up a rotation that could be struggling with injuries or ineffectiveness.

My distaste for this move stems from the fact that there is so little upside in it for the Pirates. It’s safe to assume that the Bucs will not be getting any prospect of note in return, so all they really did was get Brubaker’s $2.25 million salary for 2024 off the books. That amount is so minuscule in the world of Major League Baseball that it’s hard to believe a team would consider this a salary that had to be dumped, but this is Bob Nutting and the Pittsburgh Pirates we are talking about. In return for saving a few million bucks that Nutting can now spend on baggy, poor-fitting shirts, the Pirates lose $500,000 to spend on international prospects and one of their better depth options for the rotation.

If you wanted to look at this in a light most favorable to Ben Cherington, I would guess — and just to reiterate, this is a GUESS, not actual reporting since I’m not sourced up — there might have been an indication that Brubaker won’t be able to pitch this year. If that’s the case, Brubaker would only be under team control for one more season, and perhaps the Pirates would have preferred to move on from him this offseason anyway. If that’s true, there is no reason to keep him around to rehab in 2024.

But if there was any chance that Brubaker could contribute this year — and if he does for the Yankees — this is not a good move. There were several Pirate fans on social media yesterday arguing that the Bucs had sufficient depth options in AAA to withstand losing Brubaker, but I’d rather have him than Eric Lauer or Michael Plassmeyer and certainly more so than Domingo German. Even if you compare him to someone like Paul Skenes – yes, Skenes has the higher ceiling, but Brubaker has a track record of success in the majors, and there is value in that. Even if Brubaker doesn’t return this year, he should almost certainly be ready for 2025 — and he likely wouldn’t cost that much to boot.

A team can never have enough pitching, and that’s certainly true for a Pirate team whose rotation has been an enormous question all winter. The only benefit the Bucs gained form this move was $2.25 million being trimmed from the payroll, and unless that’s going to be put back in to the roster this season, it seems penny wise and pound foolish to cut into the pitching depth to do so. Of course, given the way this team is run, maybe the weight room in PNC Park needed some new treadmills.