North Shore Tavern Mound Visit: Pirates don't have a clear answer at second

Last year, 438 hitters in baseball had at least 120 trips to the plate, including Gonzales. He saw a slider 30.1% of the time, the 16th-most. His big-league career is just 35 games old and the book is out on him.

When Gonzales was promoted to the majors in late June, I wrote about how he had drastically cut his whiff and chase rates against high spin breaking balls that month with Class AAA Indianapolis. He followed that up with a 61.1% whiff rate against curveballs in the majors and a 43.3% whiff rate against sliders. His 30.8% chase rate against breaking balls out of the zone is a big reason for those whiffs.

There's going to be swing and miss in Gonzales' game, but when most of the whiffs against spin are well out of the zone, that needs to change:

Hitting a major-league breaking ball is one of the hardest things to do, and Gonzales' performance against fastballs does at least give him a good foundation to build off of, but if he can't hit spin, he's going to keep getting spin pitches.

LIOVER PEGUERO

Peguero also has slider issues, which I wrote about several times last season. Of course a 48.7% whiff rate against breaking balls needs to be drastically improved, but he also ran into four home runs against spin. He hit the mistake pitches, and while that's a good place to start, you can't rely on the pitcher making mistakes.

But when you look at Peguero's 2023 season, what really stands out is that September, and not in a good way.

Perhaps it was because he was playing deeper into the season than normal, but Peguero did not exactly run through the bag in the final month of the season, slashing .226/.258/.290 over his final 97 trips to the plate. He finished with -0.4 WAR in September, the worst of any Pirate position player. His August was solid: Four home runs, a 92 wRC+ and 0.3 WAR over 25 games played. Extrapolate that over a full season and nobody is complaining about the second base production.

Peguero actually had his best average exit velocity in September (90.6 mph), but that hard contact resulted in just two barrels. That hard contact was just being drilled into the ground. If he could have elevated it more, then perhaps he could have had a September closer to his August.

Like Gonzales, Peguero has some swing and miss to his game. His on-base percentage is probably going to hover in the lower .300s, so he needs to run into a few to keep his OPS above water. He has the tools to be a productive player in the field and on the base paths, but he can't let his ground ball rate near 50%. If he can cut down on that and get more line drives and barrels, then he is a happy median between Gonzales' offensive upside and Bae's base running abilities.

JI HWAN BAE

Expected stats aren't everything when it comes to analytical evaluation of a hitter, but Bae's expected wOBA (.266) was in the bottom 1% of qualified hitters last year, according to Baseball Savant. Bae has an elite tool in his speed, and those expected stats -- which includes an expected .224 batting average and .291 slugging percentage -- do include his sprint speed on certain batted balls that could be infield hits.

To put it simply, his quality of contact was really bad. And while the first instinct may be this is a launch angle problem and that Bae is the rare hitter who would probably benefit from more ground balls, he had a near 60% ground ball rate last season. He isn't getting himself out in the air. It's usually on the ground, or striking out (24.8% strikeout rate).

Like the other young hitters in this article, we can look at concerns against the breaking ball (38.4% whiff rate), but the results against the fastball and offspeed pitches were not that great either. He underwent several noticeable mechanical changes -- including ditching his high leg kick, moving off the plate, tweaking his hand position and more -- but nothing really seemed to click. If you're looking for any positive he did see his contact rate spike up towards the end of the season, but even then it took a pretty significant drop in the final games:

Having Bae in center is probably the Pirates' best defense, but he hasn't hit enough to unseat any of the Pirates' outfielders. There's probably more playing time to be won at second, but to do that, he's going to need to make more contact and drive the ball more.