Pittsburgh Pirates: 2016 Draft Pick Brent Gibbs

In continuation of recent articles, we take a look at The Pittsburgh Pirates seventh round pick from the 2016 draft in Brent Gibbs.

Brent Gibbs was acquired with the 225th pick in round seven by the Pittsburgh Pirates. He comes from Central Arizona College as a catcher.

2016

After signing on June 15th, Brent Gibbs was assigned to Bristol. In  19 games, Gibbs hit .236 with no home runs and six RBI.  He struck out nine times while drawing seven walks to register a .371 OBP.

2017

The Pirates assigned Brent Gibbs to low a  West Virginia for 2017. Through 29 appearances, Gibbs is hitting .257 with two home runs and 10 RBI.  Most of his stats are about the same as last year or a slight improvement. Except for one alarming stat. The strikeout to walk totals on Gibbs register 35 whiffs against three walks. With little power being shown, it’s not an assuring sign to see a radio that bad.

Age doesn’t help Gibbs. At 22 he is at the upper limit of old for low a ball.  Combine that with pedestrian numbers for the most part and it doesn’t add up to a top 30 prospect ranking.

Defensively Gibbs is doing well. He has a .996 fielding percentage this season, only committing one error. To accompany that he has 31 assists and 201 putouts all up from a season ago.

I won’t be too quick to rule out Gibbs as an option at catcher. Outside of Elias Diaz the system doesn’t’ have a can’t miss catching prospect. It’s a lot of throwing it at the wall and see if one sticks kind of approach at catcher. So there isn’t much of an expectation for any of the catching prospects in the system.

Next: Pirates Lose to the Reds, Again

Gibbs does have less than 50 games behind the plate professionally. So it should be interesting to see what he can do with a full season under his belt. For now, I would say that Gibbs is a definite work in progress that could pay some dividends in the future, most likely as a backup catcher.