Pittsburgh Pirates: Ben Cherington Needs to Fix the Farm

Now that the Pittsburgh Pirates have finally found their new GM, Ben Cherington, they can really start to focus on what needs to be done this off-season.  This should start with the minor league system.

One thing that was made clear by the 2019 Pittsburgh Pirates was that their farm system was not what it once was.  Under now former General Manager Neal Huntington, the Pittsburgh Pirates consistently had a top 10 farm system.  However, over the last couple of years, the team’s farm system has seen a lot of its talent either graduate or not pan out and now the farm system is considered in the bottom half of the league.

This was what led to Huntington’s dismissal.  At the end of the day, the Pittsburgh Pirates are a small-market team and their best chance to compete is by building up through the minor-league system.  Huntington lacked in this area over the last few years and that is most likely one of the main reasons he lost his job.  On top of that, trading away the talent the club did have in the minors has completely backfired.

Now comes new general manager Ben Cherington. The first thing that Cherington needs to do this off-season is to fix the minor-league system.  As mentioned earlier, the Pittsburgh Pirates will need to have a strong pull of prospects in order to truly compete; prospects are everything to a small-market team and really are becoming more and more important to all teams across baseball.
Cherington has always focused on building up the minor-league system everywhere he’s been. Before his run with the Red Sox, Cherington was with the Cleveland Indians.  The Indians are very similar to the Pittsburgh Pirates in terms of operations and market size.

Then once he joined the Red Sox organization and eventually became their general manager in 2012, he had a decision to make.  The Red Sox were seeing a lot of their core players get close to retirement and Cherington had to figure out how to get the team back in contention.  His way was to build up the Red Sox farm system, which ended up being one a top-five farm system in baseball during his years as General Manager.

When building up the farm system it can often be hard to compete at the major-league level.  As mentioned earlier, the Red Sox were seeing a lot of their veteran players get closer to retirement and had to go through a transitional period.  It was up to Cherington to try to get the team back on track to compete and he decided that the best way was through the minor leagues.  Dave Dombrowski came in and utilized the farm system to lead the Red Sox to be one of the best teams in the American League over the last few years.

Dombrowski did what he does best and depleted the Red Sox farm system.  However, by doing so he showed why it’s important for any team to have a strong minor-league system. He was able to use his top prospects to help fill out his lineup at a cheaper rate, but also as trade currency to bring in high impact players.

Meanwhile, Cherington took some time off of baseball and then hooked on to the Toronto Blue Jays in 2016 where he was hired as the Blue Jays vice president of baseball operations and helped the Blue Jays start their rebuild after their run during the early 2010s.  Once again, Cherington took over a team that had the pleated farm system and helped turn it into one of the top 10 farm systems in baseball.  Now they are not only one of the top system’s in baseball but they also feature some of the premier prospects in baseball.

If history is any indication then Cherington will likely come into the Pittsburgh Pirates organization and look to hit the reset button.  I fully expect that anyone not named Kevin Newman, Brian Reynolds, and Mitch Keller will be made available.

While this is not ideal for most Pittsburgh Pirates fans it is the reality.  Neal Huntington let this team slip out of contention and now Cherington is going to have to right the ship.  While he might make some moves that will irritate fans now, it is important for him to build the Pittsburgh Pirates farm system back up that way they can get back to contention sooner.