Pittsburgh Pirates: Three Non-Tender Candidates

This off-season, the Pittsburgh Pirates are going to face some questions with who they will keep, trade or release. Here are three potential non-tender candidates.

The off-season is approaching for the Pittsburgh Pirates and they will have to face many questions. The team will likely depart with many current players through trades, but there are a handful of players that they may move on by non-tendering them a contract rather than going through arbitration.

This year, there are three players fans could see the Pittsburgh Pirates non-tendering. Let’s go through, and analyze each, and see why they could be a non-tender candidate this upcoming off-season.

Dovydas Neverauskas

If there is any player that gets a non-tender, it’s going to be right hander Dovydas Neverauskas. The Pittsburgh Pirates have given him chance after chance to prove himself, but he’s yet to do anything at the MLB level. In 19 innings pitched in 2020 Neverauskas had a 7.11 ERA, 5.77 FIP and 1.78 WHIP. He gave up five home runs, and put up a 48.2% hard hit rate.

Neverauskas’ 6.81 ERA and 5.77 FIP are the fifth and fourth worst in Pirate history among pitchers with at least 80 innings under their belt. He’s surrendered 20 home runs in 80.2 innings of work, resulting in an extremely high 2.2 HR/9. Neverauskas has a career -1 fWAR as well.

Though he did have a solid xFIP and SIERA, both at 4.07, along with his fastball at an elite 70-grade, he had a 5.11 DRA. Neverauskas has been given way too many chances, if you ask me. He’s given up nearly as many earned runs in the past three years than innings pitched with a 50/55 ratio. Earned runs might not be the best identification of productiveness, but he also has a 4.69 xFIP and 4.23 SIERA. Even if he was pitching to his ERA estimators, he would be a sub-par relief pitcher.