Pittsburgh Pirates: Three Goals For Shortstop In 2021

Goal Number Three – Improve The Offense

The third goal is to improve the hitting stats for all three of the potential shortstop candidates. Out of all three of the players competing for the starting job, none of the three was able to bat above .227, which is really bad.

Lets start with the worst of the three, Tucker. Tucker batted .220 with an OBP of .252 and an OPS of .527. When you combine all of these hitting stats and compare it to the average player using runs batting (Rbat) it shows that Tucker was worth eight less runs than the average hitter.

Next is Newman. He batted .224 with an OBP of .281 and an OPS of .556. If you look at his Rbat it shows that while the numbers appear to be slightly better than Tucker’s, Newman was worth eight runs less than the average hitter as well.

The best hitter, average wise, last year out of these three was Gonzalez. He batted .227 with an OBP of .255 and an OPS of .614. While his OPS and average was higher than both of the other players, Gonzalez was worth the least when it came to Rtot. Gonzalez managed to have a Rtot of ten runs below the average hitter, which is worse than the eight below that Tucker and Newman posted.

As made clear by all of these stats combined, the entire shortstop group needs to really improve their hitting this season if they want to change the perception that they are one of the worst positional groups that the Pirates have right now.