Pittsburgh Pirates: Breaking Down Players Acquired in Adam Frazier Trade

Tucupita Marcano

The headliner of this trade was the 21-year-old utility player. Like Frazier, Marcano’s primary position has been second base, but he can also play third, short, left, and right field. Additionally like Frazier, Marcano is more of a contact hitter, who has a left-handed swing.

Tucupita Marcano has been disagreed upon a decent bit when it comes to his ranking because MLB Pipeline and FanGraphs have him listed at completely different ends of prospect lists. MLB Pipeline had him ranked at 5th in the Padres system just after their 4 top-50 guys, but FanGraphs plugged him in as the Pirates’ 33rd best prospect with a FV of 40.

Marcano has very little data for the Major Leagues, as his Major League debut was on April 1st of this year, and he was sent back down to Triple-A after only 50 at-bats. Looking at his Triple-A stats though, it begins to look more and more like the Pittsburgh Pirates traded 1.5 years of Frazier for 6 years of a player identical to him plus two more players.

At Triple-A this season Marcano has hit .272 to go with a .367 on-base percentage and a WRC+ of 101. Additionally, he has great plate vision, as he manages to draw walks at a greater clip than he does going down on strikes. (13.6% vs 12.6%) These stats are very eerily similar to what Frazier put up from 2016-2020 when you take out his outlier season this year.

Lastly, Ben Cherington was huge on this guy back before they made the Musgrove trade but the Padres did not want to give him up at all during the offseason. This should show the fans that even if something great about Marcano does not stick out to them, it definitely has to the Padres and Cherington, or he would have been part of the Musgrove trade, or the Pittsburgh Pirates would not have sent $1.4 million in addition to Frazier to get him.

Marcano will start off his Pirate tenure in Triple-A Indianapolis. However, he could join their MLB roster sooner rather than later.