Pittsburgh Pirates Prospects: Concerns About Mason Martin’s Season

Pittsburgh Pirates first base prospect Mason Martin has spent all of 2021 at Double-A and his overall campaign should raise some concerns.

One of the Pittsburgh Pirates higher ranking prospects is first baseman Mason Martin. Martin was their 17th round pick in 2017. Despite the late-round selection, he’s developed into one of their more notable prospects.

FanGraphs have him as the Pittsburgh Pirates 26th best prospect. Meanwhile, MLB Pipeline holds him in even higher regard, placing him as the team’s 17th best prospect and even go so far as to say he is the 6th best first base prospect in all of baseball.

Martin got ranked so high because of his immense power potential. In 2019, he hit .254/.351/.558 through 556 plate appearances split between Low-A and High-A. Not only did he have a slugging percentage well above .550, but slammed 35 long balls, tied for the third-most among all minor league batters. His isolated slugging percentage surpassed the .300 mark at .304 (the 11th highest among minor league batters with at least 300 plate appearances). Though he struck out a ton with a 30.2% strikeout rate, he at least drew walks at a fantastic 12.2% rate.

However, Martin’s 2021 season has been slightly concerning. He’s played the entire year at Double-A batting .251/.328/.508 with a .356 wOBA, and 121 wRC+. Now I’m not saying that this isn’t a great year. He’s continued to show off his light-tower-power, blasting 21 home runs in 415 plate appearances and having a .257 ISO.

But the major concern is his plate discipline, or the lack thereof. He’s striking out more than in any previous season. He currently has a 34.7% strikeout rate. But that’s not the only issue. He’s not walking nearly at the same frequency compared to years prior. His 8.2% walk rate may not be awful when comparing him to the league average but is awful when you compare it to Martin. He’s seen about a 4% decrease from 2019 (his previous lowest walk rate), but a 4.5% strikeout rate increase.

Martin needs to have a walk rate of at least 10% to help offset his usually high strikeout rate. It’s also not like he’s started to develop a good contact-hitting tool neither with a batting average .004 points lower than his 2019 mark.

Things haven’t gotten much better as the season has gone on. Since mid-June, he has been walking more with a 9.8% rate. However, his strikeout rate has only gone up. The last 161 plate appearances have seen him go down on strikes in 38% of said plate appearances.

Martin hasn’t even been a three-true-outcomes player this year. More of the all-or-nothing kind of player. That’s highly concerning at his age-22 season. Sure he hits nukes, but in this era of the game, you can find about a dozen all-or-nothing kind of players. Triple-A will be the real test as to whether or not this kind of approach for Martin will lead to success in the Majors.

My biggest concern is that he fails to even reach Pedro Alvarez standards. From 2012 to 2015, Alvarez hit .238.310/.456 with a .329 wOBA, and 110 wRC+. He hit 111 total home runs (including back-to-back 30 home run seasons in 2012 and 2013) while having a .218 ISO. Alvarez also was pretty much an all-or-nothing kind of batter. He walked at a solid 9.3% rate but struck out well over 25% of the time (28.6 to be exact).

Though Martin is a far superior defender at first base compared to Alvarez, the point still stands that Martin may never even surpass the former Pittsburgh Pirates offensive output during his prime.

A player like Martin can have such high variance in terms of the difference of their ceiling and floor. His floor could be a Matt Davidson; a guy who comes up for a few years, crushes a handful of home runs, but is soon forgotten about because home runs were the only thing of value he brought to the table. His ceiling could be Adam Dunn, a player who mastered the art of three-true-outcomes and was one of baseball’s most feared sluggers for a better part of a decade. However, Martin’s lack of walks and increased strikeout rates make it harder to see an Dunn, and easier to see a Matt Davidson.

It’s all going to rely on Martin’s strikeout and walk rates. His Double-A season has been slightly concerning because both have moved in the wrong direction. I still believe that Martin can be a productive player. If he puts up numbers as Alvarez did in his prime with solid defense at first base, that’s a 2-3 WAR player. But that doesn’t mean I’m not doing a double-take on his walk and strikeout rates at Double-A. It’s definitely something to keep an eye on over the course of the next year.

That also doesn’t mean I think the Pittsburgh Pirates will not be able to find another capable first baseman and run a carousel at the position as they did in the early-2010’s. It’s quite possible their first-round pick from 2021, Austin Davis, gets some reps at first if Endy Rodriguez ultimately pans out, as well because of Rodriguez’s far superior defense. If both pan out, it’s also possible that the two split time behind the dish and at first base to keep each other fresh. They could probably also slide someone like Jared Triolo, Jackson Glenn, or Rodolfo Castro over to first base. Martin not panning out isn’t the end of the Pirates.

In the end, Martin is going to need to show better plate discipline, or an improved ability to make contact in general in order to inspire more confidence that he is the concrete long-term answer at first base. The lack of it he’s displayed in 2021 is a very reasonable concern. But he has displayed solid discipline at other levels of the minor leagues, so hopefully, he can do it again at Triple-A and potentially the Major Leagues in 2022.