Pittsburgh Pirates Trade Recap: Josh Bell to the Washington Nationals

The Results So Far

Well, Josh Bell had another Josh Bell season. He started slow and ended strong. All told, Bell had a .261/.347/.576 line, 27 home runs, a .352 wOBA, and 118 wRC+. In the first half of the season, he had just a 99 wRC+. Then in the second half, that rose to 136. Bell displayed some good pop, posting a .215 ISO. Though this did come with -1 DRS, -3.2 UZR/150, but having +3 outs above average. His glove had improved but was still nothing too great. Bell ended up with a 1.4 fWAR, the second-highest single-season mark of his career so far.

Crowe made his debut in 2020 and was one of the Pirates’ primary starting pitchers in 2021. He didn’t do all that good, posting a 5.48 ERA, 5.67 FIP, and 1.57 WHIP in 116.2 innings of work. Crowe only struck out 21.2% of batters faced but gave up free passes at a poor 10.9% rate.

His biggest issue was home runs, which he gave up at a 1.93 pace. He did have some solid moments, as he looked like a solid back of the rotation starter in July, and ended the season on a high note. But overall, not very good results from Crowe.

Yean’s bottom line numbers are a bit misleading. The young right-hander had a 5.27 ERA, FIP, and 1.43 WHIP in 66.2 innings. But this also came with a solid 23.3% strikeout rate and 1.08 HR/9. Walks were the right-hander’s biggest issue, which he surrendered at a 13.2% pace.

But most of the damage done to Yean was done in two outings.

On August 13th and May 5th, Yean gave up a total of 10 innings between the two outings in a combined 1 inning of work. Outside of these two outings, he had a solid 3.97 ERA. Yean did see an uptick in velocity as he was working in the upper-90’s with his fastball and in the upper-80’s with his slider. Plus he had a strong 52.7% ground ball rate. He’s still pretty young as next season will be his age-21 campaign.