Pittsburgh Pirates Prospects: Player to Watch at Each Level in 2022

Greensboro Grasshoppers – LHP Reliever Tyler Samaniego

The Greensboro Grasshoppers’ 2022 roster holds one of the best pitching prospects in the Pirate system in Jared Jones and one of the best position player prospects they have to offer in catcher Henry Davis. There’s also a handful of other notable names like Logan Hofmann, Ricky DeVito, Hudson Head, and Endy Rodriguez. But southpaw Tyler Samaniego has a chance to close out games for the Grasshoppers in 2022.

Drafted in the 15th round of last year’s draft, Samaniego is a product coming out of the University of South Alabama. During his age-22 season with Alabama, the lefty tossed 17.2 innings, only allowing a single home run while racking up 27 punchouts. The downside is he also walked nine batters.

Samaniego got his first taste of action at Bradenton last year. He only faced 28 batters but retired 75% of them, with 15 going down on strike three and only allowing two to reach via free pass. As we saw earlier, he did give up a home run, but he wasn’t very home run prone in college.

Samaniego has a four-seam fastball that he can run up into the upper-90s. A lefty who can fire it through the zone in the 95-97 MPH range will always get attention from teams. He also tosses a wipeout slider that he can get his fair share of swings and misses on. It’s a typical relief pitcher arsenal. His ability to locate needs to be sharpened up, though he did walk just 2 of the 28 batters he faced last season in his first sample size of professional playing time.

It’s not often you find a good relief pitching prospect. Most of baseball’s best relief pitchers started their careers out as starters. Mariano Rivera, Trevor Hoffman, and Lee Smith were all starting pitching prospects before they were Hall of Fame closers. While that’s not to say that the Pittsburgh Pirates have a potential Hall of Fame closer on their hands or that Samaniego will do poorly because he’s a relief prospect already, he is one of the few quality left-handed pitching prospects in the Pirate system. The fact he has the chance to be a closer makes him a player to watch in 2022.