MLB expert pours cold water on Pirates’ Konnor Griffin service time controversy

Plenty of Pittsburgh Pirates fans were angered — and somewhat perplexed — by the club's decision to leave Konnor Griffin off the Opening Day roster.

Was the decision made based on a complex thought process involving several factors? Or, at the end of the day, was the 19-year-old Griffin simply not good enough in Spring Training (7-for-41, 13 strikeouts) to deserve a roster spot?

Foul Territory's A.J. Pierzynski dove into these questions with guest Keith Law this week, and Law pushed back against the notion that Pittsburgh is engaging in service time manipulation with the Griffin decision. Law was sure to point out that Griffin flat out didn't perform well enough to garner a roster spot.

Law pointed out that Griffin has only spent a couple of weeks in Double A and "did not look great" this spring. "If he had gone off in Spring Training against big-league pitching, this is probably a very different situation," Law surmised.

Pirates aren't manipulating Konnor Griffin's service time, asserts Keith Law

Interestingly, Law also revealed that he heard all offseason long out of Pirates camp that the organization was rooting for Griffin to make the team, but at the same time, that Don Kelly and Pittsburgh's leadership weren't going to just "hand him the job."

Still, Pierzynski was baffled that the Pirates would send Griffin down after discussing a record-breaking, nine-year, $110 million extension with Griffin, suggesting that Pittsburgh would have kept Griffin on the MLB roster had he accepted.

Law pushed back against this theory, too, asserting that it might have been even easier for Pittsburgh to send Griffin down in the event of an agreed-upon extension from an optics standpoint, seeing as there wouldn't be any trace of service time manipulation at play.

Plenty of fans won't feel any better upon hearing Law's explanation. They just want to see Griffin in the majors ASAP based on his generational talent. Still, the underlying strategy surrounding Griffin's development matters, and the Pirates have more or less demonstrated that they are trying to avoid past mistakes in their handling of Griffin.

Pittsburgh sat and watched while another generational talent, Paul Skenes, raced past all expectations before the Pirates extended him, a saga which feels like the source of such early extension discussions with Griffin.

Pierzynski's financial-based theory that the unsigned extension led to Griffin's Opening Day fate is an interesting one, but ultimately, Law's baseball-based argument emerges as the stronger one. If Griffin had mashed this spring, the Pirates would have had an easy decision on their hands ahead of Thursday's opener. He didn't, and here we are.