The Pirates released veteran reliever Ryan Borucki, according to the MLB.com transaction log. That was the expected outcome after Pittsburgh designated the southpaw for assignment on Friday. Borucki has more than five years of service time and had the right to refuse a minor league assignment, making the release a formality.
Assuming no team claims Borucki off release waivers, he’ll be a free agent. The Pirates will remain on the hook for the rest of his $1.15MM salary, while a signing team would pay him the prorated $760K league minimum rate if he gets an MLB opportunity. If he does sign somewhere, it’d likely come before the beginning of September. Players need to be in an organization by September 1 to be eligible for postseason play. They don’t need to be on the 40-man roster by that point, so Borucki would be playoff eligible even if he signs a minor league contract within the next two weeks.
The 31-year-old would be a long shot to make a postseason roster but should get attention from teams seeking left-handed relief depth. While he has struggled to a 5.28 earned run average through 30 2/3 innings, his underlying marks are a little more intriguing. Borucki has kept the ball on the ground at a huge 55% clip while posting slightly worse than average strikeout and walk marks.
Borucki recently returned from a six-week absence due to a lower back injury. He reeled off five straight scoreless outings upon coming off the IL, but he gave up three runs in an inning of work in Milwaukee last week. The Pirates designated him for assignment after that, calling up lefty Evan Sisk to take his spot in the bullpen. Sisk is a 28-year-old rookie reliever, so the ceiling isn’t exactly high, but the Pirates liked him enough to acquire him from Kansas City in the Bailey Falter deadline deal. It’s understandable they’d rather take a look at Sisk for the final six weeks of the season than continue pitching Borucki, who was headed for free agency at season’s end.
I wonder if Nutting will scold Cherington if no other team signs Borucki and he’s stuck paying for a player no longer with the team
He already cleared waivers so the Pirates are paying him no matter what. If he signs elsewhere its for the minimum ontop of his Pirates salary.
I think Bob Nutting would be one of those owners that, if for example, the Pirates were to go over the first luxury tax tier, and Ben Cherington had not been able to offload players to duck under that threshold, Nutting would probably fire him on the spot.
Cherington should have been fired on the spot last year for not perusing Jazz Chisholm and instead getting Bryan De La Cruz.
Cherrington is the biggest idiot. He used most of the money that was budgeted to him,for analytics.
And from what I’ve read, Nutting wasn’t happy about that
Yes uve heard the same thing. Maybe this will change the water nutting runs the pirates.
The best teams are the most analytical. I think the problem is Cherington does not know how to best use analytics to the team’s advantage.
If anything, I’d say the Pirates aren’t investing enough into their analytics department. According to their directory, they only have 18 employees running their R&D department. The Brewers, Guardians, Rays, and Tigers, all of whom have low to middle-market payrolls, have 25+ members of their R&D, data engineer, or player data analysis departments.
Of course, they need to invest more in general. Bob Nutting has no excuse not to give his GM more to work with, both in terms of acquiring players and investing into the team’s data analysis departments. But if you’re not going to invest in free agents, at least give him some more people to work with in the R&D and data analysis departments.
Neil Huntington did the same thing. Only Huntington produced results
That’s what I’m saying. Huntington knew how to take advantage of the analytics of his time. Cherington does not.
Nothing says you’re not an idiot like misspelling the person’s name you’re ripping and adding commas where they don’t belong.
But you’re really smart, so…
So….. Bubba Chandler ain’t coming up this year?
Also why did we hire a hockey guy as our team president.?
Have you been paying attention to Bubba’s pitching in Indianapolis?
Yeah he’s frustrated that he’s not being called up… because the Pirates are choosing a figth with the players association even though they rake in $$ Millions a year in Luxury Tax Savings
If he is that frustrated to the point where he is putting up an ERA of almost 6.00 and is averaging only about 4 innings a start since June at Triple-A, then that’s on him to settle down, not the Pirates’ job to promote him if his emotions get that much in the way.
In the old LOOGY days, Borucki’s extreme splits would have made him a pretty decent lefty option. Now him primary value would be in situations where he’d face two lefties in an inning or to finish off an inning. He’s probably destined for some team’s AAA roster.
Sisk looks potentially really good. We’ll see. They seem to short leash a lot of their pitchers and send them up/down after one bad outing.