When you think of teams that hit for power, the Pittsburgh Pirates don’t come to mind, but we didn’t know it was this bad.
Historically, the Pirates haven’t had that one guy who can crank out 40 or more homers in a season.
In fact, they haven’t had one since Willie Stargell hit 44 dingers in 1973. That’s nearly 50 years ago.
In the past 20 or so years, a few players have gotten close.
Brian Giles has 39 and 38 in 1999 and 2002 respectively and in 2019 Josh Bell hit 37 out of the park, but he’s now with the Washington Nationals.
Even in the run the Pirates had between 2013-2015, only Pedro Alvarez hit over 30 homers with 36 in 2013. Of course Alvarez also broke the record for most strikeouts in a season for a Pirates player with 186, breaking his own record of 180 the previous year.
Now we come to present day, and if trends continue, it doesn’t look like the long ball will be a huge factor in the Pirates scoring runs this year.
Daren Willman Director of baseball research and development for Major League Baseball, shared an interesting graph on Twitter early Tuesday.
Willman looked at every team’s current active roster to see what clubs had the most combined home runs.
With Albert Pujols on the Angels, Los Angeles sky-rockets to the top of the list with over 1,800 combined home runs. Even with Pujols’ 662 career home runs, L.A. would still be in the lead.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is the Pirates, with just over 200 combined home runs as a team.
Next lowest on the list is the Seattle Mariners who have almost double the number of home runs the Pirates do as a club.
To be fair, the Pirates have one of the youngest rosters in the MLB so the number of at bats the Bucs players have gotten are way down compared to the rest of the league.
But even with that, when you look at the current roster, there really isn’t a true home run hitter in the lineup.
Sure as Ke’Bryan Hayes develops, hopefully he can put together a string of a few 20+ home run seasons, but last year it was Colin Moran who lead the team in HR’s with 10, not bad for only 60 games, but still not enough power.