What is wrong in State College?

First things first, the Pirates beat Baltimore to win the series and return to .500. They are just 3 games out going into a day off and a scary series versus the Boston Red Sox.

Today the topic is the State College Spikes, the Pirates A- minor league team. They were shut out the second night in a row and held to 3 hits. They have just one win to their credit and are an absolute disaster on offense. Nick Kingham did a lot to remove worries about his abilities by going 5 giving up 1 run and striking out 8. A nice recap can be found at Pirate Prospects.

A quick look at the stats shows that of those people with 10 ABs only two appear able to hit. Derek Trent is hitting .286 and Samuel Gonzalez is hitting .500 with an OPS over 1. Other than that the next best hitter is Carlos Mesa at .222. There are 6 players below .200 and 3 below .100 with the requisite number of ABs. Only 1 HR has been hit so far. This is not a good start.

The question is why such a slow start to the offense? Is this just what happens when you only draft 4 seniors, 2 of whom are pitchers, and one of whom just played his first game tonight where he went 1 for 4. Derek Trent is the other, and he was one of the hitters with an acceptable average.
But this cannot be the whole answer as a few college juniors are struggling like Brian Sharp and 10th round pick Taylor Lewis. Plus, some of these guys were fairly well regarded prospects coming in such as Exicardo Cayones, who is hitting below .100 right now. Cayones is easily the biggest prospect on this team and he is currently 1 for 11 with 5 strikeouts. That is not good.

I know that this is early in the season, and that many more prospects will be showing up such as hopefully Alex Dickerson (3rd round pick), or maybe Dan Gamache (6th round), who should help the offense quite a bit. But, has been 6 games, and this is not a promising start. This team is not going to win when only 3 players are hitting (Justin Bencsko is one AB short, but will be at least a .300 hitter when he gets that 10th AB). Cayones and Lewis are the two who need to start hitting and hitting now. Wes Freeman ought to be hitting as well. He is 21 and has had enough minor league experience that he ought to be hitting. He is hitting .214 and has that lone homer, but that is not good enough for a guy who has this much experience in the minors.

No matter how you look at it, this is not a good start. While it is too early to panic. The Pirates are going to need a wave of bats, and some of these guys are going to have to figure out how to do it.