It's almost scary to think about how good the Pittsburgh Pirates can be one day, as they have so much young talent on both sides of the baseball, but there's absolutely no reason for them not to be among the elite of the elite in Major League Baseball over the next decade plus.
The only reason the Pirates wouldn't be among the elite is if the front office makes the wrong decision and trades guys when they shouldn't, or doesn't give these guys the money that they obviously deserve. The harsh reality is that no team outside of the Los Angeles Dodgers will be able to pay everybody.
However, with that young talent we're talking about, there are a lot of guys in the organization who can replace players. One of them is right-hander Seth Hernandez, who is viewed as one of the top prospects in Major League Baseball.
Speaking recently about Hernandez's future, general manager Ben Cherington had a lot to say. He added that while they're very happy about Hernandez, everybody's situation is different when looking at a prospect.
“I think first of all, just keep it case-by-case," Cherington said, per Dominic Campbell. "Everybody is an individual. Seth’s case is going to be different than anybody else’s. It’s definitely true he’s off to a really good start. He’s very talented. On the one hand, we don’t want to create a sort of hard ceiling on what someone’s capable of, but we’re going to continue to challenge guys, including Seth, and sometimes that can mean with the right player, they can move faster. We’ll see.
“I think that what’s interesting about Seth and specifically is that as a high school pitcher, he just never pitched, I mean no high school pitcher, but including Seth, pitches that many innings, actually, over a course of a 12-month calendar between the high school season and the way the showcase stuff works. You’re just not building up a lot of innings as a high school pitcher. So you come into pro ball, we know what the eventual outcome is we want. We want Seth, or any young starting pitching prospect to be in a position at some point to start to get into that 130-150-170 inning category where you see guys like [Mitch] Keller and [Paul] Skenes eventually graduate to.”
The unfortunate part for Hernandez is that he's only thrown 12.0 innings in his minor league career and is 19 years old, and while he might be incredible and have all the tools to be a big leaguer one day, there's just no possible chance the Pirates are going to call him up anytime soon.
However, if he does what everybody expects him to do, I'd expect him to be up sooner rather than later.