Bryan Reynolds has become Pirates’ best player but will they lock up center fielder long term?
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Ben Cherington pointed to the way Bryan Reynolds runs the bases as a model for the Pittsburgh Pirates to follow, calling their 26-year-old center fielder “the best player on the team right now.”
The Pirates general manager is hardly alone in his high praise for Reynolds, whose bounce-back season included his first All-Star Game selection, an array of dazzling diving catches and finishing ranked among baseball’s top-10 outfielders in most major offensive categories.
Reynolds not only fared well by traditional numbers — he slashed .302/.390/.522 with 35 doubles, 24 home runs and 90 RBIs — but also by advanced analytics. According to FanGraphs, his weighted On-Base Average (.305) ranked fifth among all MLB outfielders, his weighted Runs Created Plus (.382) — which factors in ballpark size — ranked sixth and his Wins Above Replacement (5.5) was tied for third.
That Reynolds was productive at the plate, played hard in the field and hustled on the basepaths, even long after the Pirates were long eliminated from playoff contention, carried weight with the club.
“He’s a phenomenal baseball player, and that’s a guy that you can look at on the field and the way he prepares and goes about his business and you can try to model yourself after as a player,” Pirates shortstop Kevin Newman said. “He’s doing it offensively and defensively. That’s the guy you want to look at and say, ‘How can I be like him?’”
Pirates manager Derek Shelton raved about Reynolds “busting his (butt)” in trying to stretch a double into a triple with the Pirates trailing by eight runs in the sixth inning of a 13-1 loss at the Cincinnati Reds on Sept. 27, only to hit the brakes because the baserunner ahead of him, Yoshi Tsutsugo, stopped at third. Reynolds hit three triples in the final week of the season to tie Shohei Ohtani and David Peralta for the lead.
“This guy plays harder than anybody in baseball,” Shelton said of Reynolds. “When your best player plays like that every night, that’s the thing that stands out. That speaks to what we want to stand for.”
Whether the Pirates plan to reward Reynolds is another story. When asked if they planned to offer Reynolds a contract extension this offseason, Cherington hedged. He declined to discuss specific players, preferring to talk in generalities.
“That’s a door that we want to open again,” Cherington said. “We want to continue to have an open door to that conversation with players as they get to our major league roster. I know I’ve said before, for a lot of cases for different reasons, you open the door, you share information, it doesn’t go much further than that. It just doesn’t make sense to for either party. Sometimes it leads to a longer conversation. Even more infrequently, it actually leads to a deal. You can’t do those deals unless you first open the door. We would just plan to open the door again.
“Again, that’s not specific to any one player. Our hope over time, yes, that we’ll find some of those opportunities to extend guys we believe in and represent the right things and we believe can be part of a winning team here for a long time. And want to be here for a long time.”
The Pirates have control of Reynolds through the 2025 season. That is about the same time they are expected to become contenders, so it makes sense to buy out his arbitration years and extend him beyond that.
Reynolds sounds open to the suggestion of staying here long term.
“I’ve been saying all year that I like Pittsburgh,” Reynolds said late last month. “I like the staff we’ve got here, I like the players, I like the city. So … yeah, I like it here, yeah.”
The Pirates have recently had a revolving door when it comes to outfielders with long-term contracts. They signed Andrew McCutchen (six years, $51.5 million), Starling Marte (six years, $31 million) and Gregory Polanco (five years, $35 million) to long-term deals, but severed ties with all three before the completion of their contracts.
Coincidentally, Reynolds was part of the return when the Pirates traded McCutchen to San Francisco in January 2018. (They dealt Marte to Arizona in January 2020, with two years left on his contract, and released Polanco in late August in in the final year of his contract, though the team had two options remaining).
Reynolds, who earned $601,000 in 2021, should receive a substantial raise in his first year of arbitration eligibility. When All-Star first baseman Josh Bell reached his first year of arbitration, after his 37-home run, 116-RBI season in 2019, he received a $4.8 million contract.
To put Reynolds’ salary in perspective, he’s nowhere near the highest-paid center fielders despite emerging as one of baseball’s best this season. Mike Trout ($36 million) is in his own stratosphere, and George Springer signed a six-year, $150-million deal with Toronto. Cody Bellinger made $16.1 million this season, but he’s won an MVP. Starling Marte made $12.5 million in the final year of his contract.
Signing Reynolds could require the Pirates to pay a Lorenzo Cain-like deal (five years, $80 million), which would break Jason Kendall’s six-year, $60-million deal as their biggest in club history.
The Pirates had baseball’s lowest payroll at $62,984,000 this season, but have only $18.25 million committed for 2022 and could clear more room by parting ways with a handful of their highest-paid players.
Right fielder Yoshi Tsutsugo and right-hander Trevor Cahill are free agents. First baseman Colin Moran and lefty Steven Brault enter their second year of arbitration and righty Chad Kuhl will be third-year arbitration eligible. Those three combined to make nearly $7 million this season, but Kuhl went from Opening Day starter to being banished to the bullpen, Brault made only seven starts because of a recurring lat strain and Moran played in only 99 games because of hand and groin injuries.
“We should be incredibly busy in exploring trade opportunities and exploring free-agent opportunities, but need to do that in a way that fits with the strategy that makes sense to build a winning team,” Cherington said, “because we know that so much of our success will need to be driven from improvement from young players.”
Where the Pirates are using Reynolds to promote the cultural change within their clubhouse and on-field product, Pirates players will be keeping close watch on whether he receives a fair-market offer. That could be especially true of rookie third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes, who should also be a priority for the Pirates to sign long term.
After hitting a team-best .314 with 37 doubles, 16 home runs and 68 RBIs as a rookie — when he was promoted after only 13 games at Triple-A — Reynolds struggled to find his timing last year by batting .189 with seven homers and 19 RBIs in 55 games.
That Reynolds rebounded with a career year makes the abbreviated 2020 season appear to be an aberration. Waiting another year to be sure before signing him could be a risky proposition for the Pirates.
“He should get MVP votes this year. Anytime you say that, it says all that you need to say about a player’s season,” Pirates catcher Jacob Stallings said. “He’s been phenomenal. He had the down year last year, but I don’t think anybody was really worried about how he’d bounce back because he’s been so consistent his whole life. He’s a borderline superstar player, and I’m really glad he’s on the team.”