Andrew Heaney Heads to Pittsburgh To Write His Next Stanza

The great Irish writer Seamus Heaney often spoke of the good that poetry could do, both for individuals and the world at large. To that point, he once lamented in jest that “poetry can’t be administered like an injection.” Admittedly, I stumbled upon that quotation by accident, deep within an internet rabbit hole I tumbled down while researching the American baseball pitcher Andrew Heaney. (Sometimes I forget to search for more than just a last name.) Nevertheless, I was so taken with Seamus Heaney’s message that I felt inspired to inject his words into my writing and analysis today.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
-From “Digging” (1966)

On Thursday, the Pirates and Heaney – Andrew, to be clear – agreed to a one-year, $5.25 million contract for 2025. After two years with the Rangers, the veteran left-hander will slot into Pittsburgh’s rotation for his age-34 season.

A first-round pick by the Marlins in 2012, Heaney spent three seasons in their organization. He climbed to the summit of Miami’s top prospect list in 2013 and made his big league debut the subsequent summer. Following the 2014 season, he was the headlining prospect in a fascinating trade with the Dodgers that brought Dan Haren, Dee Strange-Gordon, and Miguel Rojas to the Marlins in exchange for Heaney, as well as future Dodgers stalwarts Enrique Hernández and Austin Barnes, and catcher-to-pitcher convert Chris Hatcher. Hours later, the Dodgers flipped Heaney to the Angels for Howie Kendrick. At the time, Kendrick was coming off a 4.6-WAR season for the reigning AL West champions, just to offer some sense of how highly the Angels must have valued Heaney.

Heaney was a top-50 prospect in the game entering 2015, and he showed promise for the Halos during his rookie season, pitching to a 3.49 ERA, 3.73 FIP, and 1.6 WAR in 18 starts. Unfortunately, a torn UCL kept him off the mound for most of the next two years. He pitched well again in 2018, giving the Angels 180 innings over 30 starts with a 4.15 ERA, 3.99 FIP, and 2.9 WAR. However, another elbow injury cut into his 2019 campaign. Still, he returned to make 18 starts and looked sharper than his 4.91 ERA suggested. The lefty increased his strikeout rate from 24.0% to 28.9% and finished with 1.3 WAR in just over half a season of work.

Heaney stayed healthy for the next two years, producing 3.0 WAR across his final 30 starts with the Angels before packing his bags for the Bronx at the trade deadline in 2021. It was with the Yankees that he had the worst stretch of his major league career, pitching so poorly in just five starts that the team moved him to the bullpen in September. He then continued to pitch so poorly in relief that he was DFA’d before the playoffs.

Despite Heaney’s late-season struggles, the Dodgers saw his upside and brought him back into the fold – this time for more than five hours. In typical Dodgers-pitcher fashion, Heaney spent half the year on the IL, but when he was healthy, his left arm looked better than ever. His average fastball velocity reached new heights (93.0 mph), and he added a hard, sweeping slider to his arsenal. To make room for the new pitch, he eschewed his curveball and scaled back his changeup usage, largely becoming a two-pitch starting pitcher. Thanks to those adjustments, as well as an overall overhaul of his mechanics, Heaney pitched to a career-best 3.10 ERA in 72 2/3 innings of work. Even more impressive were his 35.5% strikeout rate and 29.4% K-BB%; the only pitcher who threw more innings and bested Heaney in either category was Spencer Strider.

Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what’s said and what’s done.
-From Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (1999)

As Heaney re-entered free agency during the 2022-23 offseason, it was almost as if he were two pitchers in one. There was the frontline arm so many said he had the potential to be, and there was the starter he had actually been for most of his career: an inconsistent injury risk who’d given up way too many home runs. For that reason, he was one of the most intriguing high-risk, high-reward propositions on the open market. Ben Clemens ranked him at no. 33 on our Top 50 Free Agents list that winter, while our contract crowdsourcing exercise produced a median prediction of a two-year, $20 million deal. He ended up beating that number, securing a two-year, $25 million guarantee (plus incentives) from the Rangers. He might have commanded even more if he hadn’t instead received an opt-out after year one.

Over two seasons with Texas, Heaney picked up a pen and rewrote his own narrative. While just about every one of his rotation mates spent time on the IL in one of the two years, if not both, the southpaw avoided the injured list entirely throughout his Rangers tenure. He reached the triple digits in innings pitched in back-to-back seasons for the first time in his career, with 147 1/3 frames over 34 games (28 starts) in 2023 and 160 innings over 32 outings (31 starts) in 2024. His 59 starts led the team in that time. On top of that, he meaningfully reduced his home run rates. Across the first nine years of his career, Heaney gave up an average of 1.63 homers per nine with a 16.1% home run-to-fly ball ratio. With the Rangers, his HR/9 dropped to 1.35, while his HR/FB fell to just 11.9%.

Yet, the version of Heaney we were promised if only he could stay on the field and limit home runs was nowhere to be seen. The high strikeout totals from his brief Dodger days were gone. Heck, he wasn’t even the strikeout arm he had been with the Angels. With the Rangers, Heaney produced a profoundly average strikeout rate of 23.2%. He paired that with a presentable 4.22 ERA and 4.34 FIP. All in all, he racked up 3.5 WAR, for an average of 1.7 WAR per 150 innings pitched. Somewhere along the way, the high-risk, high-reward pitcher the Rangers signed turned into a reliable back-end innings eater instead.

Heaney continued to throw his slider as his secondary pitch in Texas, and he continued to throw it with the extreme horizontal release point that gave it its sweeping appearance. Indeed, for what it’s worth, PitchingBot and Pitching+ liked the breaking pitch better from 2023-24 than they did in ’22. That being said, his velocity was down on the slider (and on his fastball too), and the results were undeniably worse:

Heaney also increased his changeup usage with the Rangers to give him an alternate course of action against opposite-handed hitters. He threw it just 6.4% of the time against righties in 2022 but upped that usage rate to around 20% of the time in each of the past two years. Nobody would call it a nasty weapon – neither of our pitch models is particularly fond of it – but the cambio has always been his best option for inducing grounders. That’s key for a pitcher who has long struggled to keep right-handed batters from taking him yard. So, Heaney’s reduced velocity and an approach that leaned less heavily on his best pure stuff might explain why he didn’t miss nearly as many bats with Texas as he did in L.A. At the same time, throwing more changeups and pitching with a little less oomph could also explain why he was better at limiting home runs and staying on the field.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
-From Seamus Heaney’s commencement speech at UNC-Chapel Hill (1996)

When Heaney re-entered free agency this past fall, there wasn’t much talk of his frontline starter potential. That hope had long since died. However, a new, different expectation – that Heaney could be a reliable, back-end arm – was born in its place. Once again, Ben ranked him at spot no. 33 on our Top 50 list. Meanwhile, our contract crowdsourcing efforts returned a median prediction of two years and $25 million; that’s the same deal he signed with the Rangers two years back. Heaney was a completely different type of free agent this time around, but his value, as we collectively estimated, was exactly the same.

Unfortunately for Heaney, the market this offseason has been much kinder to high-risk, high-reward arms than stable, back-end veterans. From Walker Buehler and Patrick Sandoval to Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, and Alex Cobb, riskier bets have landed sizeable contracts, while safe and boring names like Heaney, Jose Quintana, and Kyle Gibson have generated little buzz.

So, with spring training already underway, Heaney ultimately signed for much less than most of us expected. His $5.25 million guarantee is 79% lower than his median crowdsourced prediction of $25 million. The only free agent from our Top 50 to sign for less, compared to his crowdsourced prediction, was Kyle Hart. Considering Hart’s 15.55 career ERA in 11 MLB innings, his contract was always going to be a challenge to predict. Heaney’s should not have posed nearly as much difficulty.

With such a low salary, Heaney is a good bet to provide surplus value for the Pirates. Dating back to 2018, he has a 104 ERA- and 99 FIP- with an average of almost exactly 2.0 WAR per 150 innings pitched. He has been worth at least 1.0 WAR in every season of his career, outside of his cup of coffee in 2014 and the two years he lost to Tommy John. However you calculate the going rate for a win above replacement, it would be hard to argue that Heaney has not provided upwards of $5.25 million in value in every proper season of his big league tenure. The home run-suppressing confines of PNC Park should help him to do so once again in 2025; he hasn’t played his home games in such a low-homer environment since his brief residency at what was then Marlins Park.

Was it Heaney’s low price tag that convinced the Pirates to open their pouch of doubloons and give out their largest free agent contract of the winter? Perhaps. But an arm like Heaney should have been on their offseason shopping list from the very beginning. (Then again, a lot of pieces should have been on their offseason shopping list.)

The aim of the poet and of the poetry is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual work into the larger work of the community as a whole.
-From Seamus Heaney’s lecture “Yeats as an Example?” (1978)

Without Heaney, the Pirates still would have a perfectly capable starting five. I’d argue the quintet of Paul Skenes, Jared Jones, Mitch Keller, Bailey Falter, and Johan Oviedo would be a slightly above-average group with the upside to be a top-10 rotation in the sport. And while Heaney is an upgrade over Falter and Oviedo – he has a higher ceiling and a much longer track record – he’s not necessarily that much of an upgrade. Falter gave the Pirates 28 starts last year, putting up a 4.43 ERA, 4.30 FIP, and 1.7 WAR. In like manner, Oviedo pitched to a 4.31 ERA, 4.49 FIP, and 1.8 WAR over 32 starts in 2023 before Tommy John surgery kept him out for all of 2024. That’s pretty much the kind of pitcher Heaney has been for the last couple of years, too. Indeed, here’s how those three arms stack up according to our Depth Charts projections for the upcoming season:

Heaney should slot in as Pittsburgh’s fourth starter, pushing Falter down to no. 5 and Oviedo down to Triple-A. Unlike Falter, Oviedo still has an option year remaining, and it couldn’t hurt to start him off slow as he makes his way back from Tommy John. Yet, the reason Heaney will be of service to the Pirates isn’t as a replacement for Oviedo. Because, as you surely understand, the five-man rotation – like the stories of Philoctetes or Antigone – is little more than a myth.

This addition isn’t really about one individual replacing another. It’s about improving Pittsburgh’s overall starting pitching depth. The Pirates will almost certainly need all six of Skenes, Jones, Keller, Heaney, Falter, and Oviedo to start games at some point this season. So, they didn’t sign Heaney because they don’t trust Oviedo. They signed him so they won’t have to worry as much about converting Caleb Ferguson into a starting pitcher. They signed him so they’ll be less likely to have to start Joey Wentz in a pinch. They signed him so they hopefully won’t need to call up a top prospect like Bubba Chandler, Braxton Ashcraft, or Thomas Harrington before they’re ready to debut. Heaney is a marginal improvement for the Pirates’ Opening Day rotation. But much more than that, he strengthens their starting pitching reserves – reserves they’ll need if they’re going to survive the 162 games to come.

Walk on air against your better judgement.
-From Seamus Heaney’s Nobel lecture (1995), and his epitaph

I don’t need to tell you the Pirates have had a disappointing offseason. Michael Baumann already did that. With a generational talent like Skenes to lead the way for the handful of years, this team should be walking on air. Instead, it is happy to remain in the basement, in the name of better judgment (for Bob Nutting’s bottom line, that is).

On its own, the Heaney signing is a good move. Pittsburgh’s starting rotation is already its greatest strength. With another two young starters on our Top 100 Prospects list, both of whom could debut this year, the Pirates didn’t need to pursue a top-end hurler on a multi-year deal. Heaney was the kind of starter they needed, and they got him at a great price. Still, I wouldn’t feel right to commend this move without mentioning how little else the Pirates have accomplished. That would be like praising Anthony Hopkins for his unflinching performance as Sir Edmund Burton without acknowledging that Transformers: The Last Knight was an objectively terrible film. The Pirates may have gotten it right with Heaney, but that does nothing to change the fact that their pitiful offense and defense are bound to let their pitchers down time and time again.

The NL Central is a winnable division, and the Pirates’ 17.5% postseason odds suggest that with some bigger moves, Ben Cherington could have made his team into a dark-horse playoff contender. Instead, his only hopes for that are for Skenes to break Ed “Cannonball” Morris’s franchise record for starts in a season (63) or for both the Cubs and Brewers to choke. In the heavily paraphrased words of Seamus Heaney, the Pirates don’t seem to believe a further shore is reachable. Thus, they will continue to suffer, and no poem or play or song can fully right the wrong that their fans have long endured.

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