{"id":702932,"date":"2026-05-29T20:45:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T20:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/702932\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T20:45:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T20:45:11","slug":"pirates-designate-justin-lawrence-for-assignment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/702932\/","title":{"rendered":"Pirates Designate Justin Lawrence For Assignment"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Pirates announced that right-hander Justin Lawrence<\/a> has been designated for assignment. That opens active and 40-man roster space for righty Jared Jones<\/a>. It was reported<\/a> yesterday that Jones would be activated from the 60-day injured list to start tonight\u2019s game.<\/p>\n

Lawrence, 31, is having a poor season. He has thrown 22 innings for the Bucs, allowing 5.32 earned runs per nine. His 23.6% strikeout rate and 43.1% walk rate are decent but his 11.3% walk rate is quite high and he has allowed four home runs.<\/p>\n

The Pirates were surely expecting much better. Lawrence had spent 2021 to 2024 with the Rockies, posting a 5.43 ERA. The Bucs claimed him off waivers ahead of the 2025 season, perhaps hoping that getting Lawrence away from Coors Field would help him out. That worked last year, in a sense. Lawrence missed a few months due to elbow inflammation and only made 17 appearances, but the results were great. He had a 0.51 ERA in that time. His 11.6% walk rate was too high but he struck out a third of batters faced and induced grounders on 47.2% of balls in play.<\/p>\n

Pittsburgh tendered Lawrence a contract for 2026 and he is making $1.225MM this year but that investment has not worked out so far. Lawrence is out of options and has been bumped into DFA limbo. That can last as long as a week but the waiver process takes 48 hours, so the club could take as long as five days to explore trade interest.<\/p>\n

Though Lawrence isn\u2019t having his best season, it\u2019s possible there\u2019s some interest. The salary is barely over this year\u2019s $780K league minimum. His four-seamer and sinker average in the upper-90s. His control has never been good, with a 12.3% walk rate in his career, but he has always induced grounders and has occasionally flashed big strikeout potential as well. This year\u2019s struggles are partially due to a drop in strikeouts but also to a home run spike, leading to an unfortunate 55.6% strand rate. His 3.79 SIERA suggests he could have fared better with a slight change in luck.<\/p>\n

If Lawrence were to pass through waivers unclaimed, he would have the right to elect free agency but likely wouldn\u2019t do so. Players with three years of service time have the right to elect free agency but need five years of service to exercise that right while keeping their salary commitments in place. Lawrence is in between those three- and five-year lines and he is still owed about $800K on his contract. Presumably, he wouldn\u2019t want to walk away from that money and would accept an assignment to the minors.<\/p>\n

Photo courtesy of Charles LeClaire, Imagn Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Pirates announced that right-hander Justin Lawrence has been designated for assignment. That opens active and 40-man roster…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":702933,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,342178,591,85],"class_list":["post-702932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-justin-lawrence","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=702932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702932\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/702933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}