{"id":579452,"date":"2026-04-03T11:11:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T11:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/579452\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T11:11:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T11:11:09","slug":"pirates-konnor-griffin-making-history-by-debuting-in-mlb-at-19-years-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/579452\/","title":{"rendered":"Pirates’ Konnor Griffin making history by debuting in MLB at 19 years old"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pirates’ Konnor Griffin making history by debuting in MLB at 19 years old<\/a> originally appeared on The Sporting News<\/a>. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Konnor Griffin has reached MLB faster than almost anyone expected.<\/p>\n

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In the process, the Pittsburgh Pirates<\/a>‘ shortstop phenom and top prospect in the sport will make quite a bit of baseball history when he debuts on Friday at just 19 years old.<\/p>\n

He’s the first teenage position player to appear in an MLB game since Juan Soto did it with the Washington Nationals<\/a> in 2018, according to MLB’s Sarah Lang<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The last time a teenager appeared this early in a season as a position player? That was Adrian Beltre in 1999, per Langs.<\/p>\n

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Griffin is slightly younger than Beltre was then, the youngest (19 years, 344 days) to play this early in the season since Andruw Jones in 1997, again according to Langs.<\/p>\n

MORE:\u00a0Braves make baseball history so rare it dates back to the Montreal Expos<\/a><\/p>\n

How about for the Pirates? MLB.com’s Thomas Harrigan<\/a> has a few more Griffin stats.<\/p>\n

The last teenager to play for the Pirates was back in 1998, when Aramis Ramirez played in 25 games while he was still 19 years old.<\/p>\n

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Griffin becomes the fifth teenager to play for the Pirates since the end of the 1950s, joining Bob Bailey, Bob Moose, Miguel Dilone and Aramis Ramirez.<\/p>\n

Amazingly, Harrigan shares, the Pirates had 11 teenagers play for them just in the 1950s, including Bill Mazeroski.<\/p>\n

Griffin will turn 20 later this month, so his time as a teenager in MLB won’t last for that long.<\/p>\n

But the fact that he has gotten here this quickly at all, and has generated so much hype in a short period of time, makes this an exciting day for the Pirates.<\/p>\n

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More MLB news:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pirates’ Konnor Griffin making history by debuting in MLB at 19 years old originally appeared on The Sporting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":579453,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[221921,175852,221922,210385,49,48,1509,131696,462,509,215458,221923,82,3968],"class_list":{"0":"post-579452","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-adrian-beltre","9":"tag-andruw-jones","10":"tag-aramis-ramirez","11":"tag-baseball-history","12":"tag-ca","13":"tag-canada","14":"tag-juan-soto","15":"tag-konnor-griffin","16":"tag-mlb","17":"tag-pittsburgh-pirates","18":"tag-position-player","19":"tag-sarah-lang","20":"tag-sports","21":"tag-washington-nationals"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/579453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}