{"id":72453,"date":"2025-08-15T20:48:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T20:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/72453\/"},"modified":"2025-08-15T20:48:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T20:48:07","slug":"pirates-designate-ryan-borucki-for-assignment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/72453\/","title":{"rendered":"Pirates Designate Ryan Borucki For Assignment"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Pirates have designated left-handed reliever Ryan Borucki<\/a> for assignment, manager Don Kelly announced to reporters prior to this afternoon\u2019s game (link via Noah Hiles of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette<\/a>). Pittsburgh also recalled righty Colin Holderman<\/a> and lefty Evan Sisk<\/a> from Triple-A Indianapolis and optioned righty Cam Sanders<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The 31-year-old Borucki has had a second straight rough season with the Bucs. Back in 2023, he turned in a sharp 2.45 ERA with a 21.7% strikeout rate and superlative 2.6% walk rate through 40 1\/3 frames. He\u2019s since turned in successive ERAs of 7.36 and 5.28 over a combined 41 2\/3 frames while navigating multiple injuries. Borucki was out for more than a month due to a lower back injury earlier this summer, and a triceps injury limited him to just 11 innings in 2024.<\/p>\n

Even with that rough stretch, Borucki still carries a career 4.38 ERA in 252 big league innings. He\u2019s set down 19.6% of his career opponents on strikes and walked 8.7% of them. Neither is a plus mark, but neither is too far from league average. Borucki\u2019s career 48.3% ground-ball rate (55% in 2025) is several percentage points north of average.<\/p>\n

Borucki\u2019s minor league deal with the Pirates contained a $1.15MM base salary that locked in when he was added to the big league roster. Any team that claims him off waivers \u2014 he obviously cannot be traded now that the deadline has passed \u2014 would be responsible for the prorated remainder of that sum, about $272K through season\u2019s end. Since Borucki has more than five years of big league service, it doesn\u2019t make much of a difference whether he\u2019s placed on outright waivers or release waivers. He has the right to reject an outright assignment in favor of free agency and still retain the remainder of his guaranteed money.<\/p>\n

For the Pirates, it\u2019s an understandable decision to move on. Borucki allowed three runs in his most recent outing and has struggled for much of the season when healthy. He\u2019d have been a free agent at season\u2019s end, so they\u2019ll instead give his innings to younger arms who can be controlled beyond the current season. If a team claims the remaining $272K that\u2019s on his contract, it\u2019s all the better, but either way his departure will allow the Pirates more opportunity to evaluate potential future pieces in the \u2019pen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Pirates have designated left-handed reliever Ryan Borucki for assignment, manager Don Kelly announced to reporters prior to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":72454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[49,48,44922,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-72453","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-ryan-borucki","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72453","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=72453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}