PITTSBURGH (93.7 The Fan) \u2013 Just hours into the trade late Friday night that brought Pirates manager Don Kelly a utility infielder and a left-handed reliever, he gave some ideas of how Jacob Gonzalez and Brandon Eisert could impact his team.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Sounds like Gonzalez has the potential to be a platoon at shortstop. The 24-year-old played mostly short in the minors although mostly first base in his rookie season with the White Sox. <\/p>\n
\u201cWill see as we go how that looks like,\u201d Kelly said Saturday morning. \u201cSee Jacob Gonzalez at short and third, want to see him move around, see how he\u2019s going, swings the bat. With Triolo and Gonzo (Nick Gonzales), Gonzales has been doing such a great job offensively, he\u2019s going to be in there a lot and then we will fill it out with Jacob and Tri.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 2023 White Sox first-round pick had 19 home runs in 53 games at AAA this year and had a pair in 30 games with the Sox. Gonzalez had 53 home runs in his previous two minor league seasons.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s shown a lot,\u201d Kelly said. \u201cFirst round pick a couple of years ago and then to show the improvement that he showed this year and the power that he\u2019s showed, very intriguing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eisert gives the Pirates not only another lefty in the bullpen, but maybe help for Mitch Keller as he struggles against left-handed hitters.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s been really good against left-handers,\u201d Kelly said. \u201cGives us other options if we wanted to open or do other things either with Eisert or with Monty. I just feel like it gives us better options because then, let\u2019s say we open Eisert, we still have still have two guys. If we open Monty, we still have two lefties to deploy later in the game especially against some teams that have a lot of left-handed batters.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kelly said the book on Eisert is that he throws strikes and attacks lefties with some \u2018underlying stuff that the front office saw is very intriguing\u2019.<\/p>\n
This season against lefties, Eisert has allowed a .174 average, .391 slugging, .646 OPS\u2014compared to .295, .557 and .886 against right-handers.<\/p>\n
\u201c12 hours in, not even 12 hours into the trade, will see how everything works out, will see how everything plays out,\u201d Kelly said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PITTSBURGH (93.7 The Fan) \u2013 Just hours into the trade late Friday night that brought Pirates manager Don…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":795537,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[3307,280527,49,48,50480,280529,462,509,82,1215],"class_list":["post-795536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-baseball","tag-brandon-eisert","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-don-kelly","tag-jacob-gonzalez","tag-mlb","tag-pittsburgh-pirates","tag-sports","tag-trade"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795536","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=795536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/795537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}