DALLAS — During the middle of the Winter Meetings, the Cleveland Guardians flipped Spencer Horwitz, the principal aspect of their return from the Toronto Blue Jays in the Andrés Giménez trade, to the Pittsburgh Pirates in exchange for three pitchers: Luis L. Ortiz, Michael Kennedy, and Josh Hartle. The deal expands the Guardians’ return for Giménez — whose projected impact on Toronto you can read about here — to four pieces once you include Nick Mitchell, a 2024 fourth rounder out of Indiana who was drafted by the Blue Jays and shipped to Cleveland in the initial deal.
The biggest fish in the quartet is Ortiz, a hard-throwing 25-year-old Dominican righty who has pitched at least part of each of the last three seasons in the majors in a few different roles. Across 238 1/3 big league innings, Ortiz has a career 3.93 ERA, 4.69 FIP, 17.9% K%, and 9.8% BB%, but those stats don’t sufficiently illuminate Ortiz’s talent and potential, nor do they contextualize his deployment with Pittsburgh. A former top 100 prospect, Ortiz was shuttled between the Pirates rotation and bullpen a few times during the past couple of seasons. He began 2024 as a long reliever and was shifted back into a starting role midway through the season. After he had struggled with walks since reaching the upper levels of the minors, Ortiz had by far his most efficient big league season as a strike-thrower, and he walked just 7.8% of batters after his move back into the rotation. He worked 135 innings combined between his two roles, which is right in line with his season-long workload from each of the past three seasons and sufficient to project him straight into Cleveland’s 2025 rotation.
Ortiz was a top 100 prospect because, despite his strike-throwing issues in the minors, he has premium arm strength and a huge slider. I was of the opinion that, even if Ortiz never developed into a starter-quality strike-thrower, his stuff would be big enough for him to play a high-leverage bullpen role. But Ortiz hasn’t missed big league bats at that level, even when he’s been able to air it out as a reliever and max out his fastball in the 99-100 mph range. Cleveland has among the best pitcher development track records in the game and now will try to optimize Ortiz’s prodigious stuff. The curvaceous Ortiz (he’s 6-foot-2, 240 pounds or so) has a powerful lower body and is an impressively loose and whippy athlete for a guy his size. His low three-quarters delivery produces pitches with mostly lateral action. He works with a four-seamer, sinker, cutter, slider, and once in a blue moon will show you a changeup. The Pirates tinkered with the rate of Ortiz’s sinker/four-seam usage in 2023, and the cutter was a new addition in 2024. That surfeit of fastballs should continue to help Ortiz work as efficiently as possible for someone who sometimes struggles with mechanical consistency, especially the sinker, which generated a 58% groundball rate in 2024.
The meal ticket pitch here, though, is Ortiz’s slider. It flashes ridiculous horizontal movement for a pitch in the 83-87 mph range and was the only pitch in Ortiz’s repertoire to generate an above-average swinging strike rate (14%) in 2024. Despite lacking vertical depth, Ortiz’s slider played equally well against lefties and righties in 2024, at least as far as chase and miss are concerned. That slider and an elevated four-seam fastball are the ways Ortiz most often attempts to finish hitters off in two-strike counts. If Cleveland can either add something (like a splitter?) or augment an aspect of Ortiz’s repertoire (perhaps via something as benign as his placement on the rubber) to give him a second dynamic, bat-missing pitch, then he will more cleanly profile as a starter. For a while now I’ve been betting on Ortiz’s uncommon combination of size, athleticism, and arm speed to carry him to such a role, and I’m still inclined to do so now that he’s with an org that has shown an ability to make pitchers better. But Ortiz, to this point, has not performed to the level I’d hoped he would when he was a prospect.
The other pitchers coming back to Cleveland are both in the organization’s developmental wheelhouse. The Guardians love accessing pitchers who do everything but throw hard in the hope that their pitching dev machine can help the pitchers add velocity and facilitate a breakout. Tanner Bibee and Shane Bieber are great examples of this. They got two versions of that in squat, 20-year-old lefty Michael Kennedy, and newly drafted 21-year-old southpaw, Josh Hartle.
Kennedy has advanced command of two good off-speed pitches and well-below-average fastball velocity, sitting 88-91 mph. He was a 2022 over-slot fourth rounder who signed for $1 million rather than go to LSU, and in 2024 he pitched his way to High-A. A short-levered 6-foot-1, Kennedy’s physical traits combined with his low-to-the-ground delivery help his fastball punch above its weight. The line it takes to the plate is flat and tough for hitters to get on top of. The vertical snap and 11-to-5 movement of Kennedy’s 77-83 mph breaking ball plays nicely off of his fastball, and Kennedy commands both and likes to alter his leg kick to mess with hitters’ timing. Kennedy’s feel for locating his 82-84 mph changeup improved in 2024, and that pitch generated above-average chase and miss. This is a high-floored back-end starter prospect tracking for a 2027 debut. Most 20-year-old pitchers have a fair bit of physical projection left, Kennedy less so based on his frame but arguably more based on his athleticism. Cleveland has been able to coax more arm strength out of guys who weren’t obviously projectable, and if they can do the same with Kennedy (while he retains his great command) then he’ll break out and look more like a mid-rotation candidate.
Josh Hartle, on the other hand, has had exciting physical projection for his entire lifetime as a prospect, but he hasn’t yet delivered on it. He’s a 6-foot-5 lefty who had a ton of profile in high school and seemed like he might be the beneficiary of Wake Forest’s pitching dev program and potentially go in the first round of the 2024 draft. It looked like Hartle was making the leap as a sophomore, even without increased velocity, but his performance backed up during his junior year. Because of Wake’s reputation as a pitching factory, there’s concern that if there were better stuff here, the program would’ve have unlocked it. All the elements that made Hartle an exciting high school prospect are still here (broad-shouldered 6-foot-5 frame, very repeatable delivery, starter-quality repertoire depth and command), but his fastball averaged 90 mph during the 2024 college season; he gave up a lot of hits and went in the third round. He features a five-pitch mix and mostly lives in the bottom of the zone. His sweeping breaking ball and changeup (both low-to-mid-80s) generated roughly average miss in 2024, while his fastball and cutter were way, way below average in that regard. This is grounder-getting (60% GB%) fifth-starter stuff.
Though none of these players are likely to match the peak Giménez has had, Cleveland stands a pretty good chance of getting at least two soon-to-be integral members of its pitching staff out of this trade. If we’ve seen Giménez’s peak already and he hits more like he did in 2024 for the rest of his contract, it’s possible one or two of these pitchers will be about as good or a bit better than either Giménez or Horwitz. Ortiz will play a role right away, and over the course of 2025 might become more and more impactful either as a starter or at the back of Cleveland’s bullpen. The Guardians have shown no compunction about accelerating the promotional pace of pitching prospects who have an uptick in arm strength, and if either Hartle of Kennedy do, they might put themselves on the doorstep of the big leagues by the end of the season.
The Pirates are dealing from the deep part of their organization — their collection of young pitchers. In Horwitz, they get a hitter, which they badly need, who graduated as a 45 FV player last year when it became clear that he could play a passable, situational second base. Due to the makeup of the Pirates roster, he’s likely to spend a majority of his time at first base. He’s a clear upgrade from Pittsburgh’s other options here at this time, even if he lacks the power typical of an impact first baseman. The Pirates coughed up depth in this trade more for Horwitz’s years of control (they have him through 2030) than his ceiling. He’s a creative, long-term solution of modest impact and makes their big league team a little bit better right away.
