The Pittsburgh Pirates have done something no other Major League Baseball team can claim: They are running a starting rotation made up entirely of five homegrown pitchers. Braxton Ashcraft is one of them, alongside Mitch Keller, Carmen Mlodzinski, Bubba Chandler and Paul Skenes.
For general manager Ben Cherington, the milestone is the kind of thing that still sounds unusual even after years in the job. Cherington said he had been in the game 30 years and did not think he had ever been part of an organization that could say that, adding that it was not an easy thing to do.
The rotation is the product of a long pipeline rather than a single draft class. Keller was taken in the second round in 2014 and made his major league debut in 2019. Ashcraft followed as a second-round pick in 2018, after a prolific high school football career as a wide receiver. Mlodzinski came in the Competitive Balance A round in 2020, Chandler in the third round in 2021 and Skenes in the first round in 2023. Cherington became the Pirates' general manager after the 2019 season, and one of the first things he said he saw was a club with a high level of confidence and proven competency in identifying and developing amateur pitchers.
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The homegrown rotation also tells a story about timing. Mlodzinski debuted for Pittsburgh in 2023, then Skenes became the National League Rookie of the Year the following season. Ashcraft made his big-league debut last May, and Chandler followed in August, turning the idea of a future core into something the Pirates could put on the mound now.
Mlodzinski said the group has a common trait that helps explain how it all fits together, saying the Pirates do a really good job of identifying athletes and that all of their pitchers are super athletic. Skenes pointed to how much overlap they had on the way up, saying they had a lot of the same coaches, the same experiences and had been to the same places coming up. He said he had played with Chandler, Ashcraft and Mlodzinski at some point and had obviously been with Keller for a couple of years, calling it pretty dang cool.
Don Kelly said the rotation shows up in two ways: the talent and work ethic of the pitchers themselves, and the depth and development behind them. For the Pirates, the bigger significance is not just that five drafted and developed arms reached the same rotation at the same time, but that the organization has turned pitcher development into a competitive identity that is visible in the majors.
