Bucs shuffle front office, move farm director Baker into new role (sources)

The Pirates are making another major change to their front office, moving John Baker from the director of coaching and player development to a new role overseeing the performance team, sources told MLB.com. While the club has not confirmed the move, the search for a new farm director is underway.

Baker’s new duties include overseeing areas such as strength and conditioning, nutrition, mental skills, sports science and more, ranging from the Majors through the Minor Leagues. Baker’s new role will be part of a bigger combination of changes that is coming to the front office.

Baker joined the Pirates in November 2020 as the director of coaching and player development, a tweak from the traditional farm director role. During his time, the Pirates adopted a more player-centric, individualized development plan to try to maximize their players.

That approach has yielded great things on the pitching side, which has seen Paul Skenes, Jared Jones and Luis Ortiz grow through the farm system to become staples in the rotation, with perhaps the best collection of Minor League arms still waiting in the wings. Offensively, however, the team has struggled to have its top position-player prospects hit at the Major League level, which is part of the reason for other changes this offseason, like the hiring of Matt Hague as hitting coach.

Baker had previously served as the mental skills coordinator and head applied mental skills coach with the Cubs before coming to the Pirates. His coaching career began in 2015 when he became a special assistant with the Cubs’ baseball operations department.

This now makes at least four director jobs the Pirates have either changed or will change this offseason. Max Kwan will be the team’s new director of international scouting, replacing Junior Vizcaino, and Kevin Tenenbaum is in line to become their new vice president of research and development. The team will also get a new pro scouting director after it was announced that Will Lawton will be moving to a new role within the organization.