Pirates’ 2024 MLB Draft preview

This story was excerpted from Alex Stumpf’s Pirates Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

Justin Horowitz was just a baseball operations intern with the Red Sox for most of Ben Cherington’s time as Boston’s general manager a decade ago. He interacted with Cherington often, but rarely worked with him closely on a day-to-day basis. In those brief interactions, Horowitz saw how much his general manager cared about the organization and the people in it, something that stuck with him for years.

So when an opportunity to work with Cherington in a greater capacity presented itself this offseason, Horowitz accepted. After being very involved with the last decade of Drafts with the Red Sox, he’s now the Pirates’ director of amateur scouting.

“This is an incredible group I’ve been able to be a part of the last eight months or so,” Horowitz said. “These people really, really care about the Pirates [and] are passionate about amateur scouting … Our goal for this weekend and into next week is to do whatever we can to build that next layer of foundation for a championship contender here in Pittsburgh.”

After serving as a baseball operations intern with Boston from 2012-2014, Horowitz moved to being an assistant in the scouting world and then an area scout. In Sept. 2020, he was elevated to being a special assistant of amateur scouting, and he served in that role before joining the Pirates this offseason.

This year’s Draft, which kicks off this Sunday, is going to be quite different for the Pirates. Not only is the team picking ninth overall, the latest first-round pick in the Cherington era, but Horowitz will be running the show with assistant general manager Kevan Graves, while Joe DelliCarri — who had been overseeing the Pirates’ amateur scouting efforts since 2012 — moved to the vice president of scouting. DelliCarri is still very involved with this Draft process, and the new arrangement gives the organization a combination of youth from Horowitz and experience with DelliCarri.

“I feel like we’re getting the best of both worlds with some new ideas [from Horowitz], combined with the wisdom that Joe brings all the time,” Cherington said recently.

Horowitz is extremely thankful to have a veteran like DelliCarri to lean on, and while much of the scouting process is very similar to the past, he’s also wanted to keep the floor open for new ideas, whether from himself, Graves or anyone else involved.

It’s helped build a support system that Horowitz believes helps the group challenge each other and come up with new ideas and the necessary information they should pursue to reach the same goal as always: Help the Pirates get the best haul of Draft talent possible.

In this particular Draft class, that might be centered around collegiate bats. While every demographic of player is available and has talented prospects, Horowitz, Cherington and the general league consensus is that college position players are the strength of this group.

“We’re still working through that in the final days, but it’s nice to see some highly valued college bats towards the top of the Draft,” Horowitz said. “We’ll see if we end up landing one.”

That doesn’t guarantee the Pirates are taking a hitter, or a collegiate one at that. Some of that decision is going to be reactionary, seeing what the eight teams in front of them do and how it would factor into the players they want to target in later rounds.

“I think the net’s a little bit wider than [Pick] 1, I can tell you that,” Horowitz joked.

It’s going to have to be a collaborative effort, not just with scouting but player development, coaching, the analytical department and more, all of them having the same goal: To nail this first pick and class of a new regime.

“You have to get the pick right, no matter what,” Horowitz said. “I will say I’m pretty stoked about the talent pool that is available to us at Pick 9 this year. I think there are plenty of available players for us to be pretty excited about. We’re going to get someone pretty dang good at nine. I’m very confident in that.”