What to expect from MLB's top-ranked pitching prospect Chandler in The Show
This browser does not support the video element.
At his best, Bubba Chandler is the best pitching prospect in baseball and the best athlete in the Pirates’ system. This is a guy who was drafted as a two-way player, after all, one who could have gone on to Clemson to play quarterback in the fall while both pitching and hitting in the spring.
It took him a while, as MLB.com's Alex Stumpf wrote, to embrace being a pitcher only. Once he did and focused his premium athleticism and competitiveness fully on his work on the mound, he took off, allowing him to climb to No. 7 overall on MLB Pipeline's Top 100 Prospects list.
Chandler doesn’t lack confidence and has long understood he has the stuff to get big league hitters out. While that competitive fire can be a huge edge, it’s also shown it can be an obstacle to him being a frontline starter in the big leagues.
Know that line from "Bull Durham" when Crash tells Nuke, “Don’t think. It can only hurt the ballclub?" Chandler could have used a dose of that.
That’s not to say that Chandler is some kind of simpleton who just needs to rear back and throw. Quite the contrary. He’s worked very hard to become a complete pitcher with a legitimate four-pitch mix, three of which could be plus in time. But he’s had his most consistent success when he’s free, easy and athletic on the mound, trusting his stuff inherently.
That’s what was happening during the first two months of the 2025 season with Triple-A Indianapolis. Over his first 11 starts spanning April and May, Chandler had a 2.03 ERA and a .181 average-against. He struck out 12.8 per nine innings. He dominated in a way that had people thinking a callup was imminent, with the lone mild blemish a slightly inflated walk rate (3.9 per nine) keeping him from pitching deeper into starts.
Not only did Chandler think he was ready for the ultimate challenge, he couldn’t help but hear the buzz surrounding him and getting that first call to the big leagues. And that’s when it appeared to start getting in his head, providing stark information about the mind-body connection.
From June 1 on, Chandler posted a 5.96 ERA and .306 BAA. In June, he had an ugly 2.29 WHIP and didn’t have a single outing lasting more than four innings. While his July was a bit better, he posted a 7.50 ERA in three August starts. It was a confounding downturn, especially considering his stuff was every bit as dynamic as it was over the first two months of the season. An electric fastball averaging around 98 mph, two breaking balls (led by an upper-80s slider that could be devastating) and a changeup touching 91-92 mph that also misses bats.
What wasn’t happening was execution. Chandler possesses one of the most effective heaters in the game, one that elicited a 41 percent miss rate combined in April and May, with Triple-A hitters managing just a .169/.324/.241 against the pitch in those months, according to Synergy. From June 1 on, though, he missed bats with it at a 27 percent rate and hitters put up a much healthier slash line of .274/.392/.403.
There wasn’t anything wrong with the fastball. But his ability to land his secondary stuff consistently let hitters sit on the heater. When things went south in June, he threw his breaking stuff and changeup for a strike just 53 percent of the time (vs. 63 percent over the first two months). Hitters learned to lay off the other stuff, and as good as the fastball is, it becomes more hittable when you’re waiting for it.
It’s human nature to press when something you expect to happen doesn’t when you think it should. With each outing Chandler didn’t get promoted, he tried to make every pitch perfect. The free-and-easy athletic competitor had given way to someone trying to will a callup with every offering.
The bet the Pirates are making in bringing him up now is that now that he’s arrived, he can get back to that guy with an elite fastball and impressive complementary pitches. And he should get to use all of them. This isn’t a relief assignment in which he’ll just pitch an inning with the temptation to shorten up his repertoire and just go fastball-slider. Pirates fans should see all four of Chandler’s pitches, coming from a very simple and repeatable delivery, in multiple innings.
It’s a formula the team has used to bring fellow right-hander Braxton Ashcraft along. He’d been used almost exclusively as a reliever, but was often given more than three outs to work with. He slowly added length, earning more trust and more innings, going five frames in his last outing -- his third start of the year.
For Chandler, this is a chance to hit a reset switch and get back to the guy who trusts his stuff and doesn’t try to make the perfect pitch. It doesn’t really matter if he works his way to a start like Ashcraft before season’s end. This is all about an extremely talented arm (who won’t turn 23 until September) getting back to trusting himself so he can be a big part of the big league rotation at the start of 2026.