When right-hander Quinn Priester arrived at the Pittsburgh Pirates alternate site in September 2020, the Cary native’s minor-league game experience could be counted on two hands.
For Priester, the 18th pick in the 2019 draft, a lone start at Low A represented the highest level at which he had pitched in nine games after being drafted. Then the pandemic cost him the 2020 minor-league season.
But two invaluable weeks in Altoona, Pa., that September became a launching pad for Priester. He made three starts against hitters, including players with Triple-A and big-league experience.
The night before his first alt-site start, Priester called his dad, Andy, expressing uncertainty about how it would go: “I’ve never thrown against guys of this caliber. I don’t know if my stuff is going to play against them. I don’t know if they’re just going to hit BP off me.”
His dad put the situation in perspective, telling him to give 100%, do the best he could and then he would learn the answers to his questions.
In his alt-site debut, Priester, then 19, struck out seven and walked three in three innings. The outing gave him a huge confidence boost.
“I was like, OK, I can do this, there is no doubt in my mind,” Priester said. “It was: ‘I belong here. I deserve to be here.’ And I’d never felt that way until that day.”
Priester, 21, has quickly established himself among the best up-and-coming pitchers, but his path wasn’t without challenges the last two years.
With the 2020 minor-league season canceled, Priester played catch and threw bullpen sessions at Cary-Grove High School, eventually working up to live batting practice in late summer against minor-leaguers and Illinois natives, including top-40 prospect Alek Thomas of the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Thomas provided helpful feedback, never swinging if Priester’s arm slowed down on a pitch. In turn, Priester realized the importance of consistent arm speed to get out high-level hitters.
Working out at FullReps Training Center in Harrisburg, Pa., where he adjusted his delivery to shorten his stride and stay over his backside, served as the foundation for what transpired in Altoona in September 2020.
“Seeing the work he did over the pandemic, he did as much as any of our minor-league players to take advantage of the downtime and find ways to get better,” Pirates general manager Ben Cherington told the Tribune at the GM meetings in November. “And he put himself in a position to get invited to big-league camp, basically out of high school, because of the work he did during the shutdown.”
After Priester impressed at the alt site and in the Florida instructional league, the Pirates challenged him during his first full pro season in 2021 by putting him at High-A Greensboro, where only 22 of the 407 batters he faced were younger than him.
He got off to a slow start in an uneven first half. The turning point came July 16 with a start in Rome, Ga. Priester went six innings but walked four and surrendered a three-run homer, prompting a conversation the next day with pitching coach Matt Ford.
Ford told Priester his fastball command wasn’t where it needed to be, which left him exposed on breaking balls.
“That game, it just flipped in my head,” Priester said. “I’d been playing catch for three months and I hadn’t really focused on commanding the ball. Like, what have I been doing? I’d felt like I wasted a bunch of time. … After that, my season really changed because I was able to locate my fastball.”
The lessons didn’t stop there. A month later, Priester gave up four runs in five innings on a day he felt he had his best stuff of the season. Everything was working, but Priester became so focused on wanting to beat Bowling Green, the best team in the division, he got stuck in a mindset of throwing only his hard stuff and didn’t adequately mix his pitches — no changeups or curveballs to throw off the hitters’ timing.
Priester bounced back Aug. 27 with his best start of the year: six innings, one hit, 13 strikeouts and zero walks.
Those experiences, the good and bad, forced Priester to adapt and in the process learn how he needed to compete to be successful.
“I was more worried about having big, sexy breaking balls and stuff like that rather than just being gritty and attacking guys with fastballs that hit my spots,” Priester said. “And then once that change happened and I was able to command my fastball around the zone and then be able to throw off-speed off of it, it was so much of a better pairing rather than trying to throw nasty breaking balls and then fastballs.
“I think my ceiling’s a lot higher than what I performed at last year.”
Learning experiences
Pirates director of development John Baker believes Priester breaks a lot of the stereotypes attributed to first-round high school pitchers. He is incredibly curious and wants to know more about everything, Baker said, and is unafraid to ask questions, doing so in a respectful and thoughtful way.
How Priester adjusted from those moments of adversity last year and quickly course corrected did not go unnoticed by the Pirates.
“That’s just a really positive sign,” Baker said. “If you’re going to bet on somebody to develop, when you see somebody learn from their experiences (and) then actually go on and apply those things so it’s not just him saying that he’s learned, we can see that he’s learned.
“He’s finding those things himself, with our guidance, but we’re not telling him any answers. We really try to provide an environment of guided self-discovery for these guys, so Quinn is the perfect person for a system like that.”
Priester’s maturity is evident in explaining how changing things at a macro and micro level turned around his season and positioned him to take another step forward in his development in 2022. That maturity contributed to Priester being selected in the first round out of high school. It was obvious immediately once he was in the Pirates system, and it has paid off on the mound.
Cherington wasn’t with the organization when the Pirates drafted Priester, but he heard about Priester’s maturity shortly after being hired in November 2019.
“He wants to be a good influence on teammates,” Cherington said. “He wants to be part of winning, part of something special.”
Baker appreciates how much Priester cares about his teammates. He recalled a moment from late last season that epitomizes that. Priester took the mound Sept. 15 in his final regular-season start with a chance to clinch one of two playoff spots for a tight-knit Greensboro team.
Priester entered the game on a roll, posting a 1.80 ERA over his previous seven starts. But nothing went right against Hudson Valley. He failed to throw strikes and broke off his off-speed stuff too early. He took the loss after surrendering five walks, three hits and five runs in 2? innings.
Watching his performance, Baker said it was apparent that Priester felt responsibility to dominate that game for his teammates and lost.
His next outing came nine days later in Game 2 of the High-A East finals. Ahead of the start, Priester sat down with the Pirates pitching coordinator and staff personnel to discuss what he could learn from the ugly start versus Hudson Valley and what was going through his mind on the mound.
His thoughts during that game centered on not wanting to let his team down. Next time out, though, Priester told them his focus would be on attacking hitters. He went on to dominate in Game 2, earning the win with one run and three hits allowed in five innings and seven strikeouts.
“Some of the things that we miss are those moments of context … but to see that rapid learning is really remarkable,” Baker said. “So that gives me a lot of hope that when we have a wild-card game in Pittsburgh or an important playoff game, he’ll have been through caring about his teammates and knowing how he needs to go out and pitch. How many times can you say that about somebody as young as Quinn Priester?”
Priester knows it’s a cliche, but learning to move on to the next pitch and not dwell on the outcome helped him get on track at High A. For him, it’s about maintaining confidence and a mindset that he’s always in control of the situation — regardless if there are runners on base or if he allows a hit off a well-executed pitch.
“That’s something that in high school I never had to deal with,” Priester said. “If I threw the pitch that I wanted to do, it was not going to get hit or it was going to give me the result that I wanted — pro ball, not so much.
“The biggest thing that helped me limit damage was limiting essentially my thinking of the whole situation, like, when those things happen, when guys just beat me not because I made a mistake but because they’re really good baseball players too.”
Priester’s arsenal — a four-seam fastball, sinker, curveball, changeup and slider — gives him plenty of options to attack hitters. Knowing when to utilize his fastball and sinker and locating those pitches became an important part of Priester’s growth with Greensboro.
“Part of any pitcher’s development is not every inning is going to be clean,” Cherington said. “Make the messy ones one or two runs instead of five, and that’s a skill to be able to manage, like, all right, things aren’t going perfectly, but I’m going to figure out how to execute enough to limit the damage. And then I’ll go back out and give my team a chance.
“He did that better and better as the year went on. To do what he did at his age in that park was really impressive.”
High expectations
Cherington credited Priester for “working his tail off” to make those key in-season adjustments, describing him as an exceptionally hard worker and a model for other pitchers in how he goes about his craft.
A consensus top-100 prospect in the minors and the top pitcher in the Pirates system, Priester became a favorite of scouts for his intangibles and potential to develop into a big-league starter at the middle to top of the rotation.
Priester, rated the No. 88 overall prospect by Baseball America, felt the buzz around him and admitted he let it get to him going into spring training last year.
“I put so much dang pressure on myself to be perfect right away,” Priester said. “Because there were high expectations for me and all that stuff. And to be super freaking good Day 1 of February, it’s like, dude.
“It’s exciting and I realize it, but I’m more comfortable with the situation I’m in and I’m more focused on what I can do rather than what other people see me being able to do.”
Illinois historically hasn’t been a major-league pipeline of elite high school talent. In the last 35 years, only four high school players in the state have been drafted higher than Priester. As a high school pitcher, Priester is in even rarer company as one of just 14 in Illinois to be drafted in the first round dating to 1965.
“I feel like I’ve always been the guy where it’s like, oh, he’s a Midwest guy, we don’t know how good he actually is,” Priester said. “Being from the Midwest, you don’t get the same publicity as maybe some of the warmer-state players. And then once people started to talk about it, it got to me a little bit, so I just need to reel it back in and I feel in a much better place going into this spring training.”
Priester doesn’t like to think about what level he might pitch at this year or when he could reach the majors. Those things are out of his control. He sets more tangible goals each season, such as improving his two-strike efficiency or strikeout numbers, which he wants to bolster after posting a 24.1% strikeout rate in 2021.
From the Pirates’ developmental perspective, they want Priester to continue on the same course and likely will give him his first taste of the upper levels of the minor leagues this year, which will present a new set of challenges. After he threw 102? innings last season, the Pirates also want to make sure Priester remains durable as he physically matures and gets bigger and stronger.
Behind his work ethic and repertoire that continues to develop, it wouldn’t be surprising if Priester earns a big-league call-up as soon as 2023.
“I want to make people proud,” Priester said. “I think it’s cool to be from the Chicago area. I take a lot of pride in it.”
