Jeff PassanFeb 27, 2026, 07:00 AM ETMultiple Authors
BRADENTON, Fla. — The first time Konnor Griffin visited Maven Baseball Lab in Atlanta, he did something no one there had ever seen. Since opening in 2022, Maven has assessed thousands of baseball players with force plates that use sensors to measure the amount of energy being transferred into the ground during a swing. Griffin was the top-ranked 16-year-old in the country, a 6-foot-4, 200-pound specimen, and the plate was no match for him.
“You’re looking at a Ferrari,” said Tyler Krieger, the co-owner of Maven and a former Cleveland minor leaguer. “You’re not looking at a little Fiat.”
And until the Pirates make that decision, the eyes of the baseball world will be trained on Bradenton. Griffin represents more than a glimmer of hope for a woebegone organization. He is the dream of any franchise: top-of-the-scale power and speed, with a nifty glove and a shotgun-blast arm, the kind of work ethic that will make any slacker in his orbit feel like a lout, and a demeanor so polite and accommodating that the words “yes” and “sir” might as well be surgically attached to one another.
Two other recruits accompanied Griffin in Baton Rouge that day — and when they saw Skenes, they went full fanboy, asking for photos. Griffin did not.
“And I had so much respect for that,” Skenes said. “He had the presence. It’s a feel thing. It’s such a small world, and he probably knew at some point he would see me again.”
“At that point,” said Josh DeMoney, the hitting coach they worked with that day, “Corey’s been in probably seven or eight seasons in the big leagues. And Konnor’s going toe-to-toe with him every swing at 14 years old.”
Griffin found comfort with DeMoney, whose Grit Training facility in Flowood, Mississippi, was a two-minute drive from Jackson Prep. Kevin would accompany his son to hitting sessions and throw batting practice right-handed, and DeMoney countered from the left side. They would crank up a pitching machine to spit out fastballs with velocities that, accounting for the machine sitting 38 feet from the plate, were equivalent to hitting pitches of 100 to 105 mph.
“One thing that I look for is how quick a player can make adjustments,” DeMoney said. “You literally could tell Konnor, ‘All right, try this,’ and he would do it the first swing. He is very cerebral and very advanced. Some kids it takes a month or even a whole season to figure something out.”
Baseball came naturally to Griffin. His physicality allowed him to dominate other sports — he was featured on “You Got Mossed” as a freshman in high school after outjumping three defenders to snag a football — but his love of baseball ran deep. The sounds, the smells — even more than that, he said, the constant failures, which made the successes feel that much richer.
The Pirates haggled with Griffin until the signing deadline, when he agreed to a $6.5 million signing bonus, nearly $300,000 over the assigned slot value. He played all of 2025 at 19 years old — Griffin will turn 20 on April 24 — and ingratiated himself as much with who he is as what he does.
The easiest solution to Pittsburgh’s dilemma is to take service time out of the equation. At some point this spring, the Pirates are expected to approach Griffin with a long-term contract extension, sources said. For comparison, Boston Red Sox outfielder Roman Anthony — the No. 1 prospect in baseball entering last year — spent the season’s first two months at Triple-A as a 21-year-old. Less than two months later, he signed an eight-year, $130 million extension.
Either way, Griffin won’t allow a decision that’s ultimately out of his hands to dictate his mood. Nor will he rest on the past successes that have led to the spotlight on his every move as baseball’s next teenage phenom.
“It was wonderful getting all those awards and really just brought the whole year together,” Griffin said, “but what I worked on was kind of closing that yearbook, taking everything I’ve learned and continuing to put in the work to prepare for what’s to come. I haven’t made it to the big leagues yet, and that’s what matters. Awards in the minor leagues are great, but they’re even better when you’re in the big leagues.
“I always tell people my goal is to be in the Hall of Fame, and if I can make the Hall of Fame, then I’ll sit back and be happy and be complacent. But right now I’m just trying to grow.”
Though the plate was anchored into a portable frame that had withstood swings from perennial major league All-Stars and MVP-caliber players, the force Griffin was creating jarred it loose, cajoling it out of place. Once the awe of onlookers subsided, they scrambled to place 45-pound weights on each side of the plate, hopeful that would suffice in keeping Griffin from wrecking the setup. It did, though those at Maven learned that day what others in the world of Major League Baseball have in the years since: It’s damn near impossible to keep Konnor Griffin — and anything he touches — down.
This spring, the Pittsburgh Pirates are endeavoring to figure out whether they’re ready to take their F40 for a spin. Now 19 years old — and the No. 1 prospect in the game after a tour de force 2025 in which he dominated three levels and was the consensus Minor League Player of the Year — Griffin entered camp with an opportunity to win Pittsburgh’s every-day shortstop job. Regardless of whether he secures an Opening Day roster spot, Griffin will debut at some point this season and join Paul Skenes as the best pair of young players on any team in baseball.
Now, two years after missing out on earning a first-round draft pick because they kept Skenes in the minor leagues to start the season — after he won the National League Rookie of the Year, they would have been awarded the pick through the prospect promotion incentive program — the Pirates face a similar conundrum with Griffin. It’s not exactly apples to apples. Skenes spent three years in college and was two weeks shy of his 22nd birthday when he arrived in May 2024. Griffin would be the first teenage hitter to debut on Opening Day since Ken Griffey Jr. in 1989.
What it breeds is an all-timer of a cost-benefit analysis. Griffin could immediately be a star … and he also could struggle with the truth that baseball excellence is far from linear. He possesses immense and magnificent tools … and has under 100 plate appearances above Single-A. He could help Pittsburgh this year … and if next season is lost due to a work stoppage and as part of an eventual deal the time to free agency is reduced from six years of service, his tenure as a Pirate could be even shorter-lived.
IN LATE 2022, Paul Skenes met Konnor Griffin for the first time. After transferring from the Air Force Academy to LSU, Skenes was a few months from turning in one of the best seasons in college baseball history, capped by a College World Series win and being taken with the No. 1 selection in the amateur draft. Griffin already had reclassified to graduate high school a year early and was LSU’s top recruiting target, a can’t-miss kid the coaching staff knew would likely get poached in the draft before he set foot on campus. Still, the cachet of having a player of Griffin’s talent even committed made the juice worth the squeeze.
The two reconnected after Griffin slid to the Pirates with the ninth pick in the 2024 draft, met again last spring and have chatted more during Griffin’s ascent toward the big leagues. Skenes’ opinion of Griffin has only grown brighter. A top pick in the draft, the No. 1 prospect in the game — few understand the deluge of hype, the potholes on the road to success, quite like them. And Skenes, a 23-year-old who carries himself like a 10-year veteran, can’t get past the way Griffin conducts himself as a teenager.
The uniqueness dates back to before Griffin was a teenager. His father, Kevin, is a longtime coach who had turned the softball team at Belhaven University — a Division III college in Jackson, Mississippi, with an enrollment of around 1,000 undergraduates — into a powerhouse. Konnor, the second of his three sons, was the tallest, strongest and fastest of his peers. Recruiting services pegged him as a future star at 12 years old. Agents chased him around the South, hoping to advise him. He latched on with Excel Sports, whose client Corey Dickerson, an 11-year major leaguer and Mississippi native, invited Griffin to a hitting session when he was 14 and already playing varsity at Jackson Prep as an eighth grader.
Griffin became a regular at DeMoney’s facility, running from midweek road basketball games to hitting sessions that didn’t start until 10 or 11 p.m. Griffin’s reclassification, in which he moved from the class of 2025 to 2024, forced him to take extra classes and attend summer school. Neither deterred Griffin; if this was the price to reach professional baseball sooner, he would gladly pay it. For years, he spent his weekends traveling around the country playing games and using off weeks to improve, like his five-hour treks from central Mississippi to Atlanta for maintenance sessions at Maven.
Griffin needed to anchor his back leg into the ground to keep from almost leaping forward. He tightened up his swing, allowing his back elbow to guide the movement of his hands and carry his bat through the strike zone. With his hit tool cleaned up, he entered the 2024 draft with no discernible weaknesses. The power was extraterrestrial, the speed blazing enough to steal 87 bases in 88 tries during his final high school season, the glove in center field arguably even better than at shortstop, the arm good enough to pump 97 off the mound and warrant consideration as an early-round pitching prospect, too. Griffin won Gatorade National High School Player of the Year, then heard eight names — all college players — called before his in the draft.
FEW ORGANIZATIONS IN baseball suffer as many self-inflicted wounds as the Pirates. It’s not just the bad trades of past front office regimes and decades of paltry payrolls, either. It’s the removal of Bucco Bricks and replacing Roberto Clemente’s retired number on the right-field wall with an ad for alcohol-spiked iced tea. More than anything, though, it’s the lack of winning. The Pirates last made the postseason in 2015. Their last NL Central title came in 1992, Barry Bonds’ final season in Pittsburgh.