Joe La Sorsa set to trigger clause, Pirates face bullpen decision
Joe La Sorsa is set to force Pittsburgh’s hand again, and his 3.60 ERA in Triple-A Indianapolis has turned a minor league clause into a real bullpen test.
Joe La Sorsa is about to put the Pirates back on the clock. The left-hander is set to trigger another upward mobility clause Thursday, and after 25 Triple-A innings with Indianapolis, Pittsburgh has to decide whether to keep him in the system or expose him to the rest of Major League Baseball.
That clause is the pressure point. Once it is activated, the Pirates must offer La Sorsa to the other 29 clubs. If another team wants him on a big-league roster spot, Pittsburgh has to put him on its own roster or trade him. If nobody claims him, he stays in the organization as non-roster depth. For a fringe reliever, that is the pathway from Triple-A performance to an actual major league job.
La Sorsa has already forced this same decision once in 2026. Before Opening Day, the Pirates optioned him to Triple-A Indianapolis, he triggered the clause, and no team took him. Since then, he has kept the pressure on. In Indianapolis this season, he has posted a 3.60 ERA, a 1.12 WHIP and 21 strikeouts in 25 innings over 21 appearances, including two starts. That is not the line of a reliever blowing away every hitter in sight, but it is the line of a pitcher who keeps getting outs and keeps making himself hard to ignore.
The Pirates signed La Sorsa to a minor league deal before the 2026 season and brought him to spring training as a non-roster invitee. He rewarded that look with a 2.25 ERA over four Grapefruit League appearances, then carried enough of that form into Indianapolis to make another roster decision unavoidable. That is what these clauses are designed to do: give players with real Triple-A production a way to push past the no-man’s-land of organizational depth.
La Sorsa, a 6-foot-5, 224-pound lefty born April 29, 1998, in Mount Kisco, New York, was drafted by the Rays in the 18th round in 2019 out of St. John’s University. He has already pitched in the majors for Tampa Bay, Washington and Cincinnati, and he gave Team Italy one of its cleaner World Baseball Classic moments when he struck out Jonathan Schoop looking and then blew one past Roger Bernadina to close a 7-1 win. That is the sort of resume that makes a club hesitate when the phone rings, and it leaves Pittsburgh weighing whether La Sorsa is a useful insurance arm or a pitcher someone else is ready to claim.
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