As I always am for Pirates and Nationals games, I’m blacked from watching these games live this weekend and so I’m just sitting down now to watch some highlights from last night’s win. Beyond all of those obvious stuff (three home runs off of a guy they couldn’t get a hit off of a month ago, a win in the Jeff Locke/Max Scherzer matchup, etc.), I feel like it’s most worthwhile to take a couple of minutes and talk about Gregory Polanco’s huge 12-pitch at-bat in the fifth inning that culminated in a game-tying two-run home run.
Besides Pedro Alvarez, Polanco’s been one of the most-mentioned players to upgrade for this Pirate team as the trade deadline nears, and I’ve even mused about his value as a trade piece. He’s obviously struggled for the Pirates last year and this year and while his talent is still awfully apparent, there are a lot more questions now than there were 16 months or a year ago. And yet, every once in a while he does something like stand toe-to-toe with Max Scherzer for 11 pitches before launching the 12th into the bleachers that makes you go, “Oh, yeah, mmhmmm, I get it.”
During Thursday’s radio broadcast, Neal Huntington was in the booth with Tim Neverett and Steve Blass when Polanco hit his double into the Notch, and made a comment about how he hoped that everyone watching understood that swings like that were why the Pirates have been so patient with Polanco and so willing to play him every day this year in hopes that he can straighten himself out and start producing.
I wrote just the other day that no matter how I tried to slice his season up it was difficult to find an extended period in which he’d played a whole lot better than his career line, but his July is slowly starting to take shape into a very solid month. He’s hitting .276/.375/.434 this month, in part because he’s already drawn as many walks in July (12) as he has in any other month in ~88 plate appearances (Baseball-Reference is down so I’m estimating based on his MLB.com player page) and in part because he’s got six extra base hits in the eight games since the All-Star Break after having eight extra base hits in April, six in May, and four in June.
Obviously “in July” and “since the break” are tiny sample sizes, but the patience at the plate and the power to all over the field is the Polanco that we’ve all been waiting for. This has been the uptick in performance, the glimmer of hope that he’s breaking out that we’ve all been desperately trying to find all year. If it turns out to be more than that, the Pirate lineup is suddenly going to look a lot deeper and a lot different.
Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images
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