How Does Gregory Polanco compare to other NL lead-off hitters?

Gregory Polanco spent the bulk of his 2015 season batting leadoff. How does he compare to other NL leadoff hitters?

The Pittsburgh Pirates had a fairly good offense in 2015. They finished fourth in the NL in both runs scored and hits. They had a well-balanced attack, but one perceived weakness of the team was the lead-off spot. Gregory Polanco, one of the primary lead-off hitters for the Pirates last year, had an up and down season in his sophomore campaign. He showed flashes of brilliance, but also had some major flaws in his game. He was the most prominent and consistent lead-off hitter for the Pirates and had a very good second half of the season, he finished the year with a decent line of .256BA/.320 OBP/18.6K%/8.4BB%.

One of the hardest things to avoid in baseball is facts vs. narrative and perception vs. reality.

Baseball is a stats driven game and sometimes the eye test can straight up lie. Was Gregory Polanco a bad lead-off hitter in 2015 or a good one? I decided to do a little research and see how Gregory Polanco compared to the rest of the National League’s leadoff hitters.

You play most of your games against you own division, so looking at the National League Central’s lead-off hitters seemed like a good starting point.

The first and most surprising thing I noticed was that in terms of batting average, Polanco isn’t far from the average. Among the top three teams in the NL Central last year, he’s pretty much right in line compared to Dexter Fowler of the Chicago Cubs and Matt Carpenter of the St. Louis Cardinals.

Interestingly enough, it was the two bottom teams that had the most productive lead-off hitters in terms of batting average. Brandon Phillips of the Reds batted .294 and Gerardo Parra of the Brewers had a division-leading .328 average. Neither player screams “prototypical” lead-off hitter, but that kind of player doesn’t really exist in today’s game at the moment.

Outside of the NL Central is where you see huge variations of lead-off hitters.

The NL East had far and away the highest lead-off batting average of .297 and a lot of that was from the efforts of Dee Gordon of the Miami Marlins. Denard Span of the Nationals, Nick Markakis of the Braves, and Ben Revere all had high averages right near the .300 mark.

The NL West had the lowest lead-off batting average in the league at .271, but a lot of that was because Jimmy Rollins of the Dodgers was awful in 2015 with a batting average of .224. Will Venable was also pretty mediocre with a .258 average.

However, batting average is fairly overrated for lead-off hitters. It doesn’t really matter how you get on-base as long as you get on base. On-base percentage may be the single most valuable statistic for a successful leadoff hitter and despite trailing both Fowler’s .346 OBP and Carpenter’s .356 OBP, Polanco’s .320 on-base percentage is still slightly above the overall National League average of .316.

However Polanco is below the MLB average of .343 for lead-off men.

The NL Central overall is a fairly good division for on-base lead-off hitters as the division average is .343, but once again our friends in the NL East are the gold standard as their lead-off hitters get on-base at an average clip of .358 and once again the West brings up the rear with an OBP of .328.

I’m throwing a lot of numbers at you, so to simplify, the average NL player gets on-base about 31.6 percent of the time and Polanco is slightly better than that at 32 percent. For a player that struggled mightily early in the season, I find this fairly impressive. It took Polanco some time, but he was a much better overall hitter during the second half of the season.

Batting average and on-base percentage are two regular metrics to judge a hitter’s worth, but two more in-depth statistics impact these and those are base-on-balls percentage (BB%) and strikeout percentage. (K%) They are fairly easy to understand, both are simply the percentage of at-bats that end in either a walk or a strikeout.

Gregory Polanco finished 2015 with a pretty solid 8.4 percent walk rate, which was slightly above the overall league average of 7.9 percent. However, Polanco played in a division with two walk-rate monsters in Matt Carpenter and Dexter Fowler, both of whom had a 12.2 percent walk rate. The rest of the NL Central was in-line with Polanco as the division rate was 8.5 percent. The NL East finished a very close second with 8.4 percent and the NL West finished a hugely distant third at 7.0 percent. The NL West lead-off hitters were simply not drawing walks, especially when compared to the other divisions in the league.

Polanco’s strikeout rate was also slightly higher than both the division and league average, as he finished with a K rate of 18.6 percent. The NL Central average K rate was 18.14 percent, which was far and away the highest in the entire league. The NL East was the highmark again with a 13.4 percent K rate and the West was slightly worse at 14.4 percent. While Polanco struck out a bit more than the typical National League lead-off hitter, he was fairly in-line with his divisional peers. Matt Carpenter for example had the highest K percentage in the league among qualified lead-off hitters at 22.7 percent. Fowler wasn’t far behind at 22.3 percent. So in that regard, Polanco was substantially better at not striking out.

Overall the “average” lead-off hitter in 2015 looked something like .282BA/.343 OBP/15.3K%/7.9BB%. If you compare Gregory Polanco to the average, he wasn’t a bad lead-off hitter at all in 2015. He was a bit below average with his batting average and on-base percentage and had more strikeouts, but a vastly superior walk rate. The advantage in walk-rate is that it negates the lower average as over the course of the season, walks can prove to be as valuable as hits, especially with the speed Polanco has.

Is Gregory Polanco the Pirates’ present and future lead-off hitter? More than likely, Polanco will remain the club’s lead-off man for the bulk of the 2016 season, but if his power fully develops, he could end up hitting himself out of the spot. You might remember that Andrew McCutchen spent a huge chunk of his first three Major League seasons as the Pirates’ lead-off hitter, but he proved to be too valuable to bat that high in the order and I wouldn’t be shocked if the same thing eventually happens to Polanco. If the power catches up to his swing, Polanco could very well end up a 20-25 home run threat, which would make him a very attractive middle of the order player for the Pirates in the coming seasons.

For the 2016 season, however, it’s in Polanco’s best interest to simply continue his development as a hitter. The defense and base-running are already there and if Polanco can take the next step in his evolution as a hitter, we could be seeing a truly special outfield with Andrew McCutchen and Starling Marte. The “Outfield of Dreams” could finally live up to both its name and potential. Polanco may turn into a middle of the order hitter, but for 2016, lets have him be a table setter for McCutchen and Marte.

I don’t think anyone would complain about that.

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