Last year on the Fourth of July, I sat on top of the right field wall at PNC Park and talked quite a bit to my dad about Gregory Polanco. I said that it was hard to find a whole ton of evidence that Polanco had improved much at the plate in the year-plus since his call-up, and that I wondered if maybe the Pirates would be considering trading Polanco given Jung Ho Kang’s emergence, Josh Harrison’s ability to play outfield, and the Pirates’ minor league depth.
The next day, that sort of thinking went out the window as Harrison injured his thumb. Within a couple of days after that, it was clear that Polanco was actually in the middle of one of the first extended hot streaks of his career. From July 7th through August 28th (hellooooooo, arbitrary end points), Polanco hit .328/.394/.508 with 13 doubles, four triples, and four homers in 44 games, pulling his OPS up from .628 to .737. That stretch coincided with some of the Pirates best baseball in 2015; they went 29-15 in those 44 games. Polanco cooled off again down the stretch, with a .571 OPS in the team’s last 31 games.
Polanco is, to my eye, one of the biggest missing pieces to the Pirate offense right now. Lots of people talk quite a bit about the Pirates having the best outfield in baseball, but it’s really hard for that to be true so long as Polanco is a below-average hitter. The Pirates lost a lot of home runs this winter with Neil Walker and Pedro Alvarez and while I think that there are some more home runs in Starling Marte and maybe even Jung Ho Kang, health-depending, the way that this Pirate offense is going to make up for those missing home runs is by being relentless. The best Pirate offenses in recent years have had threats from the leadoff spot down through the eight hole, and a dangerous Polanco really helps to deepen the lineup.
If we go back and look at Polanco’s six-week tear from last year, there are a few things that stick out as positive indicators for his long-term success. He had 203 plate appearances and drew 20 walks, a 9.8% clip that that hews much more closely to his Double and Triple-A numbers than his season 8.4% rate. He also only struck out 34 times, a 16.4% rate that again was closer to his Triple-A number than the ~19% rate he’s had with the Pirates so far. In other words, that breakout looks a lot to me like what a solid hitting Gregory Polanco would look like and not an uncharacteristic blip on the radar that will be difficult for him to replicate.
On the season as a whole, Polanco hit more fly balls and line drives and fewer ground balls, which is a step in the right direction after a bunch of weak grounders in his rookie year. His HR/FB% was about half of his 2014 rate (5.5%, down from 10.1%), which says that there might be more home runs coming from him in the future.
Of course, none of this is any guarantee that Polanco will take that big leap forward in 2016. It only means that I like the numbers buried in that hot streak from last summer, and I see plenty of places to logically think he could improve in 2016. Perhaps the most important thing for him is some consistency; he started his career with a hot streak in 2014, he had some strong moments early in the season, and he had six torrid weeks in the summer, but pretty much every one of his hot streaks has been followed by an ugly slump. I think we’ll see the hot streaks again this year, and the key is to see if he can do a better job adjusting when he’s not on fire.
Image credit: Jared Wickerham, Getty Images
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