Transaction Analysis

PITTSBURGH PIRATES Team Audit | Player Cards | Depth Chart

Reportedly signed OF-L Gregory Polanco to a five-year extension worth $35 million, with club options for two additional seasons. [4/3]

The interesting thing about Gregory Polanco signing a five-year extension to play baseball for the Pittsburgh Pirates is not that Polanco might be very good at playing baseball during the five years in question. You knew that he might be very good before you even started reading—why else would a team, especially a smart one like the Pirates, invest $35 million in his future? No, the interesting thing about Gregory Polanco signing a five-year extension to play baseball for the Pittsburgh Pirates is that Polanco might be very bad during the five years in question.

Consider this: During the entirety of the 2014 season, Polanco hit for a TAv of just .245. League average is defined as .260. Scooter Gennett had a .271 that season. Oswaldo Arcia had a .270. Heck, even Sam Fuld had a .253. Point is, Polanco was not a particularly compelling offensive player in 2014. But then, let’s give him some credit: He played the entirety of that season at just 22 years old. Perhaps he’d do better the next year. But then he went out and hit .237/.315/.338 over 336 first-half PAs in 2015, betraying in the process a worrying tendency to swing and miss at pitches both down and in (bright red box, bottom right) and up and in (bright red box, top center-right).

This tendency meant that pitchers had very little incentive to throw Polanco anything in the zone at all, and indeed they didn’t: during the first half of 2015, just ten National League hitters saw a smaller percentage of their pitches in the strike zone than Polanco’s 41.5 percent. All of which led to the Very Bad triple-slash line we just discussed above, and which gives you a general profile of the version of Gregory Polanco who could be Very Bad at Baseball over the next five years: a guy who has long levers, and lots of power potential, but can’t organize his long levers in a way that allows him to make enough contact on hittable pitches to do much with it. So why did the Pirates give Polanco $35 million just now?

Well, first, there’s the huge potential: Polanco is 6-foot-5, 230 pounds, and looks every bit of it. And there’s the fact that when he does hit the ball, he can hit it as hard as anyone in the game: his max exit velocity, last year, was the eighth-best in all of baseball (116 mph). And he can play defense: FRAA has consistently graded him as worth about 10 runs in the field, which is demonstrably not nothing. But none of that would really have played up if he didn’t learn how to get pitchers to throw him pitches he could hit. Which is why what happened in the second half of 2015 is so interesting: Polanco stopped swinging at, and subsequently missing, those bad pitches down and away. Please consider the following pretty picture:

The problems at the top of the zone still exist, but look at the bottom right. Hey presto! It’s the profile of a man who’s learned, at least for now, how to make contact inside. And the results showed: Polanco hit .276/.324/.425 in the second half for the Pirates, which isn’t brilliant in the way you might hope it would be going forward, but is also perfectly respectable for a 23-year-old making his second turn around the league. When paired with his considerable tools, and his minor-league track record (he hit .285/.356/.434 across three levels in 2013; .328/.390/.504 in Triple-A in 2014), it paints the picture of a player eminently capable of putting up the 11.5 WARP PECOTA projects for him over the life of the deal, and almost certainly worth the downside risk the Pirates just bought into.

So what if the Pirates bet on a player who might not ever fully break out. This is exactly the kind of bet the Pirates should be making. They can’t afford to go out and buy a player of Polanco’s (potential) caliber on the open market. They just can’t. And so they have to lock him up now, when there’s downside risk, and place their belief in their scouts and evaluators who tell them that he’ll be worth it. And if those scouts are wrong? Well, $35 million, in this market, is really not that much money, and the two club options at the end of the deal (for 2022 and 2023) raise the potential payoff further. If things work out, the Pirates have one of the games’ better young players under control for pennies. If they don’t, they’re hardly hamstrung. And hardly hamstrung is a perfectly fine place to be.