Prospect Profile: Gregory Polanco

dob: 9/14/91
pos: CF
h/w: 6’4″ 220
b/t: L/L
signed: international free agent, 2009, from Dominican Republic ($150K bonus)
stats: fangraphs, splits
tools/skills: 6+ hit, 6 patience, 6 power, 6+ speed, 6+ defense, 6 arm

Physicality: Polanco is a tall drink of water with a long, lanky frame and the proverbial “long levers.” His legs are especially long, and he takes huge strides when running. He’s listed at 220 lbs, up from 180 a couple years ago, but he’s still very skinny. He could add more muscle weight, especially to his upper body. He should maintain his speed even as he fills out, because the frame is so sleek. He’s a very good athlete and has good control of his body.

Mechanics: Polanco starts from a fairly wide stance, incorporates a medium-sized leg kick, and has a short stride. He stiffens his front leg as he swings, arresting his momentum a bit, so his swing is mostly upper body, but he does throw his hips pretty well. The combination of staying back and throwing the hips allows him to turn on hard stuff in as well as drag his hands to hit soft stuff away. He has good bat speed and does a great job of staying under control and barreling up. Because of the long arms, the path to the ball is a bit long, but he can still be quick inside. His swing is smooth and very pretty. He hangs in well against lefties.

Tools: Polanco controls the strike zone very well and makes consistent contact. He hits to all fields naturally, but his power is mostly to the pull side when he turns on inner-half pitches. He routinely beats out ground balls,and the combination of contact ability and speed should allow him to post strong averages. He has excellent speed and is a smart baserunner. His routes need some improvement, but the speed allows him to be a strong defender in CF. His arm is above-average. He’s got all five tools, and he should hit for both average and power while adding value in the field and on the bases.

Makeup and Miscellaneous: Polanco is a smart player with an advanced approach to the game. He’s enthusiastic and a hard-worker.

Performance: After struggling for two years in the GCL, Polanco emerged as a top prospect in 2012 for West Virginia, where he hit .325/.388/.522 as a 20-year-old. He moved three levels in 2013, from A+ up to AAA by the end of the season, hitting .285/.356/.434 overall. As might be expected, his production declined as he moved up the ladder, including poor SB/CS numbers in the upper levels. He could probably use at least half a season in AAA to consolidate his skills.

Overall: Polanco will be 22 in 2014, and he should be ready for Pittsburgh by July. He can make an impact right away with his speed and defense, though he might not hit too much right away. He’ll play RF for the Pirates with McCutchen and Marte entrenched in CF and LF respectively, and he should be one of the best defenders in the majors in RF. At his peak, he should be a star-caliber player who impacts all facets of the game. He can be a .280 hitter with solid on-base skills, 20-homer power, 20+ steals, and strong defense.

The Pirates Should Pay Burnett

I’m really glad Charlie wrote this article, because the version I would have written would have been about twice as angry, twice as long, and half as coherent. As it is, Charlie gets it absolutely right while also being cogent, succinct, and reasonable.

The main points are that A.J. Burnett is really good, the Pirates could use a really good pitcher to replace Edinson Volquez, and the difference between Burnett and Volquez could easily be the difference between making the playoffs and not. Ergo, the Pirates should pay Burnett. His ostensible desire to continue playing for the Pirates should make things all the easier. This is something that Neal Huntington simply has to do. If he doesn’t, it’s a huge failure.

I won’t bother with the full range of arguments and counter-arguments. If I did I’d just get angry. Instead, go read Charlie’s piece. I agree with everything he said. If the money is there for A.J. Burnett, Huntington needs to get him. If the money’s not there, Nutting needs to be taken to account once and for all for his stinginess.

Prospect Stuff

MLB.com, Baseball Prospectus, and ESPN all released their top 100 prospect lists recently, and the Pirates did very well on all three. Baseball America, the default gold standard in public prospecting, has yet to release their list, but we can get a good sense of where the Pirates stand anyway.

You can see the MLB.com list here. It was put together by Jonathan Mayo and long-time Baseball America writer Jim Callis. They are consensus-gatherers, basically, using industry contacts to get a sense of how the prospects are viewed within the game. They list six Pirates among the top 100, including Polanco and Taillon in the 10-20 range, and Glasnow and Meadows in the top 50. Alen Hanson and Josh Bell are also ranked in the back half. In addition, MLB.com ranked the Pirates as having the best overall system back in November.

The Baseball Prospectus list is here. Jason Parks is the mastermind behind that one, though he has a whole staff of scouts working for him. They rely more on their own eyeballs than on industry consensus. They have seven Pirates in the top 100, including Taillon in the top 20 with Polanco not far behind. Glasnow is again in the top 50, with Reese McGuire, Josh Bell, Nick Kingham, and Austin Meadows in the back half, in that order. In comments, Parks noted that Alen Hanson just missed the list. I haven’t seen a formal organizational ranking from BP.

Keith Law just released his top 100 over at ESPN today. ESPN Insiders can read the top 50 here. As with BP, Law has seven Bucs in the top 100, though the names are somewhat different. Notably, he has Glasnow in his top 20 along with Polanco, while Taillon is a few spots behind. Meadows is also in the top 50, while Kingham, Hanson, and Bell are in the back half. Based on comments, it doesn’t seem that McGuire was all that close. Yesterday, Law ranked the Pirates’ system third in baseball.

While we’re at it, I might as well mention that Baseball America listed the Pirates as the top farm system a few weeks ago.

In short: the Pirates have a really baller farm system right now, which is good because if Nutting is going to keep pinching pennies at the major league level the Bucs’ farm system is going to have to produce like gangbusters to keep them competitive. But with eight top-100 caliber players and enough depth to make them a top-three system overall, the system is definitely in a good place.

I’ll be doing a lot of my own prospect work in the months before opening day. So look out for that.

 

Pitching Notes: Burnett, Jimenez

The big news of the day is that A.J. Burnett has decided to pitch in 2014, but not necessarily for the Pirates. Travis Sawchik has the details. Word from Jump Street was that Burnett would pitch for the Pirates or not at all. But the Pirates wouldn’t even extend the $14M qualifying offer, even though Burnett is easily worth that much on a one-year deal, and on top of the Game 5 snub, Burnett may be a bit frustrated with the team. Whatever the case, he’s on the open market now.

I assume the Pirates can re-sign him if they make a competitive offer. The open question is whether they’ll make a competitive offer. They obviously should, just like they obviously should have made the qualifying offer, but Neal Huntington’s claim that they can’t commit $14M to one player does not bode well.

Despite Huntington’s protestations, it couldn’t be any more clear: the Pirates should pay A.J. Burnett. Hiroki Kuroda got $16M from the Yankees. If that’s what Burnett needs, so be it. He would make a huge difference for the Pirates, providing roughly two marginal wins to a team that’s right on the border between playoff contention and also-ran. Those two wins are hugely valuable to the Pirates, and they’d be stupid to let them go over a few million dollars. Huntington needs to get this right.

In related news, Jon Heyman is saying that Ubaldo Jimenez may be willing to sign for something like 3/39. Jimenez would be a good idea for the same reasons that Burnett is. I outlined the case for signing Jimenez here, suggesting that a four-year deal in the $50M range would make sense. Obviously, getting him for 3/39 would be even better. In fact, it would be a steal. Of course, Burnett is probably available on a one-year deal and wouldn’t cost a draft pick, so he’s the better option. And if the Pirates can’t afford Burnett, then Jimenez is a pipe dream.

The Pirates need to be working hard to get Burnett under contract, and they should probably be closely monitoring the Jimenez situation as well, just in case. Getting a solid #2/3 pitcher into the fold immediately elevates the team to legit contender status.

Frank Coonelly Is Full of Shit

Apparently, Coonelly gave an interview with David Todd this week, and Charlie Wilmouth wrote up the talking points over at MLBTR. I’m not going to listen to the interview itself, because I hate people being fake, and it’s clear from Charlie’s summary that Coonelly was at least highly disingenuous if not outright dishonest.

Coonelly supported his claim from Piratefest that the Pirates’ tv deal is in the top half of such deals across baseball. He defended that claim with a bunch of nonsense, including that confidentiality agreements prevent teams and networks from disclosing terms. But of course if no one can disclose the terms than Coonelly can’t no what they are. And if he doesn’t know what the terms of other teams’ deals are, there’s no way he can know how good or bad the Pirates’ deal is in comparison.

Assuming for a second that Coonelly is both honest and correct, it’s weird that a contending team with such a lucrative tv deal wouldn’t be able to spend more than $70M on the major league payroll. Coonelly’s non-explanation is that money isn’t the primary issue: “The game is about putting together a championship-caliber team on the field. It’s not about making splashes and headlines in December and January.”

Well, sure. But fielding a championship-caliber team involves paying championship-caliber players championship-caliber money. You don’t have to make a splash in December or January, especially when you can just make A.J. Burnett a qualifying offer in November.

Earlier in the offseason, Neal Huntington said about the failure to offer A.J. Burnett a qualifying offer, “There is money available, but the question is how do we build around A.J.? We’ve got some other soft spots to address, and where do we go there with the money that A.J. may ultimately cost us?” He’s pleading poverty there. The Pirates can’t afford to pay A.J. Burnett what he’s worth because then they just wouldn’t have enough money to address other needs. But in the two months since the linked article appeared, the Pirates have spent virtually no money and done virtually nothing to address any of their offseason needs. We’re left with a paltry $70M payroll and a couple clear holes on the roster.

Either the Pirates’ tv deal is not all that great and there’s very little money coming in, or there’s plenty of money coming in and the Pirates simply aren’t spending it. So Frank Coonelly is full of shit. Either he’s being dishonest about the tv deal or he’s obfuscating about the team’s stinginess. It simply can’t work both ways.

I said yesterday that I choose to believe the Pirates have money available, because the alternative is too depressing. But if the last twenty or so years have taught us anything it’s that whether the team has any money or not, we shouldn’t expect them to use it. Maybe they have a great tv deal and a lot of money or maybe they don’t. But what’s clear is that they don’t have a competitive payroll, and that’s a huge problem.

 

The Case for Ubaldo Jimenez

The Brewers are reportedly close to a four-year, $52M deal with Matt Garza. Or maybe not. Whatever. It seems like a pretty stupid deal for the Brewers if it does happen, and I wouldn’t want the Pirates to sign him for that money if it doesn’t happen, so who cares.

Garza is a good pitcher, but he’s only thrown 259 innings over the last two years and he has a pin in his elbow, which should scare the bejesus out of teams. Furthermore, he’s good but not that good. Over those same past two years, he’s got an ERA- of about 94, just slightly better than Edwin Jackson had in the two years before he signed his 4/52 deal with the Cubs last winter. Garza, for whatever reason, has a strong reputation, but he’s just a #2/3 even when healthy.

Of course, the Brewers’ rotation was incredibly weak before this signing, so even a #3 would make a big difference. Unfortunately, the Brewers projected as something like a 90-loss team, so a big difference still doesn’t make them a winner. And given the injury concerns, it’s hard to see Garza making an impact for a good Brewers team in the future. The Brewers have a history of signing mid-rotation starters to questionable contracts, so I guess this is just sort of their thing.

Like I said, I wouldn’t want the Pirates to give Garza this contract. Even with the exploding financial situation across baseball, mid-rotation starters on the wrong side of 30 don’t seem like good long-term investments for small-market teams. But unlike the Brewers, the Pirates could actually use Garza right now. In the past couple weeks, both Ray Searage and Frank Coonelly have said that they don’t expect A.J. Burnett back, which means the team is left with Edinson Volquez filling the fifth starter spot.* That’s not a good thing. He has some talent, and Searage has a history of helping talented-but-disappointing pitchers improve, but current evidence suggests that we shouldn’t expect much from Volquez. The upgrade to Garza would make the 2014 Pirates serious contenders.

* If Wandy Rodriguez is healthy, the Pirates could theoretically give Jeff Locke the fifth-starter role and move Volquez to the bullpen. That would hurt their starting pitching depth and also force them to expose someone valuable to waivers (Bryan Morris, probably), so they won’t do that.

Keeping all that in mind, the Pirates should probably start thinking about Ubaldo Jimenez, who is still out there on the free agent market. I don’t know what his demands are, but they’re probably not reasonable. If they were, he’d already have signed. Obviously, the Pirates shouldn’t be unreasonable, but they should start thinking about the financial terms at which he would make sense for them and feeling out his agent about a potential deal.

A Closer Look at Potential Platoons

I suggested in my review of the ZiPS projections that the Pirates could gain an additional 2-3 wins by platooning aggressively. Obviously, the platoon advantage is a good thing, all else being equal, but my 2-3 win estimate was closer to guesswork than analysis, so I decided to see how much the Pirates could actually expect to gain from platooning in 2014.

There are two platoon considerations that I’m not going to concern myself with here. Neither Starling Marte nor Russell Martin should ever sit against a lefty, but they’re both going to be playing almost every day anyway, so the gain realized by maximizing their exposure to lefties will be fairly marginal. It’s a real gain, and it shouldn’t be ignored by Clint Hurdle, but it’s small enough that I’m going to ignore it here.

That leaves three platoon situations: Gaby Sanchez and Andrew Lambo at 1b, Neil Walker and Josh Harrison at 2b, and Pedro Alvarez and Clint Barmes at 3b/ss (with Mercer sliding to 3b when Barmes starts). To figure out how these platoons would perform, we first need to calculate their platoon splits. There’s a good, straightforward article about how to do that at Fangraphs. The basic idea is that you take a player’s career platoon rate, regress toward the league platoon rate, and then center the split around the estimated overall talent level.

For our purposes, I used the ZiPS projections for true talent. Also, I treated Neil Walker as a lefty; even though he’s a switch-hitter, he obviously has lefty-like problems handling lefties. This is cheating, I admit, but I think it’s reasonable. Finally, I used Andrew Lambo’s total splits from last year (majors and minors) since he had such a small sample size in the majors.

Here are the projected splits, then, for our six subjects:

	ZiPS wOBA	vR	vL
Sanchez	0.322	0.313	0.344
Lambo	0.3	0.308	0.279
Walker	0.324	0.333	0.295
Harrison	0.302	0.296	0.313
Alvarez	0.328	0.339	0.296
Barmes	0.263	0.257	0.282

We can see a few things right away. Notably, Lambo is expected to be worse against RHP than Gaby Sanchez, even though Sanchez has a rather large platoon split for a righty. The Lambo/Sanchez situation seems like the most obvious platoon opportunity, but it would actually be the least effective, according to these numbers. That’s not to say that the Pirates shouldn’t try it, of course. Lambo hasn’t yet gotten a real shot in the majors, and it’s certainly possible that he’s a much better hitter than ZiPS projects. Given Sanchez’s struggles against righties, it’s worth a shot. But we shouldn’t get our hopes up.

The second and third takeaways are that the Walker/Harrison and Alvarez/Barmes platoons need to happen. Harrison has almost .020 points of wOBA over Walker against LHP, and he’s a better baserunner to boot. Barmes, despite his general weakness as a hitter, is just .014 points behind Alvarez vs. lefties. When you consider the massive defensive upgrade from Alvarez/Mercer to Mercer/Barmes on the left side of the infield, the platoon makes all sorts of sense.

Okay, let’s get to the nitty gritty. If you give Walker and Alvarez 85% of their playing time vs. RHP, you change their overall wOBAs to .327 and .333 respectively. If you give Harrison and Barmes 50% of their playing time vs. lefties (more realistic for a RHH), their wOBAs climb to .305 and .270 respectively.

Overall, this isn’t nearly as big a gain as I expected. Once you account for playing time changes (Walker and Alvarez will get fewer PAs if theiy’re platooned; Harrison and Barmes will get more), the Walker/Harrison platoon gains about one run over the course of the full season. The Alvarez/Barmes platoon loses about 2.5 runs on offense, though it gains that back on defense. As mentioned, the Sanchez/Lambo platoon is actually a net loser according to the numbers.

Well, I apologize. Far from netting the Pirates 2-3 extra wins, platoons (with the available personnel, anyway) won’t really move the needle at all. Given the status of Walker and Alvarez, it might not even be worth it to try. Hurdle managed to limit Walker’s exposure to lefties last year without really platooning him; that might be the best course of action for both he and Alvarez this year. As for Sanchez and Lambo, the team might as well give that platoon a shot, but Lambo should be on a relatively short leash. If he turns out to be more Jeff Clement than Garrett Jones, the team should pull the plug.

Regarding what I said in my initial ZiPS article about the overall projection for next year’s team, I have to scale back my forecast due to these findings. The Pirates are probably ~85 win team, based on the ZiPS numbers plus the pitch-framing numbers that ZiPS doesn’t include. That coincides with the latest CAIRO simulation, which projected 86 wins. Given that synchronicity, I feel pretty confident saying that the 2014 Pirates are a mid-80s-win team on paper. That’s right in the range where another big signing (*cough*A.J.Burnett*cough*) could make a big impact, elevating the team from above-average to serious contenders. Hopefully Neal Huntington is still exploring acquisitions for 1b and the starting rotation.

 

Two Other Views of ZiPS

Yesterday I wrote a bit about the 2014 ZiPS projections for the Pirates, recently released via Fangraphs. Based on those projections, I concluded that the Pirates should be expected to win somewhere in the range of 86-88 games in 2014, give or take a standard deviation or two. Today I want to point out a couple other Pirate blogs’ takes on ZiPS.

On the optimistic side, Tim Williams over at Pirates Prospects adds up the zWAR numbers and projects 88 wins for the 2014 Pirates. He does not consider possible added benefits from pitch-framing or platooning, which would easily ratchet the projection into 90-win territory.

On the pessimistic side, David Manel at Bucs Dugout provides interactive spreadsheets to project the 2014 Pirates. His methodology involves deriving wRC from projected wOBAs for offense and RA from projected ERAs for pitching and then using the pythagorean formula to project wins. Click on the link for a more detailed explanation. Using his method and the ZiPS projections, he forecasts a paltry 79 wins.

There are problems with both of the methods, just as there were problems with mine. In my case, I made educated guesses about league run environment that may or may not be true. I excluded pitcher hitting on the assumption that ZiPS did the same in calculating hitter value. Again, this may or may not be true. I used projected RA for pitchers, which may or may not include the right amount of defensive adjustment. Finally, I used the pythagorean formula, which is a very blunt tool, to predict wins from RS and RA.

In Tim’s case, he’s merely adding up projected WAR, which has its own problems. In fact, the disclaimers on the ZiPS post at Fangraphs include a warning against doing this very thing. Like pythag, this is a very blunt tool. And Tim makes his own assumptions about league replacement level which may or may not be true. He also assumes that Gregory Polanco’s WAR will be unaffected in the move from CF to RF, and that the Pirates will use no below-replacement relievers (he omits Bryan Morris to this end). As noted before, he does not include pitch-framing.

David, like me, used pythagoras, which isn’t ideal. Also like me, he made assumptions about league run environment and pitchers-as-hitters. He also made an assumption about translating ERA to RA, and on top of that made the same choice I did in excluding a further defensive adjustment. Like Tim, David did not even attempt to include pitch-framing.

All of this isn’t to criticize Tim and David, but rather to point out that deriving team projections from individual ones is a very tricky and imprecise art. Different methodologies can yield widely different outcomes, and in our case our forecasts ranged from 79 to 88 wins. None of these projections, by itself, is probably worth all that much, but taken together they’re a good barometer of where this roster currently stands.

In my own ZiPS piece, I claimed that the numbers showed that the Pirates were clearly a legitimate playoff contender, but David’s work suggests that caution is advised. The best estimate, all things considered, is probably that the Pirates are an above-average team, but not a particularly good one.

One final note: I’ve been critical of projected-win methodologies here, but there is a sound methodology for doing this. It involves plugging the entire league’s projections, along with depth charts, into a simulator and playing the season out hundreds or thousands of times. This method makes no assumptions beyond the projections themselves and captures the context and interaction of the numbers in a realistic way. Most people don’t have simulators, which is why we resort to pythagoras or mere addition. But it’s worth noting that SG at Replacement Level Yankees Weblog, who does the CAIRO projections, does have a simulator. In his most recent simulation, which included 1,000,000 simulated 2014 seasons, he projected the Pirates to win 86 games and tie the Cardinals for first place in the NL Central. So that’s another vote for a mid-80s win total and playoff contention.

The Pirates’ ZiPS

Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections for the 2014 Pirates were released on Fangraphs yesterday. You can see them here. ZiPS is pretty much the gold standard for publicly available projection systems, so his forecasts should give us a good idea of what to expect from the Bucs in the upcoming season. I’m happy to say that, at least to me, the results are a pleasant surprise. When I look at the roster, I see a ~.500 team that will need Taillon and Polanco to crush it upon their promotions in order to compete. But ZiPS sees a solidly above-average team that should have no trouble competing for a wild card spot.

Introducing Me

Hey folks. This is my new blog. It’s about the Pittsburgh Pirates. I hope you enjoy it.