There are plenty of tragic characters throughout history. Characters that gave their all to some cause only to be doomed by some event beyond their control or done in by their own shortcomings. Some get their stories told in song. Some get remembered in stories passed down from generation to generation. Baseball is home to plenty of these characters. Each team has one or two of these characters. The Pirates have had plenty. From JJ Davis to Chad Hermansen to Sammy Khalifa to Bryan Bullington, the Pirates have given us many of these tragic characters. But none have stuck around as long or flirted with greatness more than Gregory Polanco.
Ok, so greatness might be a slight exaggeration, but Polanco has looked damn good in stretches and has received loads of hype. I still remember when Polanco was called up in 2014. He had absolutely torched AAA pitching over the first two months of the season. The hype behind him was extremely high. When a home run was hit over him in his first game, it lead Bob Walk to say on the air that he didn’t care about the homer. He was just watching Polanco to see how he’d react to the ball that was hit well over the Clemente wall. In other words, people were drooling over what he might become. It was that hype and promise which lead the Pirates to sign him to a contract extension in 2016.
Fast forward seven years and a .245 career average since his arrival in the big leagues, we’re still waiting for the potential to show itself with any kind of consistency. Injuries have been the biggest issue with Polanco. He’s never really been able to put a full season together. Aside from being hurt, he’s been very inconsistent when healthy. In 2018, he went on a 34 game slide and hit .197 over that time. That stretch helped put the Pirates far enough back that they couldn’t catch up after a hot start to the season. He made an adjustment to his stance and started to climb out of his funk only to blow out his shoulder on one of the worst looking slides into 2nd base. He’s never been able to put anything together since then. Last season was abysmal and the first four games of this season have shown more of the same.
So why is Polanco still here? That’s what a lot of fans want to know. I think the reasoning is pretty easy to figure out. It’s the hope that he can string together anything resembling a hit streak and bring something back to the Pirates in a trade. This is the last year for Polanco in Pittsburgh. They’re not going to pick up his option for next year. If they even get to that point where they have to make that decision, it means that Polanco was so bad that nobody would take him.
Polanco isn’t a bad guy. It’s hard not to root for him. He’s always smiling. He just had a kid. I think that the resurgence of hope in fans just from seeing him enter another season in the “best shape of his life” only to have him fall flat has run its course. The hard thing is that the Pirates don’t really have a clear successor ready to step in. Troy Stokes, Jared Oliva, and Brian Goodwin would be some of the next guys up. Maybe Phillip Evans could see time out in right. The bottom line is that the Pirates aren’t contending this year. As frustrating as it is to watch, we probably need to suffer through a few months of potentially bad Polanco in order to hopefully see a month or so of possibly good Polanco.
At least I’ll have that tale of going back to my friend’s house after my rehearsal dinner the night before my wedding and catching Polanco hitting his first home run to put the Pirates ahead and essentially win the game. My kids will ask, “whatever happened to him?” I hope I can say more than “nobody knows, kid. Nobody knows.”
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