Corey Hart: Mapping His Power For The Pittsburgh Pirates

One of the Pirates minor splashes over the offseason was the addition of Corey Hart. The signing drew praises from big name baseball writers, mainly due to the lack of risk the Pirates took in the one year, $2.5 million (guaranteed) deal. The Pirates don’t need much from Hart, but it would be a nice plus if he could provide some power off the bench and prove to be a reliable handcuff to the ever up and down Pedro Alvarez.

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We know what Hart role is, but we don’t know how his performance will be.  He hasn’t done much recently, sitting out the entire 2013 season due to injury and hitting just .203/.271/.319 in 68 games with the Mariners last year. Hart has a lot to prove, and that will start with the long ball. He’s had two 30 homer seasons in his career and has gone over 20 three other times. But how does his power profile in his new home ballpark? Let’s take a look.

Hart is a right hander that hits more of his home runs to left field. But you might be surprised to the extent of that. Here’s where his homers have gone since 2010 (all data and graphs courtesy of ESPN’s Hit Tracker Online (note: there’s one missing home run in the data from the 2010 season).

So yes, as you suspected, the majority of the home runs go to left field, which isn’t great news when PNC Park is where you play half your games, but it was not an overwhelming majority. A third of his homers go to centerfield, which is much more friendly in Pittsburgh.

More good news is that when Hart hits homers, it usually doesn’t matter what ballpark he’s in – they’re normally several feet past the fence. Here’s Hart’s home runs for the last four years, mapped onto PNC Park (you can click the images to see an enlarged version of them).

2014:

2012:

2011:

2010:

I don’t know about anybody else, but I definitely expected to see way more homers end up inside the fence around the notch there, but that just isn’t the case.  Corey Hart probably doesn’t have the pop that he did in those huge 30 homer seasons, but it’s reassuring to see that he can groove it all around the park instead of just having a power alley that PNC Park will contain.

Next: Tony Sanchez off to a hot start this spring