2018 Pittsburgh Pirates Rewind: The Outfield

The Pittsburgh Pirates infield group in 2018 led to some disappointment, the Pirates outfield was strong.  The three starters will all be back again in 2019, so with the offseason starting this is one area the Pirates don’t need to look at.

The Pittsburgh Pirates outfield looked different in 2018 than in previous years.  Starling Marte was (again) moved to center field with Andrew McCutchen being traded away.  Gregory Polanco stayed in right, and the Pirates found their way into Corey Dickerson after what appeared to be moves made to wait for the arrival of Austin Meadows.

This group had strong success, and the Pirates outfield collectively ended sixth in total WARP with 12.21 wins, a rounding error off of the Los Angeles Angels’ 12.22 mark with Mike Trout counting for 75 percent of their total.

The individual breakdown of the positional group is as follows:

No surprise that Marte led the team with 4.6 wins, he’s the Pirates best player and one of the better defenders in the league.  His plus bat (.290 TAv) and plus glove (6.90 FRAA) at a premium position put Marte in the 90th percentile among batters with 250+ plate appearances.  He’s the Pirates best player, and he showed that this past season and Marte will look to lead the outfield position group again in 2019.

Polanco being the second most valuable player is more of a surprise, and depending on what defensive metrics you believe in (UZR is entirely better with three years of data), Polanco ranges from a two-win player (Baseball-Reference’s WAR framework) to a three-win player with Baseball Prospectus’s framework.

Here is a look at the last three years of Polanco’s defensive metrics:

Using a MARCEL, weighing 2016 at 0.1, 2017 at 0.3, and 2018 at 0.6, the following is achieved:

Polanco isn’t a particularly bad defender, though when it’s bad it’s really bad, but he’s not a plus defender either.  He’s average, and with the plus offense that he produced in 2018 (.340 OBP/.499 SLG/.296 TAv), it’s not unreasonable to see him as an average starter, with the chance to be slightly above average.  He got hurt at the end of the season, and with the shoulder being an issue, the power he showed in 2018 could (likely will) be a question in 2019, and that would dampen his value going forward.  However, 2018 was a good year for him and it was his third three-win season (2015 was a rounding error away at 2.8) in four seasons.

To round out the Pirates starting outfield group, Dickerson posted a 2.8 win season, making him an average starter at the position.  What Dickerson did in 2018 isn’t what he did in previous years, and he was worth a win less than in 2017.

Here is Dickerson’s career numbers:

The power numbers decreased, and Dickerson ran a sub .200 ISO for the first time since his rookie season of 2013.  He still produced an above average offensive season (TAv always set with .260 being league average), Dickerson just did so by making a tradeoff of power for more contact:

Dickerson kept swinging at pitches out of the zone (O-swing) but he made swung and missed less often, dropping his rate swinging strike rate by 3.8 percentage points.  With less swing and miss in his game, Dickerson struck out less, but that also meant less power with him often times choking up on the bat to secure a ball in play, the opposite of what Will Craig did this season.

The biggest revelation, however, was Dickerson’s glove, posting 10.4 runs above the average fielder.

Using the same method as Polanco, Dickerson’s three-year numbers are:

None of the metrics pointed Dickerson as a bad outfielder, rather an average one (which is something that Nate Werner and I also concluded at the beginning of the season), but this season Dickerson really improved his defense to the point in which he won the Gold Glove.  Dickerson had a productive season, being worth near three wins, and giving the Pirates one of the better outfield units in the game.

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The other players that contributed to the outfield include Pablo Reyes, Austin Meadows, Jordan Luplow, and Chris Bostick.  Bostick only received two plate appearances and was a Triple-A player before being traded away to the Marlins.  Reyes has a lot of similarities to Bostick, and he looks like maybe a 24th or 25th man on the roster ceiling, but a player that a club would rather have in Triple-A.

Meadows came up and hit the cover off the ball before slowing down a bit, and he was traded for Chris Archer.  The former future Pirates center fielder was productive in his short stint in Pittsburgh and this seemed like a peculiar time to trade the former ninth overall pick.

Luplow has produced in the minors and has shown power, with projection systems projecting an average bat in 2019.  STEAMER has him at a .322 OBP and .409 SLG, but while he has shown some of the raw power he hasn’t put it fully together in just his 190 plate appearances.  He’s a likely fourth outfielder going forward.

The Pirates had one of the better outfields in baseball in 2018, with Marte leading the group, Dickerson winning a gold glove and Polanco staying on the field and producing more than he did in 2017.  The group once again appears solid in 2019, though a lot depends on the length in which Polanco is out for and how the power plays once he is back.

*Numbers from Baseball Prospectus and Fangraphs

2018 Pirates rewind:

• Data Visualizations
• The Catchers
• The Infield