Besides Gerrit Cole, the two players that will have the most bearing on whether the 2015 Pirates are a good team or a great team are most likely their corner outfielders. Just like you can track the club’s mad dash in August and September to the NL’s second wild card with Gerrit Cole’s return from the disabled list, you can do almost the same thing with Starling Marte’s bat waking up. After the Pirates’ game on August 8th, Marte was hitting .256/.330/.387 with 18 doubles, five homers, and five triples. He was having the exact season that you might fear that he’d have after putting up solid numbers in his first two years in the league: because of his poor plate discipline much of his offensive performance is driven by batting average and Marte’s penchant for striking out (he had 98 Ks in 364 PAs at that point) has always been enough to make a Pirate fan feel nervous about him as a whole.
From that point on, Marte hit .359/.409/.581 with 11 doubles, a triple, and eight homers in the season’s final 45 games. Maybe most impressively, he cut way back on his strikeouts (35 in 189 plate apperances, ~18%). Those last two months represents the opposite of the spectrum: speed, gap power, a little bit of home run pop. On his best days, Marte doesn’t look all that different than the MVP that he plays alongside in the Pirate outfield.
Still, Marte’s a tough player to get a handle on: you can see this in Jonah Keri’s 2014 Trade Value Rankings, where he mentions that two executives that he talked two were pretty down on Marte because of his poor eye at the plate. It’s true that his eye is the biggest source of concern: even with the strides he made in the late part of the season, he still struck out in 24% of his plate appearances and walked in only 6.1%. Marte took a circuitous route to the big leagues when compared to other Latin American prospects (he signed late, came to the States late, and dealt with injuries in the low minors), so I think If he can keep his strikeout rate somewhere around the 18% it was in last year’s last two months, it’d make a huge difference for him as a whole.
In closing, I think it’s worth mentioning Jeff Sullivan’s piece about Marte from the end of January. In it, he points out all of the less-obvious things that Marte does really well (reach on errors, run the bases, play defense), then looks at the change in approach that lead to Marte’s huge finish to the season. Marte’s late-season breakout was a huge boon to the Pirate offense; if he can keep it going over the course of a full season, it’s exciting to think about what the Pirates’ offense might be able to do this year.
<500 is an ongoing series previewing 2015 for each key Pirate in fewer than 500 words
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