This is an unpopular opinion, but I think there’s a decent chance that Pedro Alvarez will be the exact first baseman the Pirates need him to be in 2015. This is buried well underneath the throwing problems, the position change, the power outage, and the foot injury, but in 2014, Pedro Alvarez finally did the two things that everyone has been saying that he needed to do to become a better hitter all along: strike out less and walk more.
For all of his failings last year, Alvarez still managed 18 home runs (~24/25 home run pace if he’d gotten the 600+ plate appearances he got in 2013), he got his strikeouts down to ~25%, and he got his walks up to ~10%. The power was obviously not the same as it was when he lead the NL in home runs in 2013, but it showed up in spurts. June was actually one of the best-rounded months of Alvarez’s career: he hit .299/.396/.483 in 26 games, even though he only hit three home runs. If he could keep that pace up over the course of a full season, he might only hit 20 home runs, but he’d be an exponentially better hitter than he was in either of two years that preceded 2014. If you want to get really creative with your arbitrary endpoints, Alvarez hit .275/.373/.549 with four homers from June 23rd to July 11th, which is fantastic from your clean-up hitter. It was right around that point that Alvarez completely lost the ability to throw and he didn’t homer again until his second game as a first baseman on August 23rd.
If I had to impose a narrative on Alvarez’s 2014 season, it would probably go like this: Jeff Branson and the Pirates’ coaches sat down with Alvarez in spring training and tried to finally work on his eye at the plate, which was the one thing that was keeping him from being a truly great power hitter. The change in approach worked, but it took Alvarez some time to adjust. As a result of that, his early-season power waxed and waned and it wasn’t quite the same as it had been the last two years. By the time mid-June rolled around, though, he was starting to put things together at the plate and seemed primed for a second-half breakout. And then that was the exact point that his arm hit critical mass, both because he couldn’t stop making throwing errors and because it was clear that Josh Harrison had to stay on the field.
I’m not making excuses for Alvarez here. He came close to putting it all together last year, but he didn’t. Now he has to learn a new position, he has to maintain the gains he made in plate patience and find his power, and he probably has confidence issues to overcome. He’s almost 28, so the time to dream is past. It’s time for Alvarez to actually do it. All I’m pointing out is that that isn’t quite as impossible as it seems sometimes.
<500 is an ongoing series previewing 2015 for each key Pirate in fewer than 500 words.
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