Gregory Polanco may or may not be coming up on Friday, but it looks like this is going to be more complicated than it first appeared. After the jump, let’s look at the whole situation.
First things first, Tim Williams tweeted out shortly before the start of tonight’s Pirates game that his sources told him Gregory Polanco would be called up for Friday’s game against the Brewers at PNC Park and put a post up on his site breaking the news. Ken Rosenthal quickly confirmed with a tweet of his own:
Sources: Polanco heading to Pittsburgh tomorrow and expected to join #Pirates on Friday.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) June 4, 2014
Given that Tim often has news about the Pirates’ minor league system before anyone else and Rosenthal is one of the best national reporters, it looked for an hour or two that Polanco’s Friday promotion would be fait accompli. Then this happened:
From a high-ranking #Pirates official: Gregory Polanco is NOT coming up on Friday.
— Bill Brink (@BrinkPG) June 4, 2014
Rob Biertempfel followed that up with a similar tweet of his own. Brink further clarified that he didn’t mean Polanco wouldn’t be up soon, just that he was told that it wouldn’t be on Friday. If you’re watching the game right now, you’ve probably noticed that there’s been no mention of Polanco on tonight’s broadcast, which is usually a good barometer of pending transactions.
Anyway, with Oscar Tavares and a few other prospects up, it seems like teams have mostly decided the Super Two date has passed. I had originally thought that Polanco’s call-up date would be around June 17th, mostly based on the days that Wil Myers and Zack Wheeler were called up last year (Gerrit Cole was up earlier, but by Neal Huntington’s own admission, Cole was up a week or two earlier than they absolutely wanted because of Wandy Rodriguez’s injury), but it now seems like it definitely could be sooner. Sooner might mean Friday or it might not. I don’t have any idea. It doesn’t seem like anyone does at this point.
