Here’s something you might not expect: by at least one measure (Baseball-Reference WAR), Starling Marte was the best player on the Pittsburgh Pirates last year. The reason is in the defense, of course, and Baseball Reference uses DRS, which gives more value to Marte’s defense in and less to Andrew McCutchen’s in center. It’s not a consensus opinion (FanGraphs WAR has McCutchen first by a pretty good measure and Marte fourth, also behind Cervelli and Kang, while Baseball Prospectus also has him fourth), but still, you can at least say that Starling Marte was arguably the most all-around valuable Pittsburgh Pirate on the best Pittsburgh Pirate team in a generation.
This is at least a little bit surprising because Marte’s offense dipped slightly in 2015; in his first two full seasons his wRC+ was 122 and 133; last year it was just 117. It dipped because he didn’t get hit by as many pitches — in 2013 he got hit by 24 pitches in 566 PAs, in 2014 he got hit by 17 in 545, and in 2015 he got hit by 19 in 633. I am objectively fine with this; Marte’s ability to get hit by pitches is obviously a skill that increases his OBP every year, but getting hit by more pitches leads to more injuries. The Pirates are better with Marte on the field, and so it’s best if he stays there.
Despite Marte’s dip in offensive performance last year, I see a couple of intriguing developments. The first is that I think there’s a bit of a power surge hidden inside of numbers that don’t obviously show it (Marte slugged .444 vs. a career .445 rate with an ISO of .157 vs. 162 career). Marte hit 19 homers last year, but he had 12 by June 9th, to go with a .474 slugging percentage through those 57 games. In fact, Marte slugged .521 in April and four of the six highest SLG months in his career all came in 2015, though slumps in June and August dragged his full-season numbers down a bit.
Marte is, of course, prone to those slumps due to his high strikeout rate. That strikeout rate is the other intriguing piece of data; Marte went from ~24% in 2013 and 2014 to under 20% (19.4%) in 2015. That’s actually lower than his strikeout rate in Triple-A, where he was very successful, and closer to his career low minor league rate (17.5% in Double-A) than any of his big league strikeout numbers.
It is, of course, possible that we’re looking at random variation in these numbers and that Marte is already the player he’s going to become. That would be fine; he’s already an excellent outfielder. I can’t help but look at Marte’s numbers without thinking a little bit about Andrew McCutchen before the 2012 season, though. In McCutchen’s first three years, he put up overall offensive lines that resembled each other pretty closely and there was some thought that he’d plateaued and more or less turned into the offensive player he was going to be. A closer look, though, showed that he hit for a bunch of power one year, and had another year where he drew a ton of walks, and I remember wondering what sort of hitter he’d look like if he ever drew those two aspects of his game together. We found out in 2012, and Andrew McCutchen is a franchise player now, instead of the mere All-Star he appeared to be four years ago.
That’s not to say that even if Marte leaps forward that he’ll make a McCutchen leap, of course, but then, Marte’s got more defensive value than McCutchen’s ever had. This is all just a reminder that some players improve linearly and some improve in fits and starts and that even though Marte’s a couple of years older than McCutchen was at his breakout, I think there’s still some room for improvement from him at the plate. If it does happen, well, it’s possible the Pirates will have more than one MVP candidate in 2016.
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