There’s a new star duo in town in Arizona. Determined to upgrade their starting pitching, the Diamondbacks aggressively added ace right-handers Zack Greinke and Shelby Miller to their rotation earlier this winter.
But, meh. While those two should help the Diamondbacks get to where they want to be in 2016 and beyond, the heart and soul of the team remains the other, more underappreciated star duo.
Before Greinke and Miller, there was center fielder A.J. Pollock and first baseman Paul Goldschmidt. And, granted, the two of them are hardly invisible on the national landscape. Both were All-Stars in 2015, and Goldschmidt has been the runner-up for the National League MVP in two of the last three seasons.
However, you’re not going to punch their names into Google and see anybody glorifying them the way past star duos have been glorified. You know, like Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire or Simon and Garfunkel.
Which is a danged shame, really, as the Pollock-Goldschmidt duo is arguably the best in the sport.
If you think back to 2015, maybe it’s Josh Donaldson and Jose Bautista or Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant who come to mind first as the league’s most dynamic position player duo. But with a combined 16.2 wins above replacement, Baseball-Reference.com WAR actually puts that honor squarely on Pollock and Goldschmidt.
And lest anyone think that they’re strictly a 2015 success story, over the last two years, they actually reign supreme among the star duos that are still standing:
This isn’t all Goldschmidt, either. As awesome as “America’s First Baseman” is, he actually hasn’t been that much more productive than Pollock. Goldschmidt has produced 13.3 WAR over the last two years. Despite being limited to 75 games by injury in 2014, Pollock has produced 11.3.
Skeptical of WAR? That’s OK. The popular opinion may be that it’s a flawless measure of value, but there are flaws. The Citizen Kane of baseball statistics it is not.
But in a case like this one, WAR does have the right idea.
For position players, WAR is all about encapsulating all-around value. With a few quirks, checks and balances, and bells and whistles aside, its focus is on hitting, baserunning and fielding.
And those, of course, are otherwise known as three areas where Pollock and Goldschmidt excel.
It’s no secret that Goldschmidt‘s bat is legit. He’s hit .309 with a .968 OPS over the last three seasons, putting him behind only Mike Trout and Miguel Cabrera in adjusted OPS. And in hitting .321 with a 1.005 OPS and 33 home runs in 2015, he made a strong case for himself as baseball’s best hitter.
Pollock is a darn good hitter in his own right. He’s coming off a .315 average, an .865 OPS and 20 dingers in 2015, and has hit .311 with an .861 OPS over the last two seasons combined. Among his fellow center fielders, adjusted OPS puts him behind only Trout and Andrew McCutchen.
Pollock also showed in 2015 that he can be one of the most productive baserunners in the sport. He stole 39 bases and finished in the top 10 in MLB in overall baserunning value, according to FanGraphs. For his part, Goldschmidt has averaged roughly 15 stolen bases per season over the last four years, allowing him to rate as the game’s top baserunning first baseman by a significant margin.
And then there’s the defense. Goodness, is there defense.
Pollock just led all National League center fielders in defensive runs saved, and Goldschmidt owned his fellow first basemen in that same department. And though defensive metrics have indeed been known to be inconsistent, they seem to have firm opinions on the quality of Pollock’s and Goldschmidt‘s defense. There’s also the fact that each just won a Gold Glove, proof that they pass the eye test as well.
That’s especially true of Pollock, who is capable of such feats as this:
We mentioned a few awesome hitting duos before, but pairs of players that are living, breathing highlight reels in all three phases of the game are decidedly rarer. To find two teammates as good as Pollock and Goldschmidt, you might have to go all the way back to Ken Griffey Jr. and Alex Rodriguez in the 1990s.
This naturally raises the question of why there isn’t more buzz surrounding the Pollock-Goldschmidt duo, and there are a few readily apparent answers.
One is the fact that they play in one of Major League Baseball’s more obscure markets. A second is the fact that the Diamondbacks have seemed more interested in upholding baseball’s unwritten rules than in playing good baseball in recent years. As a result of that, only Goldschmidt has gotten postseason exposure. And even when he did, it was only four games.
But another explanation for why Pollock and Goldschmidt aren’t bigger superstars is that they were never supposed to be superstars.
Baseball is in an age when the best prospects are not only hyped more than they used to be, but they are more likely to find success than perhaps ever before. It’s no wonder that many of the league’s brightest stars were famous prospects who simply became even more famous once they made good on all the hype in the majors. Think Clayton Kershaw, Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, Andrew McCutchen, Kris Bryant, Carlos Correa, and so on and so on down the line.
In an environment like this, the road to superstardom is naturally going to be a little longer for players that arrive in the big leagues amidst relatively little fanfare. And in both Pollock’s and Goldschmidt‘s prospect days, fanfare was pretty hard to come by.
Pollock was Arizona’s No. 17 pick out of Notre Dame in the 2009 draft, but Baseball America noted that there was a “debate as to whether he’s a true first-round talent.” Goldschmidt, meanwhile, was taken out of Texas State way down in the eighth round.
Their stock didn‘t rise much in the years following the draft. Neither Pollock nor Goldschmidt ever appeared in an annual top 100 list at Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus or MLB.com. In fact, eventually they both got to a point where Baseball America didn‘t even consider them among the top prospects in Arizona’s system.
After the 2010 season, Baseball America rated Goldschmidt as Arizona’s No. 11 prospect, with a note that he might “at least have a solid career as a platoon player.” After the 2012 season, Baseball America rated Pollock as Arizona’s No. 10 prospect, with a note that some scouts were seeing him as “a solid regular in center field and others thinking he profiles best as a fourth outfielder.”
Knowing what we know now, a hat tip in the direction of whichever Diamondbacks executives and coaches believed in Pollock and Goldschmidt is appropriate. But a hat tip is also owed to the two players themselves, as they have defied expectations precisely because they had the will to do so.
As former Arizona scouting director Tom Allison told Nick Piecoro of the Arizona Republic about Pollock: “Guys don’t play above their tools — they maximize their tools. For someone like A.J. Pollock, his drive and his intangibles helped him maximize his tools more than other guys might.”
And as Alan Zinter, Goldschmidt‘s rookie ball coach, told Tyler Kepner of the New York Times:
A lot of kids have so much pride that they want to show the coaches and the front office that they know what they’re doing, and they don’t need the help. They don’t absorb the information because they want us to think they know it already. Goldy didn’t have an ego. He didn’t have that illusion of knowledge. He’s O.K. with wanting to learn.
Being willing to put in the work to get better has gotten Pollock and Goldschmidt much further than most of them expected to go. And after all they’ve done in the last couple of years, here’s presuming the many doubters they once had are now true believers.
Now all they have to do is get Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Baseball Fan to come around.
To that end, it may be as simple as Pollock and Goldschmidt continuing to be themselves in 2016. If they can do that while Greinke and Miller elevate the Diamondbacks’ pitching staff, there might be some winning baseball going on in Arizona for a change.
That would put more eyes on Pollock and Goldschmidt, and those eyes would see what they’ve been missing.
Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.
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