BRADENTON, Fla. -- If Starling Marte and Gregory Polanco don't emerge as stars this summer, the Pirates of 2018 have no shot at competing, much less contending.
Overly simplistic?
Maybe, but based on my conversation with both of them, together at their LECOM Park stalls Thursday morning, they don't seem to feel much differently themselves.
"Big year for us," Marte told me, leaning back in his chair to look up with an expression more serious than his norm. "We have to be there. We will be there. You'll see."
Well, being there would be a wonderful start.
Marte, of course, was suspended 80 games for steroid use. So his 64-game finish of .282/.343/.380 with five home runs, 24 RBIs and 19 steals in 21 attempts ... it was nice, but it obviously didn't amount to much. He let everyone down on every level.
Polanco wasn't there, either, not because he was busted cheating but because he couldn't keep his hamstring from popping. Three separate stints on the disabled list were the direct result, and the indirect result -- that long swing needs to stay fluid to be effective -- was .251/.305/.391 with 11 home runs and 35 RBIs.
Going old-school here, between them, they drove home 66 total runs.
For real.
Not going to come close to cutting it.
Show me some spectacular spring stats, throw in six quarters, and I'll show you nothing more than $1.50. But it can't hurt anyone's confidence, individually or collectively, that Marte's opened Grapefruit ball 3 for 7 with a walk, two runs and as many steals, and Polanco's 3 for 8 with a double. Neither played in the 4-1 victory Thursday over the Blue Jays, but both will start Friday against the Orioles in Sarasota, Fla.
"I feel good," Marte told me. "My swing is good. I have some patience. It's good."
And being back in center field, where he's always been more comfortable and now can finally take command with Andrew McCutchen gone?
"Very good. You know that."
I do. He loves it there.
Polanco's staying put in right after that silly front-office-imposed experiment in left last spring, and he loves it there, too. Knows the Clemente Wall. Gets to let loose with the cannon. All of it.
Otherwise, though, he wants everything else to be different. Notably, he looks completely different, courtesy of an offseason training regimen aimed at getting lighter and more lithe. When he showed up at Pirate City last spring, he'd bulked up to the point where he might as well have been a tight end reporting to Latrobe. Now, he's still got the muscle, but it's leaner, more concentrated, maybe allowing him to be quicker through that long swing path.
That's how that swing looked when he first came up, remember?
"It's faster," Polanco told me. "For sure, it's faster now, like before."
To repeat, it's got to be both of these guys. Not to dump on the rest of the lineup because there are some bona fide players in there, probably more than most seem to realize. But the math painfully illustrates that replacing Cutch will have to be more than a community effort. There have to be significant rises in the performance for some. And nowhere on the roster was the gap bigger between performance and ceiling than for these two in 2017.
To that end, they seem to be in this together. That's not new. They're both Dominicans, they've long been friends, and they've basically followed the same paths to their current statuses in baseball. But this is different. I've gotten to know both fairly well over the years, and there'd always been an edge, competitively, between them. Marte didn't seem wild about Polanco showing up in the majors to much greater fanfare, for example, in 2014. Polanco didn't seem wild about Marte's suspension. There's been a lot of little fodder like that.
Now, though, it feels like more of a camaraderie. Maybe because they've now both got something to prove. Not to each other but to everyone else.
"We're going to show what we got," Marte would say, motioning over to Polanco. "We know it's a big year. For us. For the team. It's good. You'll see."
• It's not always sunny here, you should know ...
... and sometimes can get outright oppressive.
This is solely for those new to following baseball: Home runs in Bradenton can be lazy flies at almost any other park in Florida. There's a wind current that whips through here off the Gulf of Mexico and, well, suffice it to say Sean Rodriguez's solo shot in the second, which made it all the way onto the boardwalk above center field, initially had Toronto's Kevin Pillar camping under it about 10 feet shy of the track
• Assuming Corey Dickerson can rediscover his form from the first half of 2017 with the Rays, assuming the above duo do as already stated, assuming Josh Harrison doesn't dip back, assuming Francisco Cervelli's health, assuming the continued progress of Josh Bell ... this lineup isn't bad. It really isn't.
Assuming all of that goes like that.
"We'll hit the ball," J-Hay told me. "We know that."
He might be right. But they've all got to do it.
• I've got a little more on Tony Clark's momentous visit Thursday morning with the Pirates, as well as Jameson Taillon taking Gerrit Cole's place as union rep, in this week's Friday Insider. Otherwise, I'm going to try to stick to actual baseball while down here. This front office never makes that easy.
• Austin Meadows' two-run home run in the seventh inning Thursday has him at 5 for 8 with seven RBIs, and this one came off the bench.
• Nick Kingham, a Tommy John recovery project three years in the making, is seen by Clint Hurdle's staff as having a real chance at making a handful of starts in Pittsburgh this summer, if not more. He's 26, and his stuff isn't exactly explosive, but he's always had terrific poise, and that's impressed coaches the most.
Two cases in point came in his three-inning start Thursday -- one run, three hits, two strikeouts, a walk -- when he and Cervelli ended the Toronto first with a strike-'em-out-throw-'em-out of Justin Smoak and Curtis Granderson, respectively, then in the next inning picked off Pillar with a bullet to first.
"I feel good about it, yeah," Kingham said. "Those aren't situations you get to work on every day, even in the season, so that was nice."
"There are little wins out there all over the place in the spring," Clint Hurdle said. "You meet the demands of the game, and Nick was able to meet a couple today."
• Here's that Cervelli throw, by the way:
Wow, is that guy fired up for the coming season. No one takes being hurt worse than he does, and it's only exacerbated when it's some of the unlucky fare that limited him to 81 games in 2017.
"All I can do is prepare my body and my mind to the best of my ability, and I've done that," Cervelli told me in that trademark heart-and-soul tone. "I'm here to do my job. I'm here to play baseball."
He'll start two-thirds of the games at a minimum. Probably more. Don't get any notion about some Elias Diaz takeover. Not yet.
Then again, he's now the team's highest-paid player at $10.5 million, so who knows?
But hey, sticking to actual baseball.
• Great to see Ivan Nova smiling again. He had a rough finish to 2017 and, by season's end, was more down than I could ever imagine from someone of his personality. He's got the right spirit for a rebound, he's dropped a few pounds, and he's back to firing strikes low in the zone.
"Nothing like that," he told me of last year. "Nothing."
There's something to be said for someone making $8.5 million who can still torment himself over his craft when the cash itself is guaranteed. I try never to lose sight of that around these professionals.
• Hard to describe what it was like to not see Cutch here, but I'll give it a shot in spoken form: