Kovacevic: Giving up on Polanco? Really?

Gregory Polanco's a wreck and a half.

I submit this seemingly obvious observation not because of his latest 0-for-4 Sunday in the Pirates' 6-4 loss to the Cardinals at PNC Park. Not because those at-bats brought a strikeout, a popup, a four-bouncer to second and, fittingly, another strikeout with the afternoon's final pitch. Not because he's dug himself a 3-for-35 trench. Not because his batting average is a barely-Mendoza .205. Not because he's been RBI-free for two weeks.

Oh, all those apply, and painfully so. Particularly upon actual viewing of all four outcomes from this game:

It's become so bleak that, when the 9-year-old girl serving as the traditional Sunday guest announcer for an inning called him 'George Polanco,' one rather vocal fan in the upper deck spent the rest of the game badgering away: "Come on, George! Get out of it, George! Wake up, George!"

But no, the reason I'm describing this wreckage in this context is a lot less tangible: I could scarcely pry a sound from him at his stall afterward.

Me: How are you feeling?

Polanco: (Monosyllabic grunt.)

Me: Anything getting close? In the cage, maybe?

Polanco: (Possible multiple grunts, difficult to distinguish from his hurriedly putting on his jacket to bolt.)

Me: Hey, you all right?

Polanco: "I'm good."

Sure he is. And I'm Honus Wagner. That's not the same Polanco who was beaming all through spring training, telling me in Bradenton, "Big year," or the one who fairly boasted to me in Detroit upon his prodigious home run in the season opener, "It landed. They called. It just landed.”

This isn't the same guy. No joy. No jokes. And the moment I'd put away the pliers in trying to extract answers, he walked over to a teammate's stall and looked no less serious about whatever they might have been exchanging.

It's not complicated with Polanco, for as much as he's so spectacularly misunderstood by so many: He just needs confidence.

He's not stupid. He's not lazy. He cares deeply about his own performance and that of his team. I've been convinced of that for a long time, and that doesn't waver even when he'll inexcusably lose focus in a given situation. Not everyone is as intense as Sean Rodriguez, nor as locked-in as Jordy Mercer.

The confidence in Polanco's case isn't inherent. That's his problem. It's tied to performance. When he succeeds, as he did in that outrageous opening week that had a lot of us wondering if this wasn't the beginning of the long-awaited breakout, he feeds off it with a passion. But then, at the first sign of anything amiss, he wonders, he questions, he doubts, he overcompensates and ... well, he looks like he did Sunday. And for the past two weeks.

But on that note, let me offer a couple points of clarification regarding his overall showing:

1. If anyone anywhere still cites batting average as a primary statistic, it's time to finally flip that yellowed calendar from 1988.

When our Lance Lysowski asked Neal Huntington before the game about Polanco, the GM replied, “The narrative is he’s been terrible, but the reality is he’s been just about a league average offensive player."

That'll set off howls, I'm sure, but it's statistically accurate: Polanco ranks third among National League right fielders with a .732 OPS — on-base plus slugging percentage, the game's great catch-all offensive figure — and he's 11th in all of Major League Baseball. And this is because he's got eight home runs, most on the Pirates, and 27 walks, also most on the Pirates.

2. He's been miserably unlucky.

No one will want to hear that, either, but it's just as statistically accurate: He's currently lugging an unfathomably low .232 BABIP — batting average on balls in play — and it's the one useful application of anything related to batting average. What this tracks is the number of balls hit into the field of play, excluding home runs, that become hits. Basically, it's a luck-0-meter. The league average for a modern BABIP is .300, and that applies to every player, good or bad. Because that's just how often balls land somewhere for a hit. Polanco's current .232 is 40 points lower than at any season in his career.

Translation: He's due for a few to find some grass.

Actually, he's due for a bunch to fall, which might explain why, when I started to ask Starling Marte about his best bud, he quickly interjected, "You'll see. You'll see."

I'm confident we will.

But the confidence that counts is Polanco's, and I'm going to speculate here about what might have set it astray this time: After that opening week, opposing pitchers began to work around him. Way around him. And at the outset, that was cool with him because he and Marte had both spoken in the spring about being more patient. But when it kept occurring, when he was seeing maybe one or two hittable pitches in a given night, he began getting frustrated. And I'm not guessing at that because he told me so, often in uncomfortable language. It really got to him, and he started expanding his strike zone, lunging at garbage. Which, in turn, injected hitches in an already long swing.

He and Jeff Branson, the hitting coach he trusts implicitly, have been working on repairing that swing in the cages, both indoors and outdoors. But it still isn't reporting for work.

Twin that with Austin Meadows arriving from Indianapolis absolutely ablaze, and now another element's added.

Meadows has been wonderful, of course, opening his big-league career 15 for 33 with three home runs and, yeah, another fine showing Sunday at 2 for 3 with an RBI and steal. His slash line of .455/.441/.848 makes for a 1.290 OPS that should have him enshrined in Cooperstown by, oh, mid-July?

That has some clamoring for Meadows to play every day, which is understandable. And since Marte and Corey Dickerson are the Pirates' top two hitters, some of that clamoring also has Polanco getting benched or even demoted to the minors.

The latter sentiment is so ignorant of modern statistics that it's insane, but Huntington still admirably answered a question on the subject Sunday: "Polanco isn't going to get better facing Triple-A pitching. Tyler Glasnow wasn't going to get better pitching against Triple-A hitting because they can't hit his mistakes."

Right. That and so much more.

As I wrote in a column last week, keeping Meadows and a four-man outfield was ideal. It was heartening to hear Clint Hurdle announce two days later the Pirates would be doing exactly that. There will be ample at-bats for the kid. Marte's never been an iron man. Dickerson's never topped 110 games in his career and, last season with the Rays, plunged after the All-Star break. And Polanco ... we're seeing that right now.

Not to mention Meadows is due for one whale of a correction himself. That slash line up there isn't a misprint: His batting average is higher than his on-base percentage. That's because he hasn't walked once. Opponents will see him now, study him, and he'll have to bounce back from his own struggles when they do.

Polanco can still get better. He's 27, which generally is when a player's set, but there are exceptions. And Polanco's natural talent, as we've all witnessed, is exceptional.

“There are a lot of guys around our game that have made some late-20s pushes to become much better players or to reach what they were supposed to be in their early 20s," Huntington said, again referring to Polanco. "We’ve had success with guys having bounce-backs. We’ve had success with guys taking the next steps in their career. Our challenge is always: When do you recognize it may not happen? Because you don’t want to have it happen somewhere else.“

My own thoroughly unsolicited advice for Polanco?

Watch the other outfielders and learn a little from each.

Marte's benefited big-time from his newfound patience. He's staying true to his zone. He's hammering what shows up there, ignoring the rest. And when he does have a bad swing or two — he had a couple doozies Sunday — he's unfazed. Maybe working a walk isn't so bad.

Dickerson's approach is pretty much nuts, with all his different hand positions on the bat and his choke-up in two-strike counts. Maybe not everything in a swing has to be so mechanical, so precise.

Even Meadows, new as he is, can offer a glimpse into that similarly spectacular start Polanco had when he first showed up in Pittsburgh "looking like he'd invented the game," as Hurdle has described it.

No need to reinvent anything here.

MATT SUNDAY GALLERY