There are a lot of numbers that go into the two-year deal the Mets have reportedly agreed to with former Mariners infielder Jorge Polanco, and we’ll get to a lot of them, but there’s absolutely only one place to start. It’s with his completely stunning drop in strikeout rate, which must be highlighted first, because everything flows from there.
If not exactly halved, it’s close enough. It was, by far, the biggest drop in strikeout rate last season, with a large gap between Polanco’s drop of 13.6 percentage points in first place and second-place Paul Goldschmidt’s drop of 7.8 points.
It’s also the biggest single-season strikeout drop on record. Ever. All-time.
Two winters ago, when we wrote about the large declines in strikeout rate from Ronald Acuña and Cody Bellinger in 2023, we were able to note that Acuña (second-best) and Bellinger (third-best) found themselves with two of the three largest year-to-year improvements in strikeout rate in history, behind only long-ago Baltimore shortstop Mark Belanger’s contact improvement way back in 1968-69.
Those two are third and fourth now. There’s a new leader. No one, at least among those with at 450-plus plate appearances in back-to-back years, has ever cut their strikeout rate by as much in one season as Polanco did from his first year with the Mariners to his second.
If somewhat biased toward 21st-century players – surely Ted Williams could never drop his strikeout rate by that much when he never struck out more than 10.5% of the time in a season, playing a completely different sport in the 1940s and ’50s – it’s still the biggest drop ever. While “the Blue Jays got to the World Series by striking out less than anyone else” was a massively overplayed storyline in October, given that the Toronto offense also started absolutely pounding the ball, making more contact is still generally a thing you’d prefer to do, if you can.
The “how,” then, is key. Polanco turns 33 next summer. The switch-hitter has appeared in parts of 12 seasons, debuting as a 20-year-old on the 2014 Twins. If there’s some kind of secret sauce that lets veterans make a ton more contact, you can be sure that everyone else in the sport would like to know what it is. So, then: What was it? Let’s give you a pair of reasons.
1) He’d already performed like this before.
Polanco has never been, say, Luis Arraez when it comes to the contact department, but he’s never been Joey Gallo, either. From 2014 through 2021, he had a very consistent – and better than Major League average – 16.7% strikeout rate. This is key: Contact isn’t a new, out-of-nowhere skill for him. It’s one had he had … until he didn’t.
That formerly good strikeout rate crept up in 2022 (21%), and a little more in 2023 (nearly 26%), and really peaked in 2024 (over 29%), where he posted one of the highest rates in the Majors. The trend was bad.
That Polanco did previously have such a good track record of contact could give you a little confidence that 2025’s rate wasn’t just a fluke; on the other hand, that was also a pretty disastrous trend for a hitter aging into his 30s, as well. How do you know which one to believe?
For one thing, the 2025 improvement has to be, at least in part, about improved health, particularly in his lower half. Polanco landed on the injured list multiple times in each of the previous three seasons due to various back, knee, and hamstring injuries. Last year, he avoided the IL entirely, despite some issues with a sore oblique, taking 524 plate appearances. It was his first time topping the 500 mark since 2021 – which, perhaps not so coincidentally, was the last year before his strikeout rate spiked.
In 2024, his left knee was such a problem that after playing through pain for much of the year, he underwent surgery to repair the patellar tendon soon after the season ended.
In addition to his generally below-average defense, the need for lower body health is likely why the Mets talk about him as a first base/DH player, despite his lack of experience at first. Once Minnesota’s regular shortstop, and originally advertised as entering 2025 as Seattle’s third baseman, an early-season bout of knee soreness ended that experiment quickly. Polanco spent much of his time as the Mariners’ DH, making only a handful of appearances at second base, in an attempt to keep him fresher. New York will likely do the same.
2) He made a major, major stance change.
“Getting healthy” is certainly nice, but lots of players get healthy and don’t perform differently. In Polanco’s case, what he changed was so huge and obvious that we were able to highlight it on April 3, barely a week into the season. After having one of the most open stances in the entire Majors in 2024, he’d closed it by so much in 2025 that it was essentially neutral, with a wider stance. He moved up four inches while doing it, too. While that was true from both sides of the plate, it was especially pronounced from the left side, as these Statcast graphics make exceptionally clear.
Whether because of health or the stance or both, it simply resulted in a different swing shape, and here are those numbers we promised you. (For simplicity, we’ll stick with his lefty swing here.)
It is, potentially, the best of both worlds, should Polanco’s knee allow him to keep this combination of “excellent contact” and “good power,” which is how he put up a season 32% better than average, comparable with better-known stars like Bo Bichette, José Ramírez, Fernando Tatis Jr., and Bobby Witt Jr.
But he’s been an above-average hitter in four of the last five seasons, too, excepting the 2024 year ruined by playing through knee pain. He just made the biggest year-to-year strikeout improvement we’ve ever seen, fueled not only by a return to previous form, but with clear and obvious changes in his swing.
If that doesn’t soothe the pain of Alonso’s departure, we’d get it. It’s still a really, really impressive feat.
