Getting to know Jorge Polanco

Jorge Polanco’s career in baseball officially started when he signed with the Twins as an international free agent out of the Dominican Republic back in 2009. Five years later, in his age-20 season, Polanco made his major league debut with Minnesota.

Over the course of that first season in 2014 and the 2015 season, Polanco made just 20 total plate appearances at the major league level. But after starting the 2016 season with the Twins’ Triple-A affiliate in Rochester, he got called up to the big leagues twice and wound up sticking the second time. He wound up getting 270 plate appearances with the Twins that year while spending the vast majority of his time in the field at shortstop, and he hit .282/.332/.424 with a 101 wRC+.

In 2017, Polanco was the Twins’ starting shortstop out of the gate, and he played 133 games and made 544 plate appearances with a 90 wRC+. That was good enough for him to be worth 1.9 fWAR 1.4 bWAR.

During spring training in 2018, however, Polanco received an 80-game suspension after testing positive for the performance-enhancing substance Stanozolol. Because of that, he made his season debut in early July, and he finished the season with 333 plate appearances. He improved quite a bit upon his 2017 line in that half-season, hitting .288/.345/.427 with a 111 wRC+.

Polanco remained with the Twins for another five seasons after that, he hit .267/.333/.458 with a 116 wRC+ and a total of 89 home runs, 33 of which he hit in a very good 2021 season that saw him finish with a 124 wRC+ and a career-best 4.0 fWAR. He made the All-Star team once, in 2019, after a particularly great first half that saw him enter the break with an .882 OPS. He went on to finish that

Over the course of those five years, he moved off shortstop, too. The Twins played him at second base in 120 games and at short just 39 times in 2021, and in 2022, he only made six appearances at short as he spent the rest of his time in the field at second. And in 2023, Polanco again played primarily at second base, but he made 15 appearances at third base.

That 2023 season also saw Polanco miss chunks of time because of hamstring injuries, and he played just 80 games that year before the Twins traded him to the Mariners in the 2023-24 offseason. Things didn’t go particularly well for Polanco in Seattle in 2024, as he hit just .213/.296/.355 with 16 home runs, a 93 wRC+, and 0.3 fWAR. Aside from his typical handful of games at DH, he played second base exclusively for Seattle that season, and he had knee issues that saw him undergo surgery following the season. The Mariners declined their $12 million option on him for the 2025 season shortly thereafter.

Late in the offseason, though, Polanco wound up back with the Mariners on a one-year, $7 million deal that included a vesting player option for 2026. And he unsurprisingly declined the option after he had the best season of his career at the plate, hitting .265/.326/.495 with 26 home runs and a 132 wRC+. He played 38 games at second base and five at third—with one very brief appearance at first base that didn’t even log as one-third of an inning—while making 88 appearances as the Mariners’ designated hitter.

Defense has never been Polanco’s strong suit per the OAA metric over at Statcast. He’s consistently ranked in the lowest percentiles across the infield positions he’s played. Whether or not that means he can reasonably turn into a playable first baseman with the Mets over the next two seasons remains to be seen.

Zooming out a bit, Polanco has hit .263/.330/.442 with a 112 wRC+ in his major league career, and he’s hit 22 or more home runs in three single seasons: 2019, 2021, and 2024. It’s encouraging that he has a 117 wRC+ since the start of the 2021 season and only had a truly bad year once in those five seasons, but there’s at least a little risk in his bat. What he can do defensively is a bigger question, but if he can replicate his 2025 numbers at the plate, the 32-year-old would be just fine at DH. Among 23 qualified hitters who primarily served as designated hitters this year, Polanco ranked eighth.

And finally, Polanco stood out at times during the Mariners’ postseason run that saw them lose to the Blue Jays in seven games in the ALCS. It wasn’t a dominant postseason run for him, as he finished with a .208/.269/.417 line with three home runs and a double in 52 plate appearances. But his biggest contribution came in Game 2 of the ALDS when hit two solo home runs off Tigers ace Tarik Skubal, helping the Mariners win the game by a 3-2 score in a series that went five games and saw Seattle advance.