A lot has been made of Jorge Polanco's rough defense this season, and rightfully so. His fielding percentage was the worst of his career aside from 2018, where he only played about half of the innings. His 22 errors were second worst among shortstops only to Tim Anderson. I think 2020 holds an opportunity for improvement however, as Polanco recovers from injury and continues to develop defensively.

In some ways, Jorge Polanco's defense has already progressed. Defensive metrics are far from a perfectly understood science, but Polanco graded out positively in defensive runs saved for the first time since his debut season which only included 12 innings played at the shortstop position. I believe this may be a result of simple defensive positioning as we see shifts become more prevalent in baseball. The data becoming available also allows the Twins to line Polanco up efficiently to complement Sano's range inefficiencies at 3B. While I believe these statistics could continue to evolve and allow for even more improvement to Polanco's defense in 2020, I'm confident that there's more to his possible improvement up the middle.

You may have forgotten, but Polanco's status coming into 2019 was in question. So much so in fact, that The Twins flew Ronald Torreyes to the Twin Cities for opening day in case Polanco wasn't ready to play. He came out of spring training with what was described as "shoulder fatigue".

The reason I looked back on this was because Polanco's defensive struggles had a lot to do with his arm in 2019. Of Polanco's 22 errors, 13 of them were misfires on throws. Despite his career long struggles at shortstop, this was the first time throwing errors have made up such a significant percentage of Polanco's mistakes. As we know, Polanco was ready to play on opening day and went on to grind out 142 games at shortstop. While Polanco was on the field more consistently than most of our lineup, there's no way that he didn't struggle through an undisclosed injury or two throughout the year. I'd guess he played through the remnants of his shoulder fatigue to start the year, and it's certainly possible that he had it pop up again later on. This could have easily accounted for some of the many throws in the dirt we saw in 2019. Perhaps a spring without shoulder troubles is results in less throwing errors in 2020.

Polanco's ankle surgery at the end of 2020 also shouldn't be swept under the rug.

An ankle impingement for a shortstop could be debilitating when pivoting and shifting directions. We don't really know how long this ankle had hampered Polanco's play. Several defensive metrics were the worst Polanco has had in recent years when you would think that a 26 year old would still be athletic and improving at his position. Ultimate zone rating (UZR) is a Fangraphs metric that essentially cuts the playing field into "zones" and assigns that zone to a corresponding position player to cover. Polanco saw his UZR drop to -9.1, suggesting Polanco was atrocious at covering the the full range of an average shortstop. While still below average, his -3.9 in 2018 and -4.7 in 2017 (his last full season at shortstop) were much better than this season when I would have expected him to have improved. He improved this metric each year from 2016-2018. Could a bum ankle have quietly effected Polanco's range in 2019?

Baseball is an unpredictable game. Defensive metrics are far from perfect and can commonly vary from year to year. Injuries can appear seemingly out of nowhere and can linger until properly addressed. Polanco appears to be on track for spring training in 2020 and will hopefully open the year healthy as opposed to 2019. With his physical issues addressed and the stats department ever improving, might we see a surprisingly strong showing from our shortstop in 2020?