Here’s the Thing about Trevor Plouffe: He’s Pretty Good, Actually

Plouffe ranked 10th in Zach Sanders’ third base rankings.

A pleasant development in another otherwise-dreary Minnesota Twins season was the rounding into form of Trevor Plouffe. In fact, Plouffe’s +3.5 WAR this year isn’t only easily his finest season, it actually pushes him to just +3.1 for a career mark.

Or in other words, he was below zero prior to this season.

The funny thing is, without digging a bit deeper, Plouffe’s 2014 doesn’t look wildly different from what he has done before.

Plouffe hit .258/.328/.423, good for a .331 wOBA which rates him 11th among qualified third basemen, behind Aramis Ramirez but ahead of guys like Pablo Sandoval, Evan Longoria, Chase Headley, David Wright, Nick Castellanos and Xander Bogaerts.

But Plouffe’s career mark is .245/.309/.415, and he’s actually slugged much higher than .423 before — .455 in 2012 — so what’s the big deal about this year that has made him so much better? Well, part of it is defense, which quite frankly we don’t care much about here. Well, that’s not entirely true. We should care about defense as a function of if Plouffe can stick at third long-term, which was never believed to be the case for a number of reasons prior to this season.

A big part of it was Miguel Sano’s impending promotion, which seems to be still about a year off, and perhaps not even at third base. Sano was always going to be interesting at the hot corner given his size and consistency issues. But Plouffe’s emergence could allow the Twins to move the beast elsewhere, including first base — if Joe Mauer can play elsewhere — designated hitter, or as Terry Ryan ever so briefly hinted this offseason, the outfield.

Yikes.

But again all we really care about is where Plouffe plays, because his bat profiles much better at third than in the outfield. The gap isn’t as big as you’d think, though. Third basemen on the whole had a .316 wOBA this year, while outfielders checked in at .319. And Plouffe, by all accounts, improved drastically defensively at third base this year.

Plouffe’s biggest gains offensively came in two places. First was the walks, where he set a career-high with a 9.1 percent walk rate. “I’ve just worked on letting the ball get deeper,” Plouffe told me in late April, “and not being afraid to get beat by a good fastball.”

It was something that showed in Plouffe’s early season batted-ball rates as well, as he was racking up more hits to the opposite field than in the years before. Plouffe didn’t sustain that all year, but did have more well-struck balls the other way — eight opposite field doubles compared to just five (with a home run) in 2013 — and it appears the discipline was more permanent than the oppo pop. By monthly walk rate, Plouffe’s best months were April and September, though there was a pretty significant drop in the middle, almost exactly like a valley between two peaks which no doubt coincided with some of his worst offensive months of the season. Plouffe’s ‘best’ OPS in those lean months was .640, which seems to draw an obvious tie to discipline — or at the very least limiting strikeouts — as a big part of his game.

The other thing Plouffe was able to do for the first time in his big league career was hit righties. No, Plouffe wasn’t nearly as good against righties — .249/.318/.420 — as lefties — .278/.353/.430 — but for the first time he managed to at least show a pulse against them. In 2013, Plouffe hit just .240/.290/.373 against them. In 2012, .232/.285/.406. But by basically putting up his current career line against righties, Plouffe finally was able to look like a better rounded, competent big league hitter for the first time perhaps ever, especially when considering how much of his 2012 line is buoyed by arguably the most ridiculous power hitting stretch we have seen in the past five years.

Admittedly, Plouffe’s good season sort of snuck up on me. When he was hit by a pitch and broke his arm in the final days of the season, it was at that time that you really stop and look at his season line and realize that he was having quite a nice year, especially thanks to his very good August and September numbers.

There’s no real telling if the walk rate is for real; it waxed and waned in 2014 but held a pretty good correlation with when he was productive and when he wasn’t. And that doesn’t appear to be lost on him either.

Sanders’ rankings pegged him as a $7 player this past season, and honestly I think you can probably get him for close to that this year. I don’t think there’s a lot of buzz around him, and that’s probably fair since a number of his improvements don’t help 5×5 leaguers much, for instance, but I think he could probably be a pretty good bet to repeat the batting average, and 14 home runs is by no means his ceiling. In terms of raw power, there is plenty here. In fact he led third basemen this year with 40 doubles, so some variance could get him back in the 20 home run range, a mark only five third sackers reached this season.

Plouffe isn’t going to be a superstar, and if he regresses against righties might again be a platoon bat, but I still think given the third base landscape you can do a lot worse.