A.J. Pollock feels urgency to win with Diamondbacks

A.J. Pollock understands the dynamics at play. He knows the clock is ticking.

Experience has given him perspective, but the time he needed to gain it cannot be wound back. He can see the sand disappearing from the hourglass for the Diamondbacks’ current core of players. He wants them to take advantage of what remains.

“Anytime you go out and don’t make the playoffs and don’t give yourself a chance, it’s a missed opportunity,” Pollock said. “You start reflecting on, personally, your career. And having been with this organization on the big-league club – this will be my fifth year – there’s only so many opportunities you get.

“They (the front office) are the ones who will say how many chances we get before they make changes, but, yeah, there’s a sense of urgency, I feel like. We really want to do well. We got our butts kicked last year.”

If there was any doubt about Pollock’s importance to the Diamondbacks, it was erased last April when, in an exhibition game three days before the start of the season, he shattered his elbow after sliding home.

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The injury cost him nearly five months, and the Diamondbacks’ season spiraled away from them. It wasn’t the only reason the team underperformed, but Pollock’s absence seemed to suck the life out of a club with enormous expectations.

“We didn’t have our All-Star center fielder,” third baseman Jake Lamb said. “The division we play in, especially with the fields we play in with huge outfields, we have a guy who is a Gold Glove center fielder, a .300 hitter. His bat, his baserunning ability. And he’s another leader on the team. We didn’t need (the injury) to reinforce that. He’s really, really good.”

What Pollock learned from last season was the importance of health, something he said he had never thought much about before he got hurt.

Pollock is healthy again. He said he had a more diverse offseason workout regimen than ever before, and he says he feels like a “more well-rounded athlete” than in the past. The differences, he says, are tangible, though perhaps hard to put into words.

“The way my body is moving now is cleaner and more athletic,” he said. “It just feels really, really good.”

Pollock was surprised by the stir he generated earlier this month when he posted to Instagram the time he and his wife, Kate, needed to climb the Echo Canyon trail at Camelback Mountain: 27 minutes, 20 seconds. He said he wasn’t trying to brag; he was curious how it compared. The online masses gave him an answer, though Pollock isn’t exactly buying it.

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“We’re pretty fit people, and I don’t think we can beat that time by more than a minute or so,” he said. “But people have let me know that that time is not very good. Some people are telling me they’re beating it by 10 minutes. I’d like to see that.”

When Pollock has been on the field, few players have been more productive. In 915 at-bats since the start of 2014, he owns a .308/.361/.493 batting line. His total production is captured in his Wins Above Replacement, a stat that attempts to encapsulate his total contributions.

Over the past three seasons, he has averaged an astonishing 8.1 WAR per 650 plate appearances; for context, that number has been reached by a position player only six times – twice by the Angels’ Mike Trout, the clear-cut best player in baseball – in the past three seasons.

But, fluky as the injuries may be, Pollock has missed substantial chunks of time in two of the past three seasons. In 2014, he was out three months with a broken hand. And last year, after returning from the elbow injury on Aug. 26, he went down a couple of weeks later, missing the final 22 games with a groin injury.

“That’s the thing that crushed me was just not being able to be out there,” Pollock said. “You can’t really do anything. You can’t be a leader. You do as much as you can to support your team because you’re not going through the grind, you’re not going through the same struggles, you’re not going through the same mental things unless you’re out there. I really, really want to stay out there. I want them to have the option to put me out there every single day.”

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Pollock is 29. He has two seasons to go before he hits free agency. But he is not naïve; he knows the club’s core might not have two years to show it ought to remain intact. And he says that urgency isn’t lost on some of his teammates, either.

“You do think about it,” he said. “A lot of guys – we’re talking about it. I think the best record I’ve been a part of on this team is 81-81. We really, really want to do well. We’ve got a lot of work to do, obviously.”

Pollock has never played in the postseason. Teammate Paul Goldschmidt has reached the playoffs only once, during his rookie season in 2011. Pollock says that only serves to heighten the potential meaning of postseason baseball for them.

“It would be really special,” Pollock said. “You never know what’s going to happen. Stuff happens, it’s a business. We’ve been around some really special people in this organization. It would be really special to come together and really do something with the team we’ve got.”

Reach Piecoro at (602) 444-8680 or nick.piecoro@arizonarepublic.com. Follow him on Twitter @nickpiecoro.