Minnesota Twins: What to do at shortstop without Jorge Polanco?

The Minnesota Twins have lost their starting shortstop for half the season. How can they replace him?

The Minnesota Twins found out on Sunday that their starting shortstop Jorge Polanco would be missing half the season after testing positive to a PED.

For those who aren’t familiar with the Minnesota Twins big finish to the 2017 season, the loss of Polanco may seem like a simple chip from an otherwise loaded roster. After all, he’s a career -13.2 UZR/150 on defense and 98 OPS+ with the bat, meaning he’s certainly below-average in career numbers in both.

Of course, that would miss how Polanco put in a ton of time with Twins coaches on the field and in the cage to improve, and he saw his defense get progressively better, to the point where he was graded with a 0.6 dWAR via Baseball Reference in the 2017 season and tapped into his instincts to get a positive range rating on Fangraphs with all of his other defensive metrics getting much closer to neutral.

Offensively, he made progress through the season, but on August 1, he truly took off with the bat. From August 1 to the end of the season, he hit .316/.377/.553 with 10 home runs and 7 stolen bases over just 55 games, becoming a catalyst for an entire Minnesota Twins team that took off in the month and pushed into a playoff spot.

Losing Polanco is definitely a hit to the Twins, so how should they best replace him while he’s out. We’ll look at four different options.

Next: Fill in from within the MLB roster