"Jose Tabata has a big league bat capable of Manny Ramirez type numbers."
That's a quote from a scouting report on Tabata from 2007. Coming up, nobody really knew what to make of Tabata's power potential, but most scouts realized that it was certainly there. Now he's played 193 big league games and has just eight home runs. A career .284/.348/.383 triple-slash line is far from Manny Ramirez comparison, but fortunately Tabata is far from fully developed at the ripe age of 23.
So will Tabata develop more power in the next few years? Yeah, almost certainly, the question is how much more. Here's Tabata's spray charts from the previous two years:
When Tabata goes deep, he often goes really deep. Last year he hit home runs with distances of 401, 387, 417, and 411 chronologically. You can see from the graph that he also has some opposite field power.
There's no doubt that Tabata has power in that bat, he just doesn't seem to be able to use it very frequently. That could be because he has fallen into a lead-off man approach and isn't trying to drive the ball, which is probably the best thing for the team. Tabata shouldn't be up at the plate looking to drive the ball out of the ballpark all the time, he needs to be an on-base guy for the Pirates. However, I can see Jose hitting a larger volume of taters in the future.
If you look at his Isolated Power Percentages (click here for an explanation of the statistic), you may be a little less optimistic. Here's a graph, compliments of yours truly.
The ISO has been dropping since he got in the big leagues. Last year he hit three of his four home runs in April but then didn't hit another until August. He missed a good amount of time in there as well which hurt his power productivity, but there was still basically no power in Tabata's bat last year, posting his second lowest ISO of his career.
It's safe to say that Tabata is never going to put up "Manny Ramirez type" power numbers, but it's certainly not a stretch to say that this guy could hit 10-15 home runs a year in the future. That would certainly be a welcomed addition to the Pirates outfield, since right now they have three speed guys without a ton of power (although Andrew McCutchen certainly looks to be a 20+ home run a year guy from here on out). I would probably rather see Tabata keep a high batting average and focus more on contact than developing his power, but again, I won't complain if he hits for more power this year and beyond.
In conclusion, I think Tabata definitely has the ability to hit 15 or so home runs a year, but I don't think he ever will just because of the approach he'll have as a lead off hitter. I definitely expect to see more than four from him this year, I'll go ahead and put him in the 8-12 home run per year range for the rest of his career.