With the 2024 season now blessedly just days away, it’s time to look at a player who is perhaps being taken for granted this spring. Kerry Carpenter followed Spencer Torkelson and Riley Greene to the major leagues late in 2022, and so far has surpassed them both with a very nice full season debut in 2023. Carpenter’s dangerous bat remains his calling card, but it’s the secondary parts of his game that offer room for improvement this season.
By now, Carpenter’s story is well known. A 19th rounder back in 2019, the corner outfielder came out of nowhere with a monstrous 2022 campaign in the upper minors after re-making his swing with Aaron Judge’s swing coach, Richard Schenck. He debuted with six home runs in a 31 game look at major league pitching that summer and then hit 20 in 2023 despite missing a quarter of the season with a shoulder injury suffered at the end of April.
The Tigers hung in there for a few weeks without him, but as Riley Greene and Eduardo Rodriguez joined him on the injured list in late May, the club went into a tailspin, losing nine straight to open the month of June and putting themselves out of the running for the division early. Perhaps some solace and hope for 2024 can be found in the fact that the Tigers were five games over .500 from that point on. Hence the urgency to get out to a better start this year and give their young talent time to settle in and hopefully propel them to a playoff berth. The Tigers need their best hitters to carry them early on for that to become a reality, but this is still a relatively unproven heart of the order.
Carpenter is two years older than Spencer Torkelson, and three older than Riley Greene. So far he’s been the most consistent offensive performer of the trio, and while they’re still expected to get better, Carpenter is into his prime years. Yet his aggressive approach at the plate and platoon tendencies have him valued the least of the three. His game probably isn’t going to change radically at this point. With Mark Canha in the mix, Carpenter will sit some against left-handed pitching but should again be an above average hitter this season.
Opponents didn’t really change their approach against Carpenter much over the course of the 2023 season as he continued to do damage. He returned to action from the shoulder injury in June and raked until the All-Star break. He cooled down in July but was again red hot in August, hitting .347 with nine home runs on the month. Finally in September, pitchers started mixing in a few more sliders, particularly first pitch, but while he struggled over the final few weeks of the season the overall ratio of pitch types he saw didn’t change that much. Maybe he just ran out of gas a little bit.
Pitchers may adjust more this season, but fortunately for Carpenter, his strength matches up very well with what most major league pitchers are basing their approach on these days. When he’s on, Carpenter is a bit of an antidote to the riding fourseamers and flat attack angles approach. He does plenty of damage on fastballs overall, but he’s particularly adept at hammering fourseamers and can handle them up in the zone. He also hits cutters and changeups really well, while splitters and sliders are more his weakness. Still, Carpenter hit 10 home runs against fastballs last year, and five apiece against breaking balls and offspeed pitches. You can attack him down and in with sliders if you can get ahead in the count, but he’ll put a hurting on a poorly located breaking ball too.
The big flaw with Carpenter as a hitter is that he will chase out of the zone quite a bit. His 37.5 percent O-swing rate last year is almost 10 percent worse than league average. As a result his strikeout rate remains above average. His affinity for the letter high fastball makes him a little vulnerable to chasing fastballs up and away. He has some power the opposite way, staying on his back side well and driving fastballs and changeups away to left field, so he’s not afraid to try and drive those pitches, but that can be exploited by pitchers with good fastballs who can expand the zone to get chases. The other good attack point for right-handed pitchers is under his hands. Like many left-handed power hitters, he has a hard time laying off anything that starts in his sweet spot and gets under his bat path.
So, it’s a bit of a streaky profile. Carpenter puts a lot of balls in the air with authority, and when he’s driving them into the gaps and the seats it’s great. When he’s off balance, striking out more and lifting a lot of routine fly balls, he can go pretty cold. He’s not going to work a bunch of walks and he isn’t going to turn into a contact hitter to balance out his production.
Carpenter hit for zero power against left-handers in 2023, though that wasn’t the case for him in the minor leagues, and so he’ll give way to Canha sometimes. However, while he may be unlikely to hit .278 again without a real change in his profile, we’re not too concerned about his ability to handle his part of the offense. It’s just not easy to forecast him getting much better as a hitter either. His .338 BABIP last year says he’s more likely to regress a little offensively than improve. But he should hit for a similar amount of power either way.
What would really help Carpenter turn into a complete player who is hard to take out of a game is to improve his defense and baserunning.
Despite the fact that he’s 26 years old now, it still feels like Carpenter’s athleticism hasn’t been unlocked throughout the rest of the game beyond the batter’s box. He doesn’t have Matt Vierling’s sprint speed or throwing arm, to mention another Tiger that seems to get less out of his physical tools that he could, but Carpenter is well above average in both respects. Yet he graded out at -1 Outs Above Average (OAA) and -2 Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) last season. Likewise, his baserunning was just average per Statcast’s metrics. That’s certainly not bad, it’s just that for a player with good foot speed and a strong throwing arm, he’s not providing any added value in those parts of the game.
Kerry Carpenter is fine as he is, of course. Something roughly like his 2023 campaign would be plenty. It’s just a plus that he still seems like a player that could sand a few rough edges from his game. Either way, he’s going to start either in right field or as the designated hitter in most games. And when he sits against a lefty starter, AJ Hinch has a good weapon to insert for a high leverage at-bat late in the game.
His breakout over the past two years has made Kerry Carpenter a crucial piece of the puzzle for the Tigers. The core group wouldn’t be nearly as far along otherwise. As he winds down a nice spring camp, Carpenter looks like a piece they can depend on and hopefully build upon in 2024. And maybe he’s still got another level yet to unlock in his game.