The 2024 season is nearly upon us so it’s time to take a look at perhaps the key member of the Detroit Tigers youthful core. Patrolling left field on most nights will be the 23-year-old left-handed outfielder the Tigers selected with the 5th overall pick in 2019. Ever since he was drafted out of Hagerty High School, Riley Greene has carried with him a fairly lofty set of expectations. Immediately landing among the top 50 prospects in baseball and gradually ascending into the top 5 prospects with plus grades on most of his skills, Greene was quickly viewed as the next face of the franchise for Detroit. Riley certainly has the tools to step into the void Miggy left behind, but he will need to put everything together to do it in 2024.
As stated above, Riley will be just 23 years old in the 2024 season, and this is perhaps the most important thing to remember in this preview. He is still young among his MLB peers as he enters his third MLB season. This fact can easily be forgotten.
Greene made it to the major leagues with only one season of pro ball out of high school after COVID wiped out his 2020 full-season debut. He started right at Double-A in 2021 and quickly advanced to Triple-A that same summer. Despite only 800 plate appearances in pro ball right out of high school, Greene was slated to debut at the beginning of the 2022 season, but a broken foot from a foul ball at the end of Spring Training delayed his debut till mid-June of that year. In 2023, he missed all of June with a stress reaction in his left leg, and then in September he landed awkwardly on a diving catch and injured his non-throwing right elbow, requiring Tommy John surgery in the offseason.
As a result, he has yet to log over 418 plate appearances in a major league season. He still only has about 1800 pro plate appearances in total, which is a fairly common standard for prep picks before they even debut at the major league level. Simply staying healthy for an entire season will be an accomplishment for the Tiger’s young star outfielder, but it’s well worth noting that he’s really just getting started despite the fact that this is technically his third season.
Even in two abbreviated MLB seasons, Riley has put up some eye-popping numbers and he has proven he is quite capable of holding his own in the majors. He has an average walk rate and a slightly elevated strikeout rate but he’s put up above-average production according to his wRC+ marks while playing solid to above-average defense all over the outfield. Parker Meadows arrival will probably spell the end of his regular centerfield duties but his range will be a strong asset in Comerica’s massive left field. But what really gets fans and evaluators excited about Riley is his ability to square up the baseball and drive it as hard as all but the Aaron Judge’s of the MLB world.
For all the fanfare Spencer Torkelson’s sudden power barrage got last year, he still trailed Greene in max exit velocity and average exit velocity. Baseballs have nightmares about Riley Greene’s bat. Take one look at his Baseball Savant page and it’s hard not to grin seeing all the red numbers in his percentile rankings.
Boasting an 85th percentile exit velocity and 82nd percentile hard hit percentage, and coupling this with 64th percentile chase rate, it’s clear he has a good feel for the strike zone and excellent control of the bat to solidly square up pitches left over the dish.
The following two home runs are 112.6 mph off the bat on a fastball up out over the plate, and then 110.7 mph on a sweeper down and in. He’s dangerous just about everywhere in the strike zone. Greene’s max exit velocity in 2023 was 114.4 mph off the bat. Only 34 major league hitters posted a better top mark last year. On the Tigers, only Javier Báez, Matt Vierling, and Spencer Torkelson were close to that level of maximum juice off the bat.
Looking at his pitch group breakdown, Greene punished fastballs and breaking balls equally last year, struggling only with offspeed pitches, but he also saw those pitches the fewest. It’s also worth noting that while he hit just .213 against offspeed pitches and slugged a meager .311 against them, his expected slugging percentage on offspeed last year was still .486, so he’s not a safe out for pitchers with good changeups and splitters either. Make a mistake over the plate and see.
So simply throwing Greene sliders is a risky endeavor because he can lay off junk pitches and he can still get to pitches on the edge and he’ll punish hangers left over the dish. Trying to get his timing off the fastball with offspeed doesn’t work as he has the quickness to catch back up to high heat, and he does a fair amount of his damage on elevated fastballs.
He had a rather high .384 BABIP last year, but Statcast’s expected stats, have him grading out between 88th and 92nd percentile for hitting so it seems like he can sustain a high BABIP, partially because he just hits the ball so hard, so consistently. The feel for the barrel and lower half flexibility that evaluators raved about as a draft prospect has proved out in pro ball. He can barrel up pitches all over the zone with top-shelf authority.
Greene will chase breaking balls out of the zone a good amount, leading to some whiffs, but again because of the damage he is doing on ones that get too close or are hung, this doesn’t seem like a major issue either. His strikeout rate has been fairly high so far in his major league career, but he actually chases fewer pitches out of the zone than average. His swinging strike rate is a little high, but constantly blistering the ball when you’re not fooled covers for a fair amount of that, and again, this might just be where his lack of experience is still showing up. A little better two-strike approach may be all that’s really required.
Greene certainly does his best work over the middle two-thirds of the plate and up and in, but he’s only less dangerous on the outer third and with his arms extended consistently hits the ball hard out there as well. He doesn’t have an obvious hole in his swing so when you add it all up, he seems like a prime candidate for a breakout year as long as he can stay healthy. To get there, he needs to fix one annoying habit first.
Riley Greene: “Trying to get the ball in the air is my goal. I’m (expletive) tired of hitting the ball on the ground. I’m trying to get the ball in the air with pure spin, and hit it hard.” #Tigers https://t.co/VtR3ayGKJz
— Evan Petzold (@EvanPetzold) March 10, 2024
Perhaps his biggest Achilles heel is his struggle to lift balls in the air. He is working on lifting the ball and is clearly frustrated with his results so far in the big leagues. Against fastballs, his tendency to beat balls into the ground shows up to a frustrating degree. For fastballs located in the heart of the zone, where hitters should punish pitchers, he’s driving 36% of them into the ground and to the pull side. When he does go the opposite way, he’s getting more flyballs and singles and extra-base hits. Meaning, that when he can stay back, he’s finding success but when he’s out in front he’s getting himself out.
For a player like Riley, who possesses the best exit velocity and second-best hard-hit rate on the team, the frustrating contradiction that is his batted ball profile is palpable. This is a player who should be destroying pitchers who dare leave him offerings over the heart of the plate, yet he is brought down to earth thanks to a team-low launch angle. It also brings into focus his .384 BABIP and raises questions about how sustainable his profile is, surviving on hard contact and simply hitting grounders and liners hard enough that they get through the infield. It seems somewhat sustainable, but it’s time to start cashing in more of that raw power for power production. For those who follow these stats closely, the frustration can boil over as shown below.
How is it possible for Riley Greene- who has like an uppercut swing- to endlessly get fastballs at the letters and pound them straight into the ground. Feels like it violates the laws of physics. I can’t handle another year of him doing this. HIT IT IN THE AIR FOR THE LOVEOFGOD pic.twitter.com/a2zLNJzykl
— Robert James (@confusion_reign) March 10, 2024
Still, for all the legitimate concerns about his approach at the plate, he is young and thus he has time to figure out hitting in the big leagues. His natural gifts aren’t going away anytime soon and all it could take is for him to mentally flip the switch to put it all together and find a way to stay back on pitches and drive them in the air with authority. Should that happen, the sky is the limit for him. Most projection systems are still bullish on him for 2024, projecting him to hit up to 20 HRs with a 114 wRC + and a total projected fWAR of about 4.0 if he can actually play something like 150 or more games this season without another odd injury cropping up.
This feels like a safe floor for him if he can stay healthy for a full season. His ceiling though remains much higher. With his ability to produce consistent, loud contact all over the zone, it feels like a matter of time till it comes together for him. As Fangraphs noted upon his graduation from prospect status:
Greene’s swing is somehow lovely and ferocious at the same time. His odd gait belies his athleticism, which is most evident (and important) in the batter’s box, where he is a heart-of-the-order prodigy.
He is a special player who reached the big leagues at a relatively young age and he lost a significant amount of development time to the pandemic and the cancellation of an entire minor league season, and then to multiple injuries. So, patience is demanded with Riley because, despite his flaws, he is more than holding his own already and still has plenty of upside. Should the lightbulb suddenly turn on and everything comes together, he could very well cement himself as the next face of the Detroit Tigers. Only time will tell. For now, a full season of 2023 Riley Greene would do nicely while we wait for more.