Spencer Torkelson looks to broaden his game after his 2023 breakout

Angst over Spencer Torkelson in the fanbase reached a fever pitch around May 31 of last year, when Riley Greene went down with what was initially feared to be a stress fracture of his fibula. Eduardo Rodriguez hit the injured list with a ruptured ligament in his finger. Kerry Carpenter was still weeks from returning to action. The Detroit Tigers season went into a death spiral as they lost nine games in a row.

After an unnerving rookie season where Torkelson looked somewhat overmatched for a highly touted first baseman, he hit a combined four home runs with a .237 average and 89 wRC+ mark from Opening Day to the end of May. We continued to point to ample signs that Torkelson was hitting into a lot of bad luck for the amount of hard contact he was producing, but dingers don’t lie, and there weren’t many of them for a player drafted to be an elite power hitter. With the team coming unglued, frustration with the former first overall pick started to boil.

Torkelson didn’t exactly flip the switch at that point either, but the pull field power the Tigers were waiting for finally started to show up more and more. A three homer series on the road against the Texas Rangers in late June seems as good as anything to call a turning point. He hit 23 home runs in 83 games the rest of the way, posting an .850 OPS and a 130 wRC+. Not earth shaking stuff for a first baseman, but good consistent power production.

Offseason work eventually paid off. Torkelson got his timing dialed in and he was able to stay back and turn on more pitches on the inner half. The low chase rates, plus batspeed and power potential always indicated he’d get to mashing, which is why we remained optimistic about him, and once he started pulling more fly balls, the home runs started to pile up.

The question facing Torkelson in his third season as the Tigers everyday third baseman, is how to sustain that success and build on it. Hitting 40 home runs would qualify, but there are also some small things he do to make himself a lot more valuable to the Tigers.

Get on base

The obvious general flaw with Torkelson’s offense game remains his low on-base percentage. At this point, I’m reasonably convinced of his ability to hit for good power numbers, but without more hits and walks overall, he remains a fairly underwhelming first baseman. Things improved last year as the season progressed, but he still finished with a weak .313 OBP overall. Hitting .233 with just average strikeout and walk numbers will do that to you.

Torkelson’s chase rate was pretty average. His contact rate was average. Swinging strike rate, called strike rate, swing percentage, outside the zone contact percentage. All almost exactly average across the board. That’s just not quite the highly disciplined, elite power hitter the Tigers were betting on.

I think it’s a good bet that things are going to improve in the strikeouts and walks department. Right now he’s basically an average major league hitter in terms of walks and strikeouts, but with better than plus power added. The trick is leveraging that power and the pressure it puts on pitchers to draw more walks and collect a few more hits. Things trended that way once he finally found his groove in late June, but it was still solid year at the plate than a good one by first base standards.

The big improvement for Torkelson over his rookie campaign was that he finally got on time with the fastball consistently, and made it a lot more dangerous for pitchers to attack him on the inner edge. He stayed on his back side better, he was balanced and shorter to the ball, and suddenly by June he was catching more fastballs out in front and hammering them in the air to the pull side.

As a result he hit .270 against fastballs, putting 17 of them into the seats while slugging .497. He posted a .368 wOBA, and as it has consistently throughout his short career, Statcast’s expected metrics say the amount and quality of contact he produced should’ve brought better results. His expected wOBA based on those measures was a whopping. 409. In his rookie year, he hit just .223 against fastballs and slugged a miserable .371.

Tork’s 31 homers trailed only Matt Olson, Peter Alonso, and Christian Walker among 25 qualified first baseman. In terms of overall production though, Torkelson was just middle of the pack. If he can carry that power production through a full season and hit 40 homers, there probably won’t be many complaints about a modest batting average. But with an average amount of balls in play, and hard hit rates well beyond league averages, you’d still hope that more hits start getting through and dropping in for him. This is why batting average is a fickle thing on which to evaluate players except over long stretches of time. Statcast’s expected stats continue to suggest that will happen.

If you’re feeling a little lukewarm, we might suggest watching a quick cut of all 31 home runs last year.

Torkelson developed into a more dangerous fastball hitter in 2023, but while he mashed his share of poorly located breaking balls, overall he hit fourseam fastballs, mashed a fair share of hanging breaking balls, was okay against sinkers and twoseamers, and really struggled with offspeed stuff. More right-handers developing sweepers doesn’t really bode well for him either as pitches moving more horizontally are not his bread and butter.

Torkelson is pretty capable of taking fastballs hard the opposite way, and it’s not like he’s a simple, grooved swing, three true outcomes type of slugger. But he’s a mediocre bad ball hitter and doesn’t have the lower half to adjust to pitches down and away at the edges of the zone. His strength against fourseamers will also leave him vulnerable to chasing some fastballs up at the letters. So the path to improvement remains staying disciplined and using his power threat to his advantage knowing that pitchers are going to be a little more careful with him this season. He can’t indulge them by expanding his personal hot zones until he has two strikes on him. Expecting him to become a significantly more complete contact hitter probably isn’t in the cards. And as long as the power flows, that’s not a problem.

Torkelson is 24 years old now, in his mid-20’s and working into his prime years. It’s a pretty good bet that his solid eye and growing intimidation factor are going to lead to a little better strikeout and walk numbers as he gains experience. If he can build even a little more on his second half rampage, the Tigers are going to be plenty happy with him. Just don’t expect too much more.

Defense

The other thing that could help Torkelson overall is to improve his defensive play. With the changes in the shift and the rules designed to increase stolen bases, overall defensive ability and savvy at the first base position has increased quite a bit in importance. He’s focused on that this spring as part of his development plans.

Occasionally, Torkelson is going to misplay a ball. He’s never been a very natural corner infielder, but he’s also clearly put a lot of work in and in most respects looks like a solid first baseman. All first basemen have to pick a lot of balls out of the dirt, so that skill sometimes gets over-rated, especially when it’s Javier Báez throwing it in the dirt, but Torkelson does scoop pretty well. He’ll inexplicably whiff an average grounder once in a while, but for the most part he makes the routine plays and works around the bag well with runners on.

The one glaring issue for him last year was his range to his right. Torkelson and the Tigers argue that was more about the reduced shifts. First baseman didn’t have a second baseman in shallow right field to cover a huge swath of territory, and so they needed to be more aggressive on the balls they could get to, and pay even closer attention to where their second baseman was positioned in relation. He’s going to have to play those balls more aggressively and trust his pitchers to cover. We had one example already on Opening Day, although it wasn’t exactly a bad play. More a model of the type of play Torkelson needs to improve on.

The soft grounder below was really in no man’s land based on the defensive positioning and the speed of Luis Robert. The ball barely had the juice to get to the dirt before Keith got to it and couldn’t barehand the ball. It was too late by that point anyway as Robert was cruising down the line as usual.

However, this is the type of play where Torkelson cost himself in terms of defensive value last season. And it’s less a matter of pure defensive ability than just being more aggressive in playing the ball and not immediately being in a rush to break for first base to take a throw. Particularly with Colt Keith’s range being below average, Torkelson is just going to have to go after everything to his right when Keith is playing close to second base. It’s on the pitcher to win the race to the bag and be able to take a throw.

Torkelson also picked a one-hopper well and overall had a good game defensively. Probably they just weren’t going to make this play, so I’m not trying to crush him for one play that wasn’t likely going to be an out no matter what. It’s just a split second decision and Torkelson didn’t read how soft the contact was and broke for first base immediately. He should probably never break for first base quickly on a ball to his right unless he knows his second baseman is further away from second base. He was the only one who was going to make the play. Once the ball is past Skubal he’s always going to go straight to the bag. And if it was hit harder than Torkelson judged initially, it was going through the infield anyway. So he had everything reason to play it aggressively and hope Skubal was there.

His career isn’t going to be defined in any significant way by his defensive work, but even with the modest skills he has, there are ways he can improve without suddenly developing quicker reaction times and softer hands.

Final analysis

All the evidence from 2022 convinced me last spring that Torkelson would be just fine, and he is fine. Predictive metrics and confidence in a player’s makeup go a long way. And those metrics continue to say he’s going to have seasons where a few more balls drop for hits, and few more go over the fence. At this point it’s easy to be confident that Torkelson will give you average or slightly better production at first base for years to come.

The issue is obviously that Spencer Torkelson wasn’t drafted first overall to be an average first baseman. A spring camp in which he was again late quite a bit on fastballs didn’t really lend credence to hopes that he’s about to level up into one of the better power hitters in the game. However, he’s still young and with his feet on firmer ground after an pretty encouraging sophomore season, we’ll continue to bet that he can refine some of the rough edges from his game and become a more consistent force.