On the one hand, Colt Keith is having a truly awful go in his first six weeks against major league pitching. On the other, his strikeout to walk ratio remains well above average and he has a higher barrel percentage than Mookie Betts or Julio Rodriguez, or fellow rookie top prospcts like Jackson Chourio or Wyatt Langford. Ah baseball.
Still, it gets harder to defend a .152 batting average and a grisly 17 wRC+ now that we’re over a month into the season. The barrel rate thing is mainly just an example of small sample silliness, and the lack of utility with that particular statistic until we’re much deeper into the season. Keith doesn’t look overwhelmed. His swing decisions are still good and he’s making plenty of solid contact, if not enough of the hard hit variety.
There is good reason to look deeper into his at-bats than just the obvious, his numbers are terrible send him down, reaction. Keith is a key piece of the puzzle for the Detroit Tigers, not just now, but over the next decade. If he fizzles out, the club has problems well beyond plugging the hole for this season.
The Tigers struggle to develop hitters is a long-standing cloud over the organization, spanning multiple owners, team presidents and general managers. They have to get this right. The best thing for Keith is likely to let him work through this for a few more weeks. That may not be the best thing at this moment for winning games, but doing everything possible to help him develop as a hitter is far and away more important for the long-term health of the organization.
A close look at Keith’s at-bats shows a distinct case of hitting them where they are, and less hard contact than his minor league track record would suggest when adjusted for major league pitching. But it’s not as though he’s getting dominated out there and can’t put the ball in play with authority.
His expected batting average is .239, with an expected wOBA of .295. Instead he’s hitting .152, with a .193 wOBA. He’s certainly been unlucky on balls in play, but it’s also undeniable that he hasn’t done much damage at all. When you crush a ball to the pull field, batted ball luck goes out the window, and like Spencer Torkelson, Keith doesn’t have a home run yet. As they say, luck can’t touch a baseball that’s hit into the seats.
It can be hard to watch. For all those who watched Keith in the minor leagues or followed our reports and are used to missiles flying off his bat with regularity, it’s hard to watch him struggle. Still, at least we have a memory bank of big hits, great plate appearances, and tape measure home runs, like this one. It’s a lot easier to “trust the process,” when you’ve seen a lot of what Colt Keith is capable of at the plate.
For the overwhelming majority of fans who pay little attention to the minor leagues, Keith is just a name they’re vaguely familiar with, and their first look sees him struggling to adapt to the major league level and doing zero damage. Fans can be forgiven for wondering how this guy is ever going to be good when this is all they’ve really seen of him.
It’s probably instructive to listen to Tigers’ VP of player development, Ryan Garko on some of this. You can look around the game and see top tier hitting prospects of Keith’s caliber struggling as well. Jackson Chourio, Wyatt Langford haven’t done much either. As Garko, the man most directly responsible for developing the Tigers farm talent, said on Monday’s Days of Roar podcast, and Ken Rosenthal discusses in a new piece for The Athletic, the gap between the Triple-A level and the major leagues has never been wider.
This is the problem. It’s hard for even top shelf hitting prospects to immediately settle in when they make the jump. And it’s perhaps not so surprising that it’s some of the older prospects, like Wenceel Perez, who have struggled less with the adjustment. There’s just little substitute for major league pitching at the Triple-A level. They see good, hard-throwing pitchers there and at the Double-A level as they move up, but that’s only a relatively small amount of the pitching they face. At the major league level there are almost nothing but good pitchers with nasty, highly optimized stuff and game plans, and with the ability to locate to multiple parts of the strike zone.
There are a few reasons why the gap has grown so wide between Triple-A and the major leagues.
One key reason, is the overall contraction of the minor leagues. Ever since short season A-ball disappeared starting in the 2021 season, teams have had fewer options each summer as their new draft classes show up at team facilities. The new draft class, the latest crop of international free agents signed, all these guys need to play against age appropriate competition, but there’s one less level at which to deploy them. The result, is that players are moving up out of rookie ball faster than they once did. Often they’re seeing advanced pitching before they’re really ready for it, and adjustment periods seem longer now in the upper minors.
Another is the growing emphasis on stuff over command at the major league level. Particularly in the bullpen, teams are bringing up their nastiest, hard-throwing young arms and telling them to aim right down the middle and let their stuff play. Sure you have to be able to throw strikes and locate, but the precision that used to be required to make it as a MLB pitcher has been overwhelmed in importance to some degree by the hard stuff a lot of these guys are throwing. And hitters have to learn to react to it. It’s not that one kid who stood out from the last Double-A or Triple-A series you played, it’s just about all of them once you reach the majors.
Take this quote from Rosenthal’s article where J.D. Martinez, signed late in the spring by the Mets and requiring some Triple-A games to get up to speed, says that the little mini spring training camp with the Mets Triple-A affiliate is going well, but “I haven’t seen any velocity yet.”
“It’s hard to replicate the stuff up here. That’s why you see so many of these kids get called up and struggle,” Martinez said. “This is where the dawgs come. This is the big boy league.”
If you can throw enough strikes to move up to the upper levels of the farm, and you throw 95+ with good movement and a nasty secondary pitch, you’re not going to wait around in Triple-A very long. Pitching can be practiced whether a hitter is there or not, but for hitters, there’s no way to simulate the pitching and learn to react to it until they get to the major leagues and suddenly see precious few low 90’s fastballs, and plenty more triple digit ones. The adaptation in batspeed and efficiency required is difficult, even for someone with a quick bat and a really good eye, such as Colt Keith.
Another interesting wrinkle affecting player development is the ruleset at the Triple-A level now. In each six game series, they use the automated ball-strike calling system in three games. In the other three, a human umpire calls ball and strikes, but each team is issued three challenges using the ABS system.
The automated system makes for a tighter strike zone from side to side, but a little taller one as well. Those high corner strikes that never seem to be called in the major leagues get called consistently with the ABS system. And at least with the three challenge system days, hitters can get the more egregious calls overturned. They’re encouraged not to waste the teams challenges unless they’re quite sure or on a close call in a crucial pitch in a high leverage situation, but there’s still a greater sense that pitchers have to throw the ball over the plate more overall. In half their games, catcher framing can’t help you.
Another element involves the scheduling. Minor league teams now play one six-game series per week against the same team. The idea was to streamline travel and give them a more consistent schedule to adapt their routines to, but by the end of a series, they’re seeing the same relievers for the second and third time in a short span, giving them a big advantage in the weekend games where they may even see a starting pitcher twice. The Tigers have tried to avoid this by rarely letting the pitcher slated to throw on Tuesday make a full start on Sunday as well. They pitch one of the two games like a normal start, and in the other they may only face 10 hitters. Still the bullpens and spot starters have it tough.
This is all in favor of the hitters. The strike zone is tighter and more consistent most of the time. Six game series mean they may get the same non-prospect middle relievers pitching to them 2-3 times in a series. They can feast, draw their walks, and feel pretty good about things. Then, they graduate to the major league level and everything flips. Suddenly everything seems to favor the pitchers, and those pitchers are consistently among the best they’ve ever seen. It’s a difficult mental challenge as well as a physical one. You’re set up to fail, at least at first.
So the problem in prospect development and promotion with hitters becomes; if MLB pitching is so far removed from Triple-A pitching, how can you ever learn to hit MLB caliber pitching if not at the MLB level?
You see where I’m going here.
There’s a lot of angst about Colt Keith because his production has been extremely meager. But Keith is just 22 years old and only saw Triple-A pitching for 67 games last summer. He looked just about as ready as they get to move up and take on the major league challenge, and I’d argue that his excellent strikeout and walk numbers illustrate that he really isn’t overwhelmed in his process and approach so far this season. He’s overwhelmed by the consistent quality of the stuff.
Keith has the batspeed and eye to hit high velocity stuff. That much we’ve seen plenty of, but those hard throwing minor league pitchers weren’t the ones in command of an outstanding breaking ball and/or a changeup. You could gear up for their best stuff, and if that was the fastball, so be it. At the major league level, there’s always been an adjustment to knowing a major league pitcher can throw two good pitches for strikes, at a minimum. Solid MLB starters have at least three. Beyond them, you might see three plus or better pitches with good command AND the strike zone is not only bigger, but less consistently so.
There’s a lot to adapt to, and the key is getting the timing right where they’re dialed for fastball speed, but not selling out so hard in their swing that they can’t adapt to breaking balls and offspeed. Timing is the crucial factor here. Keith is making plenty of contact, but his feel for the barrel and overall timing are just not dialed in yet. Some bad batted ball luck isn’t helping him either, but there’s no debate that he’s struggling. He is, but that may be the only way to learn.
The same will be true for Triple-A prospects like Jace Jung, Justyn-Henry Malloy, Dillon Dingler, and Justice Bigbie. If Keith, with the longer term example of Spencer Torkelson looming as well, needs plenty of time to adapt, those other young prospects will likely need even more time, unless they get enough leash at the Triple-A level to get them as close as possible to major league readiness. And this is why you’re not going to see them rushed to the major leagues this spring, and why you probably won’t see the Tigers pull the ripcord on Keith anytime soon unless his process falls apart and he loses confidence.
Right now, his strikeout rate is 17.2 percent. Major league average is 22.4 percent. Unless the strikeout rate spikes to above average levels and Keith is really struggling mentally, there’s no point sending him down. He can’t learn to hit in the major leagues down there. The only reason to do it is to reset him mentally and give him a break.
Maybe that comes at the end of May if things don’t turn around, but don’t be surprised if the Tigers stick with him and simply give him extra off days even well into June before any decision to send him down comes through.
The Tigers long-term future is more important than finding some temporary mediocre replacement for Keith, and that long-term future requires that the Tigers develop Keith into a good major league hitter. As frustrating as that may be, for now that’s going to take priority over replacing him with whatever replacement they could patch together.