Detroit Tigers’ first baseman Spencer Torkelson was optioned to Triple-A back on June 3. So far, there has been nothing to suggest things have clicked for him at the plate. Maybe that’s for the best. Maybe just a quick fix isn’t the best thing for him. After a good night at the plate for the Triple-A Mud Hens, and a lengthy Scott Harris interview, the situation feels more clear than in did in early June.
In the simplest terms, Torkelson has really struggled with velocity in two of three seasons in his major league career. Because he had excellent batspeed and good plate discipline, this flaw wasn’t exploited much in college or even the upper minor leagues. Whatever you think of his swing or his approach, the struggle to handle velocity is the crux of the matter. How to help him solve his timing problems in ways that help him course correct his own path out of slumps over the rest of his career is the question.
In 2023, Torkelson posted a weighted runs created average (wOBA), of .374 against all pitches 95 mph or better. The league hit just .315 last year. In 2022, Torkelson’s mark was a feeble .250. In 2024? A .221 mark. When he can’t handle the gas, he isn’t going to handle anything else, and that’s true for the majority of major league hitters.
When Torkelson went down, it had been clear for a long time that he was just getting bullied into oblivion by major league average or better fastballs. There’s certainly hope, because we have a full season’s evidence that he’s physically capable of handling velocity really well, but this is now the second flame-out where Torkelson got into a slump and spiraled without being able to turn it around on his own.
What many wondered about his demotion, was whether the Tigers, and/or Torkelson himself as well were simply going for a quick fix and a little hot stretch, or whether there was actually a detailed, actionable plan in place to help him finally figure it out to a degree where his struggles wouldn’t spiral out of control again. All players have slumps, but his inability to course correct in season has been a huge Achilles Heel in his game.
Now we have a little better idea how the Tigers feel about things.
The Spencer Torkelson plan
The Tigers reportedly have pressed him to narrow his stance and get a little more of his weight on his back foot rather than being quite so spread out. Torkelson does employ a fairly wide stance for his height and likes to keep his weight pretty evenly distributed. Considering he doesn’t have Riley Greene or Kerry Carpenter’s lower half flexibility, that position can make it difficult to adjust to the ball in flight and in particular to stay inside of outside pitches and line them to right field. Torkelson doesn’t really adjust well at all, and the one criticism that cropped up pre-draft was that his swing was a little too grooved. We’ve seen him pull the ball for power, but the overall approach and swing have remained fairly limited in terms of plate coverage.
Rather than good bat to ball skills, he relied instead on above average swing discipline to simply wait for something up in the zone, or something down and in where he can spin on it. He’s not adjusting mid-swing to spoil pitches on the outer edge too often and he isn’t really staying inside the ball much at all. That may well stem from being too spread out and locked up. If he could get a little more mobile in the box by adjusting his stance it would likely help.
As to the Tigers front office and their sense of all this, Scott Harris appeared on the Have a Seat podcast on Tuesday, and while he didn’t speak directly to Torkelson’s issues, he did offer his general perspective on demotions for young hitters. It doesn’t sound like they’re going to use a brief hot streak as the bar for Torkelson to be called up again. To paraphrase Harris, they wouldn’t send him down just for their lack of results if they didn’t have specific things for him to work on and thought some decompression time to work in Triple-A was worthwhile.
From the outside, there isn’t anything obvious that Torkelson has changed so far, but it’s entirely possible that subtle adjustments are what is required, and they may not be too obvious to the eye. Perhaps some specific conditioning work is involved as well. When the Tigers made their pitch to Jack Flaherty that they could help him get his career back on track, the plan wasn’t just to ditch his cutter and tweak the slider grip. Chris Fetter and Robin Lund also wanted him to activate different muscles in his legs and drive himself down the mound more efficiently. They’re more capable now of implementing comprehensive adjustments that go beyond just technique and mechanics into training those specific moves down to the muscle groups. Something like that could be involved in Torkelson’s case as well.
Torkelson had a good night and squared up a couple of firm fastballs (95+) to right field on Tuesday. Looking for more of that is the simplest way to track when he might really have turned a corner. If he’s hitting velocity and driving outside pitches to right field, he’s probably getting somewhere. Figuring out exactly how to improve his swing issues are tougher.
When a player isn’t timing the ball well and is overwhelmed by velocity, they’re going to take some bad swings. So it can be hard to evaluate exactly the root of the problem. Torkelson often just explodes with hip rotation and flings the bat at the ball when he’s late. That doesn’t means he’s trying to swing just like that. It may just mean that he’s late, with the root cause being more in his setup and load than the actual swing itself. It may be rhythm and timing, or good old fashioned lock up under pressure, rather than his actual swing mechanics. It’s a complicated chain.
I might want to see him narrow his stance a little, stay on his back foot a little more, and keep his upper arms better connected to his torso when he loads his hands by starting with them lower and tipping the bat knob to the catcher, but from the outside it can be very hard to see the source of an issue through the resulting swings and swing decisions. I’m not a hitting coach. You probably aren’t either, but you may have a completely different opinion. All that matters is whether Torkelson and the Tigers can figure it out. Not just temporarily, but to a degree where the player himself can take ownership of the problem and solve it more quickly when and if it arises again in the future.
The roster perspective
Beyond the specifics of Torkelson’s issues and potential, the other side to this is the team posture toward the first base position going forward. Harris gave the wise general answer to questions about the team’s longer term future by saying they have advance planning going for everything, but that he focuses on the decision day-to-day and week-to-week rather than getting carried away from the present. Faced with trade deadline talk, he said his main focus right now is helping his team get on a winning trend and make any future decisions in late July more difficult. Then the draft will take priority in the runup its beginning on July 14.
Point being, the Tigers have no reason right now to decide on Torkelson’s future and their needs in 2025 at the first base position. That’s certainly a decision that is going to have to be made correctly, if not in July, then in the coming offseason. But making that decision now, rather than seeing how things play out with Torkelson, doesn’t make a lot of sense in Harris’ estimation. They want to have as much information as possible before that call has to made. That’s just sensible, but when the call is made, they better be correct. Leaving a gaping hole in the offense by not having a strong offensive contributor at the first base position yet again, would be a huge blunder.
Coupled with Torkelson’s defensive issues, the evidence that he’s sorted out is going to have to be really convincing for most of us. As A.J. Hinch said when the demotion occurred, the problems aren’t just at the plate. Torkelson needs to get his game right defensively as well. And even the 2023 edition Torkelson wasn’t more than an average first baseman. The bar to really becoming the kind of force that seriously impacts the Tigers future is fairly high, so there is a long way for Torkelson to climb.
It sounds as though the organization is pretty committed to taking the time to get this right for the long haul, rather than just a quick patch job. Hopefully they can make it happen. For now, his production against good fastballs and ability to take outside pitches hard to right field should remain a good barometers of any tangible progress. Tuesday night was a good start, but it will take a lot of good performances against velocity before he’ll be ready to return.