Spencer Torkelson is staying the course this spring

A new year of major league baseball is underway, and hope springs eternal. For Detroit Tigers first baseman, Spencer Torkelson, that hope revolves around finding some solid footing at the major league level and becoming something like the slugger the club hoped they had drafted back in 2020. The problem is that hope may be the worst thing for him at this point.

Right now, Torkelson doesn’t have a spot on the active roster. Colt Keith was informed months ago that he’d be moving to first base, and the Tigers added free agent Gleyber Torres to provide some of the right-handed stick that Torkelson hasn’t provided outside of one sustained outburst in 2023. With one option remaining, the wayward first baseman is headed back to Toledo to start the season. Only a really impressive spring camp is going to give him a chance to change that outcome.

For his part, Torkelson says he isn’t really doing anything differently. Instead of buying into the ongoing addition of technology into the process of player improvement, he’s trying to simplify things and get out of his own head in the batter’s box. As well as the usual database of video of each players’ at-bats and cage work, the Tigers have invested a small fortune in high speed cameras, motion and bat tracking systems, force plates to track balance and weight transfer throughout the swing, and much more. As he told reporters on Wednesday, Torkelson isn’t particularly interested in knowing all that information in detail.

“That’s not me. That’s not the way I roll. I’m pretty old-school in the fact that, you know, that felt good. the ball flight looked good. That must’ve worked.”

Considering his struggles, many took that to mean he doesn’t think he needs to change, or at least is too resistant to using the information available from technology to get better. That’s certainly possible, but the issue is still way more about what he’s working on rather than how many of the bells and whistles he’s using in the process.

Manager A.J. Hinch chuckled a bit during a radio interview with 97.1 The Ticket on Thursday when asked about this.

Per Hinch, Torkelson will be watching video, saying “I don’t think that’s what he meant to be drawn from that. One of the things that Tork has battled over his few years here has been a little bit of an over-analysis or being obsessed with every single detail in the iPad or the video,” Hinch said. “He’s going to watch video.”

Torkelson is presumably just emphasizing that he’s a feel hitter over a technical one who can obsess over the minutiae and large amounts of data and implement it. Obviously it’s impossible to have all that in your head while trying to hit major league pitching. It’s more a question of whether he’s missing opportunities to understand his issues better and make effective changes in his practice.

One of the big knocks on Torkelson over the past few years, other than his performance itself, is the sense that he’s doing the same things expecting different results. Despite talk of making adjustments when he was demoted to Toledo again last season, there is still nothing to suggest he’s really making an effort to reinvent himself and try some new things. He had a little hot stretch when he returned from Triple-A, but within weeks had reverted back to pretty mediocre performance the rest of the season.

Certainly Torkelson isn’t alone in this. Thousands of talented young players have found themselves caught in the very same dilemma over the years. They’re understandably worried about letting go of the processes, swing mechanics, and approach that got them to pro ball. Recognition that there is nothing left to be moored to sometimes comes too late, if at all. There are probably plenty of cases where this gets inverted and a player starts tinkering too much and screws themselves up as well, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with Torkelson at all.

One might consider the case of J.D. Martinez, who was a slightly less effective player than Torkelson at the same age but understood that he was too far from establishing himself in the major leagues to keep doing the same things and hoping a minor adjustment in stance, setup, or approach would suddenly unlock his power production. Martinez became the model for starting over from scratch and rebuilding his swing and approach. Torkelson may end up regretting it if he doesn’t follow that example. For now though, he’s continued to stick with the same offseason coaches and shows no signs of making any significant changes.

Of course the difference between he and Martinez, and the thing that still lends some hope to the proceedings, is that 31 homer campaign in 2023. His numbers overall were still only modestly above average, but still, 31 major league home runs is 31 major league home runs. When you’ve done something once, it’s easier to believe that you can do it again without starting over from scratch.

Mobility work

One adjustment Torkelson did discuss, was trying to work on his flexibility and balance to be more athletic in the batter’s box. Even back prior to draft day in 2020, FanGraphs mentioned his stiff-legged, heavily rotational swing as one possible drawback. Evaluators assumed it would be worked on in pro ball enough, and that his plate discipline would carry him the rest of the way. Instead, four and a half years later Torkelson still has trouble changing levels and putting strong, balanced swings on pitches around the strike zone. Unless it’s in the middle of the zone, he’s just not built to drive the ball hard in the air.

As pitchers figured out how much of the strike zone was available to them they’ve just eaten Torkelson up. If he has really finally made some adjustments to his conditioning to help him use his lower half better, that could certainly help. Prospect Josue Briceño’s monster breakout campaign in the 2024 Arizona Fall League was also predicated on similar work to build strength and flexibility in his hips and legs and become more mobile in the box during his summer rehabbing a knee injury. Briceño credited those adjustment for unlocking his power potential by helping him dial up his batspeed and build better bat angles and more loft on pitches in the lower half of the strike zone. Torkelson’s flat, stiff-legged swing and inability to change levels still won’t allow that.

In Torkelson’s favor remains the fact that he still rarely chases out of the zone. His 23 percent swing rate out of the strike zone is far better than the league average of 31.8 percent, but that’s also a measure of the swing and miss and the amount of weak contact that have crept into his game. Zone recognition isn’t at all the issue. Plate coverage and hitting the ball hard in the air remains the problem.

That still sounds based in mechanical issues in the swing itself, as opposed to a problem with the instant ball-strike decision-making required of a good hitter. Torkelson, and Hinch for that matter, still appear to feel that his problem is paralysis by analysis. Hopefully they’re right.

As we see in his 2024 whiff rate chart, Torkelson really struggles to get the bat on pitches away and below the zone. Most of those he shouldn’t really be offering at anyway, and typically he doesn’t. But he isn’t able to foul off some of the close pitches when he does offer. And once a pitcher gets ahead of him, Torkelson struggles badly to find pitches he can drive when he has to worry about a pitcher’s willingness to spend a pitch or two looking for a chase.

Certainly that’s true of all hitters to one degree or another. The difference between plate appearances starting 0-1 versus 1-0 is typically a stark divide for hitters, but in Torkelson’s case it seems particularly exaggerated. Once he’s thinking about protecting the zone, he no longer gets off good swings even on pitches he should handle.

Torkelson has a point about getting in his own way mentally as opposed to a swing mechanics issue, but differentiating balls and strikes is clearly not the primary issue. He’s not chasing balls, and his swing and miss rates are basically league average. So why isn’t he doing damage in the strike zone?

Trouble in the zone

The answer may partly lie with pitch selection, it’s true. Too often he’s taking the pitches he should drive early in counts and then struggling to get off good swings late in counts when he’s under pressure and really trying to protect the zone. Still it all seems to come back to his swing being ill-fitted to handle anything that isn’t grooved waist-high.

Instead of driving pitches up in the zone, he’s fouling the ball off or lifting a lot of towering fly balls that don’t go for hits nor leave the park often enough. On pitches low in the zone he’s hitting flat line drives and routine ground balls rather than getting effective loft on those and hammering them into the seats. You’d prefer to see the reverse where he gets more on top of fastballs up in the zone and lines them around the park, and then goes golfing more on the pitches down in the zone for damage. Instead he tends to do the opposite.

Below, you can see his average exit velocity by zone in 2024, illustrating where he tends to hit the ball hardest. In the next chart down, you can see his average launch angle by zone. Keep in mind that the sweet spot for homers is roughly centered around a 25 degree launch angle. It’s like he’s steeper in his attack angle on pitches up, and flatter when he has to go down and get a ball above the knees.

It’s really hard to unpack the process leading to these results. There are still good things in his process, like his well above average chase rates. He’s not getting fooled out of the zone, but he is seemingly built to lift the wrong pitches in the wrong parts of the zone. That can certainly be about timing, but it certainly seems more physical and based in his swing mechanics than in his mental approach.

2025 Outlook

The fact that the Tigers didn’t end up signing Alex Bregman may be a minor reprieve for Spencer Torkelson this season. There’s still a clear need for a right-handed power bat in the lineup, and if he has a good camp and shows real signs of change there may be some opportunities to DH at points through the season. He’s probably starting in Toledo no matter what but for now the Tigers are at least less likely to give up and trade him.

The problem is that it just sounds like he doesn’t really want to make any major changes. He may well be waiting for it to click with multiple other teams on the Keston Hiura path to total obscurity. If he’s really improved his athleticism and is more mobile in the batter’s box, that would certainly be a step in the right direction. But the fact remains that he’s not even necessarily fooled that badly by major league pitching, he just can’t hit it consistently.

So we’ve reached the point now where Torkelson is little more than an afterthought and running out of time to change that perception. He’s almost certainly not a notable part of the Tigers’ future, but they also have no real reason not to give him one more season to try and figure it out. Unless a team really makes a real offer for him, he should get some more chances in Detroit this season. Sometimes you have to fail completely to really change, and 2025 is setting up as the season where things will finally come to a head.

Hope can be the best of things, but it can also be substitute wish-casting for making real change happen. We’ll find out this year if Spencer Torkelson has anything more than hope left to offer. Buyers are becoming scarce, but a strong camp with some obvious changes to those swing and batted ball patterns would certainly help.