OF Justyn-Henry Malloy promoted to Detroit, Spencer Torkelson optioned in huge transaction

According to a report from Evan Petzold on Sunday evening, the Detroit Tigers are planning to promote outfield prospect Justyn-Henry Malloy to the parent team for his MLB debut on Monday in Texas. To make room for him on the big league roster, the Tigers are demoting former first overall pick Spencer Torkelson to Toledo.

Malloy was not a member of the Tigers’ 40-man roster to open the season, and a corresponding move has not yet been announced to accommodate this move. Prior to the season, we ranked Malloy as the tenth-best prospect in the Tigers’ system.

The Tigers acquired Malloy in a trade with the Atlanta Braves in exchange for reliever Joe Jimenez. He was the first player acquired by the team after Scott Harris was named President of Baseball Operations, which has made him a bit of a touchpoint for fans keeping loose tabs on the Harris era of Tigers baseball. Since joining the organization in December 2022, he has done nothing but crush the ball across two levels of the minor leagues, making this promotion a well-earned one.

This season, he’s hitting .255/.412/.477 in 44 games with the Mud Hens while swatting six home runs. That’s good for a 134 wRC+; in other words, his total offensive contribution has been 34 percent better than the average Triple-A batter. There’s no question that he’s conquered the minor leagues, and for him to keep improving at the plate, he’ll need MLB reps. However, the main issue with Malloy remains his vulnerability to breaking balls in the zone. There are still far too many whiffs and too much weak contact on those pitches, and MLB pitchers will be even better to exploit that weakness if he can’t improve.

Spencer Torkelson, on the other hand, has struggled to find his footing this season after breaking out in a big way during the second half of 2023. He’s hit just .201/.266/.330 this year, and with first base defense that has always left something to be desired, he’s been worth -0.7 fWAR in 2024. His role on the team has rapidly diminished in recent weeks, and this was always a possibility, but it still hurts to see it happen.

Torkelson has never lived up to his draft billing since being drafted with the first overall pick in 2020. After a much-headed college career at Arizona State, his trek through the minor leagues was supposed to be a coronation, but instead, he took a rocky road to the big leagues and has been below-average batter over the whole of his career. I’ll save you the effort of rewriting history — only other placer the Tigers were realistically considering, Austin Martin, has been underwhelming as well and is now a bench player with the Twins, but that hardly takes the sting out of it.

Right now, it’s a little difficult to see the path forward for Torkelson. In both 2022 and this season, he’s been absolutely unable to hit even average fastballs let alone higher velocity. He solved this issue last year by selling out to the pull side and did a lot of damage on fastballs, but so far this year he’s completely lost the ability to time anything up. In recent weeks his confidence has finally appeared to crumble and the frustration to mount, leading to this day. A.J. Hinch pinch-hitting Jake Rogers against a lefty rather than Torkelson on Sunday afternoon in Boston felt like the final acknowledgement that a move had to be made.

So, what is Detroit getting in Justyn-Henry Malloy? The two pillars of Malloy’s skill set are plate vision and power.

His 20.1 percent walk rate is third in the International League, trailing only uber-prospect Jackson Holliday and minor league veteran Rylan Bannon. The implementation of an automatic strike zone in Triple-A last season gave him the opportunity to show off his skills with a bit more flair, often challenging and beating the system on incorrect strike calls. There’s no one in the Tigers organization with a stronger feel for the zone from the offensive side of the ball. He will have to get re-used to edge calls not going his way, but the strong plate discipline is undeniable.

Malloy also packs a punch with his swing. He’s thickly built and has plus raw power, leading to 25-homer potential at his peak. There’s no question that he’s strong enough to hit for extra bags in the bigs, but as with most sluggers without a presence among the game’s top-100 prospects, the question will be whether he can access enough of it to make a significant impact.

Although he didn’t need to be placed on the 40-man roster to protect him from the Rule 5 draft this offseason, there was some talk that Malloy could break team with the camp. He was a wrecking ball In Triple-A last season, putting up nearly identical stats to his 2024 statline, and tore up Spring Training to the tune of .265/.324/.471, leading many to believe he was ready for the big time already. The team disagreed, and sent him to Triple-A to work on his outfield defense and get a few more reps in against high-level breaking balls. It was a move widely disliked by fans eager for the youth movement, but a justifiable one considering how many outfielders the team has on roster.

As always, we’re preaching caution when it comes to expectations for his first taste of MLB competition. Malloy may have android-like plate discipline, but he still tends to struggle to put good contact on breaking balls down in the zone. MLB pitchers will have no reason to throw him a hittable fastball. Likely, they’ll plan to bully him inside with velocity and pull him out of his shoes with a big curve or gyro slider late in the count.

There’s also the question of his defense, which has always been a sore spot for Malloy. He played third base in college, but mediocre lower half movement skills and an inaccurate arm made it questionable whether he’d play there in the long term. The Braves tinkered with him in left field and the Tigers have shifted him to the corner outfield full time, despite their tendency to keep players fresh and cross-trained up and down the organization. Malloy has played about a third of his reps in right field, where his arm plays in a way it didn’t at third base, with the rest coming in left field.

With the eternally restless AJ Hinch at the helm in Detroit, Malloy will almost certainly take reps in the field and play as the DH if he stays with the team for any more than a week or two. With Kerry Carpenter and Mark Canha battling injuries and Spencer Torkelson underwhelming at the plate, there will be more than enough at-bats available to feed Malloy substantial reps in either role. To keep Canha healthy, moving him to first base more, with some appearances from Gio Urshela in the mix as well, would seem to be the recipe, with Malloy starting in the outfield against left-handed hitters and doing a lot of pinch-hitting. The Tigers didn’t start him a couple of times this week specifically to get him used to coming into the game for a key pinch-hit appearance.

Now that Malloy has gotten the call, the next hitting prospects in line to make their Tigers debuts will likely be Jace Jung and Dillon Dingler, with Justice Bigbie as a late-season possibility if he can get back on track. In a different organization, Hao-Yu Lee may have an outside shot at a September call up after raking in Double-A for the first couple months, but this Tigers leadership has tended to slowplay their prospects’ progression. He’s still just 21 years old and will probably get his shot in 2025.