DETROIT — Monday night at Comerica Park, Spencer Torkelson got a sinker that drifted right into his wheelhouse. He whipped his hands through the zone and watched the ball soar high and deep. Held his pose, too. The ball cleared the fence in left-center and nearly hit the brick wall beyond the seats. It was a 440-foot home run in the ninth inning that cut the Atlanta Braves’ lead to one run.
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The Tigers forced extras, and Torkelson again came up in the 10th, when he laced a high fastball from former teammate Joe Jiménez into center field. The ball fell for a walk-off single. A great night for Torkelson, a hitter who had been in need of a big break. It was also a needed exhale for the Tigers, a team that entered play on a nine-game losing streak, their season quickly cracking into pieces.
“It’s huge,” Torkelson said. “It wasn’t fun. We were kind of going through it for a little bit, but I think every team … you can’t be perfect the whole 162.”
In the big picture, it created another chance to take stock of Torkelson’s development, to again ponder what exactly the Tigers have in the guy they drafted first overall only three summers ago.
That discussion this season has been perplexing. We’ve seen a lot of Torkelson now — 674 plate appearances in the major leagues, to be exact. We’ve learned a lot about him, too. He’s almost always calm and collected on the outside, but he internalizes failure more than he will ever let on with his words.
“He expects to do really, really well, so he’s pretty hard on himself when he doesn’t,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said.
Torkelson’s approach has evolved from one year ago, when he was headed toward a demotion back to Triple A. Torkelson this season, though still imperfect, has looked more comfortable in the box. He is hitting .343 on middle-middle pitches, a stark improvement from his .212 mark one year ago. He still has limitations, pitches he doesn’t cover well. But he seems more in tune with his strengths.
The difference in his expected numbers is palpable, too. Torkelson ranks in the 86th percentile in exit velocity and the 84th percentile in hard-hit rate. His actual batting average is a pedestrian .232, but his expected batting average is .261. When it comes to slugging, the numbers are .436 expected and .372 in actuality.
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That’s part of what makes the conversion so interesting and so layered.
How has Torkelson grown over the past year?
“That’s like a sit-down conversation,” Hinch said, exhaling.
Dating back to spring, Torkelson has been hitting the ball hard, showing signs of a potent batter we rarely saw last year. Monday’s big swings alone were a stark reminder of the talent that lies somewhere in this bat.
“I think he’s been much more process-oriented this season from last year,” Hinch said. “I don’t know if his approach has changed other than his mindset has changed. I think what he values and holds himself accountable to is more process-based.
“I think he’s evolved to being able to take a slightly different approach to different style pitchers. You get a pitcher who’s uber-aggressive in the strike zone, he’s not afraid to swing early … If you get a guy who has a wipeout pitch, he’s not afraid to eliminate the pitch. If you get somebody who sprays the ball, he will go up and be pretty patient. The maturity that I’ve seen in the past year has benefited him the most.”
Yet as this season has gone along, Torkelson’s luck has never really turned. Words like process and approach have grown old quickly. It’s a big enough sample to raise the question: Is this really as simple as bad luck? Might there be something about Torkelson’s profile that allows opponents to pitch him a certain way, that forces him to keep hitting into outs?
His average launch angle of 16.5 degrees is healthy, but might not tell the whole story. Torkelson hits the ball in the air plenty but hasn’t been able to consistently combine exit velocity and launch angle.
He has 89 batted balls this season with an exit velocity of 95 mph or greater. Only 23 of them have had a launch angle in the ideal range of 15-30 degrees.
“He’s not any happier this year than last year when he lines the ball out to left field and gets unlucky or smokes a ball 105 on the ground and it’s right at a position player,” Hinch said. “But he’s handled the peaks and valleys of this hitting thing very well this year, and slowly but surely I think the results are starting to pick up.”
All that comes under the guise of the bigger question: Can Torkelson still become the sure-thing hitter the Tigers and practically everyone else in baseball once thought they were getting?
Good as the expected numbers have looked, there’s still been a curious lack of power; repeatedly, pitches one would think a prodigious hitter would drive out of the park have instead turned into singles or lineouts.
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“He’s probably unfairly being held to a standard of perfection,” Hinch said, “both by himself and by others that is hard to attain at this level.”
Torkelson, again, has always projected the vibe of a player not too concerned with the outside noise, not too dragged down by the weight of expectations. But on certain occasions, we’ve been reminded there must be more going on beneath the surface.
“Gosh, it’s not easy to be under a microscope and struggle,” Torkelson said. “Just to show up every day with somewhat of a positive mindset sometimes was a win for me.”
There is no way to know exactly how long it will take before the Tigers can draw a definitive conclusion on Torkelson. Even his manager does not shy away from the fact everyone — the Tigers included — wants to know what they have in Torkelson.
“I know we want to have this natural number of at-bats it’s gonna take, we need to decide what this guy is, is it 400 at-bats or 500 or 600 or 800?” Hinch said. “I don’t know when it’s gonna be for Tork. But when he goes up to bat I feel pretty good about it, and I think he’s gonna get a pretty good pitch to hit.”
Torkelson has shown signs of growth and progress since his rookie season. There is a hitter in here somewhere.
“It felt great,” Torkelson said of Monday’s results, “and I have the same approach every time. Get the job done, and just slow the game down.”
Although he might not always show it, you can sense Torkelson wants badly as anyone to prove the hitter we saw Monday night is an accurate representation of the player he will become, not just a blip on the radar, not just one good night over the course of another difficult season.
(Photo: Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
Cody Stavenhagen is a staff writer covering the Detroit Tigers and Major League Baseball for The Athletic. Previously, he covered Michigan football at The Athletic and Oklahoma football and basketball for the Tulsa World, where he was named APSE Beat Writer of the Year for his circulation group in 2016. He is a native of Amarillo, Texas. Follow Cody on Twitter @CodyStavenhagen
