I feel pretty confident in saying that if Tork was both not producing results AND not putting in perceived effort to try and get better that he would’ve been demoted earlier in the season and they would’ve made an effort to deal him for something at the deadline.
The reality is much more likely to be that we promoted him through the system quickly, he doesn’t have experience making a lot of adjustments as a result, struggled with timing and then pitch recognition trying to compensate, and lost confidence. He has since been trying to retool his approach in Toledo and there are obvious positives and some collateral negatives that still need to be ironed out.
i wouldn’t give up on Tork at this point, but it would be responsible for the organization to both exercise some patience with him for the rest of this year and also come up with a contingency plan for 1B if he can’t recover to be what we need him to be.