Spencer Torkelson

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, chasfh said:

So, this is interesting: take a look at his Savant this year versus last year. He's basically Bizarro TORK! so far.

the joy of small sample sizes.

I think Tork's range issues last year were more bad habits that lack of ability. He has decent hands and it's not like he has any physical deficits in his lateral movement. He'll be fine at 1b in the long run. He can't start every season as hitter in June though....

Edited April 10 by gehringer_2

[casimir]

1 hour ago, Sports_Freak said:

For some reason I thought the discussion was about Parker Meadows, but apparently I'm just an idiot.

[kdog]

13 minutes ago, casimir said:

For some reason I thought the discussion was about Parker Meadows, but apparently I'm just an idiot.

Meadows hit well - struggling

Tork struggled - struggled

 

I was just bringing up that there was no correlation between spring and regular season.

[casimir]

3 minutes ago, kdog said:

Meadows hit well - struggling

Tork struggled - struggled

 

I was just bringing up that there was no correlation between spring and regular season.

So I'm not an idiot after all?

[Sports_Freak]

49 minutes ago, casimir said:

So I'm not an idiot after all?

Nobody said that!! 😁

[Sports_Freak]

53 minutes ago, kdog said:

Meadows hit well - struggling

Tork struggled - struggled

 

I was just bringing up that there was no correlation between spring and regular season.

Tork struggled last spring...started the season in a slump. Now he struggled this spring and got off to a slow start...spring results sometimes matter.

[ben9753]

42 minutes ago, Sports_Freak said:

Nobody said that!! 😁

Unlike Tork, @Sports_Freak doesn't miss middle middle.

[chasfh]

6 hours ago, SoCalTiger said:

The bigger picture is can the Tigers current staff develop hitters like they seem to have proven to do with pitchers ? Not to beat a dead horse, which I am doing, but Hinch had Issac Parades under his nose and never saw that he was one of the TOP power hitters in the game, 23rd in the game OPS in 2023 , as he is now for Tampa. Barely played the guy. He would really really help this team. So is Hinch and his "work the count" actually hindering development ? Others on this board have mentioned this that know far more than me. So is it TORK or is it coaching ? 

I've been giving this a good deal of thought, and I realize that it's possible that the pitching coaching is just far ahead of the hitting coaching. But from a smell-test standpoint, I find that less likely than another hypothesis I've been gravitating toward: as a group, our hitting prospects are simply not as good from a big-league standpoint as our pitching prospects.

It's not as though all players are tabula rasas that can all be molded into Hall of Famers under the right circumstances and coaching. Different players have different ceilings. Some will indeed top out at the Hall of Fame level; others top out at the minor league level. When it comes to groups of people, that's just the way things are.

My hypothesis is that when it came to player acquisition through the draft, international, minor-league free agents, trades, whatever, the Avila regime may simply have had a better idea of how to acquire pitching talent than hitting talent. I think it might have had something to do with the types of pitchers and hitting they preferred. Avila was known to draft pitchers for speed and spin toward the end, perhaps resulting from the data analysis Jay Sartori put together. But when it came to hitters, Avila always did like scrappy guys who were more run manufacturers than he did on-base guys or big boppers. That's why our system was lousy with that kind of hitter, at least until last year and this.

So maybe it's not that the Hinch coaching team is incompetent when it comes to working with hitters. Maybe it's that they simply had less to work with when it came to the hitters they inherited than they had with the pitchers.

Here's some more sample size fun for you: this, from FanGraphs, shows all Tigers hitters with at least 20 plate trips, ranked by wOBA:

There are twelve such hitters on the Tigers. Five of the top seven are Harris acquisitions. Of the two that aren't, Carpenter was a 19th-round pick so I wouldn't consider it an Avila coup; and the other is Riley Greene, a slam-dunk 1/5 pick.

All five at the bottom are Avila pickups.

They have all working under the same hitting coach team who all report to A.J. Hinch since February.

Again, sample size, so maybe this means nothing and will be completely disproved within the next few weeks. And TBF, this is a blunt table that doesn't take into account the commitment Harris has made to bottom-fiver Colt Keith. But I think this is at least worth watching over the next year or two.

Edited April 10 by chasfh

[Sports_Freak]

1 hour ago, chasfh said:

I've been giving this a good deal of thought, and I realize that it's possible that the pitching coaching is just far ahead of the hitting coaching. But from a smell-test standpoint, I find that less likely than another hypothesis I've been gravitating toward: as a group, our hitting prospects are simply not as good from a big-league standpoint as our pitching prospects.

It's not as though all players are tabula rasas that can all be molded into Hall of Famers under the right circumstances and coaching. Different players have different ceilings. Some will indeed top out at the Hall of Fame level; others top out at the minor league level. When it comes to groups of people, that's just the way things are.

My hypothesis is that when it came to player acquisition through the draft, international, minor-league free agents, trades, whatever, the Avila regime may simply have had a better idea of how to acquire pitching talent than hitting talent. I think it might have had something to do with the types of pitchers and hitting they preferred. Avila was known to draft pitchers for speed and spin toward the end, perhaps resulting from the data analysis Jay Sartori put together. But when it came to hitters, Avila always did like scrappy guys who were more run manufacturers than he did on-base guys or big boppers. That's why our system was lousy with that kind of hitter, at least until last year and this.

So maybe it's not that the Hinch coaching team is incompetent when it comes to working with hitters. Maybe it's that they simply had less to work with when it came to the hitters they inherited than they had with the pitchers.

Here's some more sample size fun for you: this, from FanGraphs, shows all Tigers hitters with at least 20 plate trips, ranked by wOBA:

There are twelve such hitters on the Tigers. Five of the top seven are Harris acquisitions. Of the two that aren't, Carpenter was a 19th-round pick so I wouldn't consider it an Avila coup; and the other is Riley Greene, a slam-dunk 1/5 pick.

All five at the bottom are Avila pickups.

They have all working under the same hitting coach team who all report to A.J. Hinch since February.

Again, sample size, so maybe this means nothing and will be completely disproved within the next few weeks. And TBF, this is a blunt table that doesn't take into account the commitment Harris has made to bottom-fiver Colt Keith. But I think this is at least worth watching over the next year or two.

And, TBF, Colt is very raw. I see the potential the Tigers are counting on and from the eye test, he looks like our 2nd baseman for the next 10+ years. 

Working with many different hitting coaches could be a bad thing. Too much advice that's been thrown at the hitters. So whenever there's a change, many players won't buy in until they see success. Hitting wise, whatever they're doing, isn't working. We could just blame the weather and root for them to stay close until it warms up. I know Javy will struggle but we should have enough hitters to carry him. Carp, Tork and Greene all need to figure things out, either here or in Toledo.

And? Nice chart!

[gkelly]

I don't know. 

Initially, I thought it was a poor choice to spend the #1 pick on a guy who can only play 1B since they kind of grow on trees.  And unless he is a top 5 offensive player there, it just seems like it was a bad pick.  But I guess that doesn't really matter now.  

However, because he was the #1 pick, the Tigers have to give him extra time for him to develop.  I thought he should have spent another year in AAA.  

 

[chasfh]

In Avila’s defense, TORK! was the consensus 1/1 that year. Most if not all of the other 29 teams would have taken him that year.

[1984Echoes]

And following him is a bunch of hot garbage.

So if he was the best of a bad draft year then we gotta just live with what we get from him...

At least until a better solution presents itself...

[SoCalTiger]

2 hours ago, chasfh said:

In Avila’s defense, TORK! was the consensus 1/1 that year. Most if not all of the other 29 teams would have taken him that year.

I agree with this. Only a few players from that draft made it and the good ones were lower picks. But that's not for debate. The issue is will he perform, is coaching hindering him or should we be concerned. I mean we have no choice but to play him snd hope he improves but 14 K's in 45 AB against right-handers  is tough for a team to absorb from the player getting the most AB's. Only 1 in 14 AB against Left-handers is better but no real results against either. SUPER early but worrisome all the same.

And Baez is so so bad. I am one of his top supporter on this board but jeesh. And getting back to G2 observation Baez is supposedly following an off season of advice from Hinch/Coachs to improve. Didn't help or made him worse.He simply can not be this bad can he ? He looks great in the field so his athleticism remains intact so it's not age. It's like he fell off a cliff into a deep ocean 

[chasfh]

47 minutes ago, SoCalTiger said:

I agree with this. Only a few players from that draft made it and the good ones were lower picks. But that's not for debate. The issue is will he perform, is coaching hindering him or should we be concerned. I mean we have no choice but to play him snd hope he improves but 14 K's in 45 AB against right-handers  is tough for a team to absorb from the player getting the most AB's. Only 1 in 14 AB against Left-handers is better but no real results against either. SUPER early but worrisome all the same.

And Baez is so so bad. I am one of his top supporter on this board but jeesh. And getting back to G2 observation Baez is supposedly following an off season of advice from Hinch/Coachs to improve. Didn't help or made him worse.He simply can not be this bad can he ? He looks great in the field so his athleticism remains intact so it's not age. It's like he fell off a cliff into a deep ocean 

I think with Tork there are quite a few potential outcomes. The one we all hope is that is he so super-talented that he will inevitably click and become a perennial All-Star hitter. That's the outcome we obviously hope for. The range of remaining outcomes includes that he is talented and has big-league hitting potential but his ceiling is a lot more limited than All-Star caliber; that he is talented but our coaching can't figure out how to fix him; that he is talented and our coaching has a good idea how to fix him but he is obstinate about instruction and/or lazy about applying it; that he is talented, our coaching knows how to fix him, he's willing to do it, but he can't figure out how to apply it; that he is talented in ways that make him a great hitter for college ball but not a good MLB hitter; or that he was talented once, but now his talent has abandoned him. Any of these outcomes are in play for Tork.

I'm swagging that the chances of the perennial All-Star outcome occurring for Tork is somewhere between one half and one third—probably closer to a third—and that it's more likely one of the field is true. That happens to some 1/1s. It happened with Mickey Moniak, Tim Beckham, Matt Bush, and Delmon Young, all flops. Or he could be Royce Lewis, who took six years to come through the minors before finally clicking with the Twins with an upside still TBD. Or maybe he'll be Pat Burrell or Phil Nevin or Jeff King or Shawon Dunston, all of whom were drafted with great promise at 1/1 only to have merely decent careers. The range of outcomes are wide and varied, but the one thing we know for sure is that he is ours for the next five years, so sit back and enjoy the show.

As for Javy—we may be seeing one of the most spectacular career flameouts of all time. Not like there weren't warning signs that this might happen, giving his skill set and approach. I think we all accept that his chances of becoming an acceptable major league hitter again have dwindled down to neatly nothing. The only thing I know for sure about that guy is that we are going to keep running him out there until we get someone in-house we know can do better than he.

[SoCalTiger]

17 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I think with Tork there are quite a few potential outcomes. The one we all hope is that is he so super-talented that he will inevitably click and become a perennial All-Star hitter. That's the outcome we obviously hope for. The range of remaining outcomes includes that he is talented and has big-league hitting potential but his ceiling is a lot more limited than All-Star caliber; that he is talented but our coaching can't figure out how to fix him; that he is talented and our coaching has a good idea how to fix him but he is obstinate about instruction and/or lazy about applying it; that he is talented, our coaching knows how to fix him, he's willing to do it, but he can't figure out how to apply it; that he is talented in ways that make him a great hitter for college ball but not a good MLB hitter; or that he was talented once, but now his talent has abandoned him. Any of these outcomes are in play for Tork.

I'm swagging that the chances of the perennial All-Star outcome occurring for Tork is somewhere between one half and one third—probably closer to a third—and that it's more likely one of the field is true. That happens to some 1/1s. It happened with Mickey Moniak, Tim Beckham, Matt Bush, and Delmon Young, all flops. Or he could be Royce Lewis, who took six years to come through the minors before finally clicking with the Twins with an upside still TBD. Or maybe he'll be Pat Burrell or Phil Nevin or Jeff King or Shawon Dunston, all of whom were drafted with great promise at 1/1 only to have merely decent careers. The range of outcomes are wide and varied, but the one thing we know for sure is that he is ours for the next five years, so sit back and enjoy the show.

As for Javy—we may be seeing one of the most spectacular career flameouts of all time. Not like there weren't warning signs that this might happen, giving his skill set and approach. I think we all accept that his chances of becoming an acceptable major league hitter again have dwindled down to neatly nothing. The only thing I know for sure about that guy is that we are going to keep running him out there until we get someone in-house we know can do better than he.

Thanks for the in depth analysis. It seems we have to just "enjoy(try) the show since both Tork and Baez will play all year come double Hockey sticks or high water. Hoping for the best but bracing for the worst.