Detroit Tigers: What to expect from Riley Greene and Spencer Torkelson
Riley Greene and Spencer Torkelson are primed to make their MLB debuts in 2022, but what should Detroit Tigers fans expect to see?
For most of “Contender November” we focused on potential free agent signings and trades to make the Detroit Tigers better. The Tigers did their part by trading for Tucker Barnhart and signing Eduardo Rodriguez and Javier Báez to big contracts, but the MLB lockout has cast a pall over what should have been an exciting and eventful offseason for Tigers fans.
There’s still plenty to discuss, though. For all our speculation about huge free-agent deals and blockbuster trades, the ultimate success of this Detroit Tigers rebuild was always going to hinge on the development of the team’s top prospects.
The arms came first, with Matt Manning, Casey Mize, and Tarik Skubal all making contributions for the 2021 squad. Now Riley Greene and Spencer Torkelson are knocking on the door. But prospects don’t always live up to the hype in their first season.
MLB players are ridiculously talented, and they have a world of information at their fingertips. They seek out weaknesses, and then exploit them mercilessly.
We can watch prospects in the minors, marvel at their tools, and write detailed scouting reports, but it’s impossible to know how they’ll adjust and perform in the big leagues.
But let’s try to guess anyway!
Detroit Tigers: Greene and Torkelson Steamer Projections
Fantasy sports and gambling are multi-billion dollar industries, and plenty of people are willing to pay money for player projections. Fortunately, there are also free projection systems of high quality, like Steamer:
Steamer is a system of projections developed by Jared Cross — a high school science teacher in Brooklyn — and two of his former students, Dash Davidson and Peter Rosenbloom…Like other projection systems, Steamer uses past performance and aging trends to develop a future projection for players. It also uses pitch-tracking data to help forecast pitchers.
The 2022 Steamer projections are already available at FanGraphs, and they include both Riley Greene and Spencer Torkelson. Let’s take a look:
All of those projections are pretty positive! But this is where we have to point out projection systems often work much better in the aggregate than on an individual player basis.
For example, Steamer projects Spencer Torkelson to play nearly 80 more MLB games in 2022 than Riley Greene, probably because Torkelson is 13 months older. But most people who actually watched Greene and Torkelson play all year think Greene is closer to being big-league ready.
The two bottom rows in the table above give us a bit of a workaround. They are stats based on Steamer600, which simply takes the rate projections for each player and extrapolates them to a season of 600 plate appearances.
Once again, both projections are pretty spectacular. In fact, Steamer600 projects Greene and Torkelson to be the two best position players on the Detroit Tigers. Torkelson’s 33 home runs would be the second most ever for a Tigers rookie, and by WAR, both players would be among the top 20 rookies in Detroit Tigers history.
Getting roughly six wins from a pair of rookies would obviously do wonders for the 2022 Detroit Tigers. But let’s turn off the computer for a bit and use some recent real-world examples to see if Steamer is on the right track.
Detroit Tigers: Greene and Torkelson Prospect Ranking Projections
Riley Greene and Spencer Torkelson are universally regarded as two of the best prospects in all of baseball. By the end of the 2021 season they both ranked in the top ten to Baseball America, FanGraphs, and MLB Pipeline.
Prospect ranking is an inherently subjective exercise, prone to a variety of biases and errors in judgment. Still, for those who have spent a decade or more in the prospect world, it feels like the methodology behind prospect rankings has improved dramatically in recent years.
With that in mind, we thought it might be useful to compare Riley Greene and Spencer Torkelson to similarly ranked prospects over the past decade, and then look at how those other prospects performed in their first real season at the MLB level.
The first thing we need to do is put each player in the proper archetypal bucket. Spencer Torkelson fits pretty neatly as a Slugging Corner Infielder. To be a highly ranked prospect at these positions players generally have to demonstrate the ability to hit a TON.
The outfield is a little bit different. Riley Greene played a lot of center field last year, but he isn’t a defense-oriented prospect along the lines of Cristian Pache, Victor Robles, or Leody Taveras, nor is he a five-tool athletic freak like Ronald Acuña Jr., Byron Buxton, or Luis Robert. Greene probably fits best into the Hitterish Corner Outfielder bucket, but that still leaves him with plenty of contemporaries.
So let’s look at the first-year MLB stats of some comparably ranked players to get a better idea of what each prospect might do in 2022. First, Riley Greene:
Each of the players above was at one point ranked a top-10 prospect in baseball, just like Riley Greene, and most had a cup of coffee (or two) before establishing themselves in the big leagues.
Now, to the Spencer Torkelson comparables:
It’s a bit harder to find highly ranked corner infield bats. We had to stretch a bit, though, as Devers, Riley, and Vaughn were all top-25 prospects, but never ranked in the top 5. Gallo and Sanó are extreme swing-and-miss players who aren’t ideal comps either, but we did the best we could.
Kris Bryant is a pretty significant outlier here, having produced one of the best rookie seasons in MLB history. It’s true Spencer Torkelson has often been compared to Bryant, but that doesn’t seem terribly fair, as Bryant’s minor-league performance was significantly better than Torkelson’s.
Speaking of minor-league performance…
Detroit Tigers: Greene and Torkelson Milb Stat Projections
Detroit Tigers fans are absolutely right to be excited about Riley Greene and Spencer Torkelson. They were two of just seven minor-league hitters under the age of 22 to post a wRC+ of 140 or better in the upper minors (Double-A and Triple-A) last year.
Minor-league stats can only tell us so much, but performing well in the upper minors at a relatively young age is generally a strong sign of future MLB success.
So, let’s look at players who were 21 or younger and put up similar upper-minors stats to Greene and Torkelson, then see how they performed in their first real MLB season.
This time we’ll start with Torkelson:
Again, these are stats from the upper minors only, which is why Torkelson only has 25 home runs — we aren’t counting the 5 he hit in High-A West Michigan.
This is a pretty interesting list, though. Rizzo and Freeman became legitimate stars, and Alvarez appears headed along the same path. Moustakas has had a quality MLB career, while Singelton and Davidson were busts, and Tellez is a replacement-level player.
Now let’s see how these seven players fared in their first real year of MLB action:
A bit of a mixed bag here. Alvarez was spectacular as a rookie, while Rizzo and Freeman were above-average hitters whose WAR was held down by rough defense. Davidson regressed significantly after his terrific 2012 season, but there were always some concerns about his bat speed and swing.
Now let’s take a look at some comparable performers to Riley Greene last year:
Dylan Carlson is starting to look like a pretty strong comp for Riley Greene. They both ranked as top-10 prospects, and they produced nearly identical minor-league stat lines at the same levels and same age.
Cody Bellinger, Joc Pederson, and Kyle Tucker also appeared on the list of top prospects and had similar statistical seasons to Greene, but we left them off here because each walked more and/or struck out significantly less than Greene.
Now, let’s finish with a look at how these players did in their MLB debuts:
We get another pretty varied sample here. Justin and Nick Williams both stagnated, while Domingo Santana had one very good season before strikeouts and poor defense sent him overseas.
Wil Myers won the Rookie of the Year award, but he’s been a mostly average player since, while Tyler O’Neill had a monster breakout season this year, albeit with some concerning strikeout and walk numbers. And then we return to Dylan Carlson, who had a very encouraging season, though it came after a 35-game cup of coffee in 2020.
Detroit Tigers: Give Riley Greene and Spencer Torkelson Time
We’ve hit you with an awful lot of charts and stats in this piece, but let’s finish with two more just to tie everything together. First, for Riley Greene:
Well that’s interesting. We wouldn’t say we cracked the Steamer code, but our methods (presumably with much smaller sample sizes) produced pretty similar results. It all depends on playing time, but Detroit Tigers fans should probably expect Riley Greene’s 2022 season to look a bit like Akil Baddoo’s 2021 season. Not too shabby. Now, enjoy some dingers:
And now let’s look at Spencer Torkelson’s projections:
Here we have a little divergence, particularly in the power department. Steamer is quite bullish on Torkelson’s power playing in the big leagues right away — perhaps they fold tool grades into their projections — and expects him to look like 2005 Chris Shelton. Our prospect ranks see more of 2008 Matt Joyce, and the minor-league stats expect something like Carlos Pena’s 2002.
Riley Greene and Spencer Torkelson certainly have the talent to reach the majors and perform like superstars immediately. They could also arrive and struggle more than anyone thought possible.
The most likely scenario is they both have up-and-down seasons, put up average numbers, and combine to help the Detroit Tigers win 2-to-5 more games in 2022. Fans might be disappointed by such an outcome, but it would actually be a terrific sign for the future of the franchise. Now, more dingers: