The Rise of Riley Greene: Can He Carry the Tigers to Postseason Success?

Image credit: © BRIAN BRADSHAW SEVALD-USA TODAY SPORTS

Translated by Jose M. Hernandez Lagunes

Although the rest of the division has not been cooperative at all, the Tigers have held up their end of the bargain through the first five weeks of the season. This team was conspicuously quiet over the winter, patching and covering instead of getting aggressive. They’ve been rebuilding (actually, two successive ones, without the interregnum of being good that often breaks such projects) for almost a decade. However, they extended AJ Hinch. Under president of baseball operations Scott Harris, they have considered themselves a team on the rise, even without anything tangible to show for their effort thus far. They have worked hard to establish some pitching depth, and it has paid off with a competitive 18-13 record to start the season.

Most of the credit must go to the pitching staff. Tarik Skubal has been as good as advertised. They got Jack Flaherty to hear some new ideas on his pitch mix, to impressive effect. They’ve cobbled together one of the most effective bullpens in the League, albeit with some suspect peripheral numbers that make DRA less impressed with it than with the robust rotation. The Tigers are, overall, fourth best in MLB in DRA-, which is why they are playing winning baseball.

It’s certainly not because of their lineup, and it’s especially not thanks to the bottom half of that group. Some of the numbers for the Tigers’ lesser position players would be hilarious, if they weren’t so mortifying or depressing. Javier Báez is slowly struggling to reach the .500 OPS threshold. The catching tandem of Jake Rogers and Carson Kelly is hitting exactly how they were expected to hit in 2024, which is almost exactly the same as Báez. In some ways, Colt Keith is much, much worse than that. He’s not hitting at a catastrophic rate, and he’s accepting the occasional walk. It doesn’t seem like he has a clue what to do to get his bat in line with the big league stuff. He’s not in Scott Kingery’s path, but he doesn’t inspire confidence either.

There are days when the Tigers not only don’t score, but it seems like they never could. They rank 24th in batting average, 24th in OBP and 25th in slugging so far this year, and there are times when it feels like that’s overstating them. However, they are about average in runs per game, and rank a surprising 16th in DRC+. Because? Look, there’s a long answer, but the short answer is the right one. The reason is Riley Greene.

With injuries delaying his debut in 2022 and cutting short his first full season last year, it was easy to overlook the way Greene improved even in that campaign. This spring, he cannot be missed. He will surpass 1,000 plate appearances in the next week, and all indications are that he has solidified his skills into an approach that makes him a legitimate star. On the season, Greene is hitting .257/.383/.523, with seven home runs, six doubles and a triple. His strikeout rate is down a bit, and his walk rate (which was around league average the last two years) has doubled. Without anything that can really be called unusual luck, he is putting up huge numbers.

This outing represents an increase of more than 100 points from Greene’s OPS in 2023, but he displayed many of the essential skills that got him to this point last year. There were some positive indicators under the hood, such as an average exit velocity of 96 mph on batted balls with an exit angle between 10 and 35 degrees. The league average for that figure is just over 93. Greene has also done well in a weighted version of that statistic that I created, to account for the probability of a player hitting a ball in that range. launch angle in a given plate appearance. This is more or less another version of barrel rate, but he wanted to scale it to exit velocity and with the susceptibility to strikeouts that comes with properly accounted for launch angle-focused approaches. The League average for weighted sweet spot exit velocity is 87 miles per hour; Greene was already in just under 90 last year.

This season, his sweet spot exit velocity is nearly 98 mph, and the weighting is identical to last year. These figures are in line with those of Fernando Tatis Jr., Luis Robert Jr. and Bryce Harper. Again, though, he was doing that last year, and he wasn’t paying off this way. His raw numbers were worse, and his DRC+ was a dismal 98. This season, in addition to an OPS over .900, he has a DRC+ of 145, sixth-best in baseball. None of his Tigers teammates rank in the top 75, among players with at least 50 plate appearances.

I’ve already given you a hint as to what has been the key to this transformation, so you most likely already know it, but in essence: Greene knows what he’s looking for now. He before was not a wild hitter, and now he is neither Edouard Julien nor Juan Soto, but he has become more selective, especially when it comes to the ball down and away. Here is his swing rate by pitching location for 2023.

And this is the same graph for 2024, from the receiver’s perspective. Notice the way he avoids shots in the far third and below the zone.

Greene’s SEAGER ratings have risen from 13 in his rookie year to 16.7 and 23.3 so far in 2024, ranking him 16th in baseball, just ahead of Mookie Betts and Manny Machado. Of course, it’s early days for both SEAGER and Greene. No one this side of Soto maintains walk rates above 17%, and plenty of players have a solid month where they see the ball unusually well and put up brilliant plate discipline numbers, only to have those dropbacks as sure as (if less severely than) a high BABIP comes back down. Greene probably won’t continue to be as good. However, because he started out with the ability to drive the ball and hit high, every bit of improved understanding of his own strike zone is more valuable to him than to a typical hitter.

If he remains a one-man wrecking crew, Greene won’t destroy enough things to lead the Tigers to the postseason. There may not be a clearer matchup of team and trade deadline position than the Tigers have. They’re going to buy a bat in July, plus hope there’s another wave or two on Baez’s wand and that Keith can be convinced to hold the bat at right end in a month or so. In the last week of games, the Tigers have scored in 12 of the 30 innings in which Greene has come to bat. They have only scored in five of the 27 innings in which he has not. They need more depth and more balance. But most of all, they need Greene to keep it up. However, watching him play, it’s pretty easy to believe he will.

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2024-05-03 12:54:42
#Riley #Greene #merry #friends