Spencer Torkelson, the good and bad

Spencer Torkelson. The future of Tiger baseball. An enigmatic player. The guy a lot of people have high hopes on and lots of frustrations with. I wanted to know: is he actually bad? Is it a lot of bad luck or anything there?  Is this who Spencer Torkelson is? So many questions with so much hope that the data will give me some answer. Not all, but some would be great.

We’ve seen his hard hit rate up to 45.2% from 41.8%, his K% is down to 20.9% from 24.5%. Seems like improvements. But he’s also not walking as much, down to 6.0% from 9.2%, wOBA close to last year, .271 in 2023 and .272 in 2022, and his xwOBA only marginally better at .315 from .305.

Time to dive into some data!

Batted Balls

Hard hit

Let’s start with some hard hit data points:

The x-axis shows the actual hard hit rate on the year for players, the y-axis is for what percentage of those hard hits actually dropped for hits. There is an orange dot in the lower right quadrant, which is where Torkelson is. Only 6 qualified batter have had a higher hard hit rate and fewer of those hard hits drop. It wouldn’t seem to suggest that hitting the ball hard is his issue. Then I saw this tweet that inspired the next thought:

Average of -20 degrees and +44 degrees is +12 degrees.

If all your batted balls are at +12 degrees, you’d be the best batter in baseball.

If half your batted balls are at -20 and the other half are at +44, you’d be the worst batter in baseball.

We don’t want average of angles. https://t.co/FEEdFADocq

— Tangotiger 🍁 (@tangotiger) April 30, 2023

Sweet spot

Why did I not think of that? I know Chris did a great job of explaining what the Sweet Spot is on the podcast and in the Discord, but if you still aren’t sure what it is I will try to explain it. The Sweet Spot is the launch angles that most likely end up as hits, regardless of exit velocity. That has been determined to be between 8 degrees and 32 degrees off the bat.

Let’s see how his BIP breakdown by launch angle:

That breakdown isn’t great, but it’s not really bad. A handful of BIP that aren’t really in good spots, but overall nothing terrible. Really, it should be expected that he’s not going to hit the sweet spot all the time. His 35.4% Sweet Spot% is good for 77 out of 173 qualified hitters, on the better side of the middle. Could improve, but not awful.

Hard hit and Sweet Spot

Then I thought that maybe his hard hit balls and his sweet spot aren’t happening frequently. We know that hitting the ball hard is important and we know that the sweet spot allows balls that are maybe not hit as hard to be hits still. Let’s combine them together to get a full on visual of what this all means.

That box on the right — that’s where the sweet spot meets hard hit. Anything on that line or inside would satisfy both criteria. By my count, that’s 24 of his 96 BIP fall in that range, or 25%. On top of that, I set the coloring so that league wOBA, .319, would be the middle point. Anything on the red side of the spectrum has a higher wOBA than .319 and anything blue side is lower. This chart seems to show him having quite a few balls land in the red colored areas, including some that would look to be right on the cusp of being good.

It seemed to be in his favor. I would need to compare this to someone else, though and see for sure. So I went with a player that I’ve seen thrown around as being a reason why we need to be patient with Torkelson: Jarred Kelenic.

Kelenic in this case would be our lighter, lime green. As I waited for the results, I fully expected Kelenic to be the far better hitter here. What I got instead was Kelenic being better, but not as large of a margin as I thought. If I showed you this plot and said one player was a 158 wRC+ hitter with a .394 wOBA and the other a 70 wRC+ hitter with a .271, you might not be able to easily point out which data points would prove who was who.

I noticed looking at his spray chart, he has two hits to the opposite field. Could it be that he is pulling the ball far too much here?

Batted ball location

Through the game on 5/7, he had sent the ball the opposite way 26.9% of the time he’s put it in play (25 out of 93 BIP). Yet two of them landed as hits. Only six of them had an xBA >= 0.300. So that made me look at the EV/LA combinations for opposite field BIP. 32% were hard hit (much lower than his 44.1% across all fields), 32% again were in the Sweet Spot (not far off from his 35.1% across all fields).

Perhaps some of his issues reside here. Not hitting that ball as hard the opposite way surely would result in fewer hits. Still — this represents roughly a quarter of data points. Would help explain some, but not the entire story.

Situational data

Could it be that he’s looking really bad in situational at-bats? Well let’s look at some of that. More specifically I wanted to zero in on close games. How did he do when the tying or winning runs were on-base or at the plate.

Overall I don’t think he’s been too bad here! And yet, expected stats say he should have been even better.

Conclusion

In all, I believe Spencer Torkelson’s 2023 season has been much better than we have seen so far. Some data would certainly suggest he’s not done working on holes in his bat, but he also hasn’t accumulated 600 MLB PA, so it should be expect that a he has work to do. We know he’s hitting the ball harder, striking out less. Hopefully we see more of what he’s had the last few games and he goes on a tear. He certainly needs it.