Roughly a month’s worth of the 2024 season is now in the books. The American League East looks great. The Brewers and Guardians are standing up for the Central divisions. The White Sox can only beat the Rays, and the Astros somehow can’t beat anyone. Enough time has passed that I feel confident saying all of those things. On the other hand, it still feels too early to be certain about which players are over- or under-performing. But that doesn’t mean our opinions can’t change a bit. There’s enough data to make some educated guesses, so let’s put on our speculation caps. Yesterday, I looked at four players — two hitters and two pitchers — who have gone up in my estimation. Today, I’m examining the other side of the ledger.
Spencer Torkelson, 1B, Detroit Tigers
Torkelson is going to end up giving FanGraphs analysts whiplash. We loved him as a prospect, then he started slow and we adjusted our expectations down. Then he got hot at the tail end of last year and made a raftload of loud contact; both Dan Szymborski and I were high on him again coming into 2024. Now he’s off to one of the worst starts in baseball, and I’m back out. Two things have changed my view. First, Torkelson’s approach at the plate has regressed. I’ve generally liked his swing decisions; he looks for something to drive and doesn’t chase breaking balls. But his swing rate in the heart of the strike zone is down meaningfully this year, and he’s not drawing walks at a rate that makes that sacrifice work out for him. If you’re going to be passive over the heart of the plate, you better absolutely crush the ball when you do swing, or at least possess a Soto-level batting eye so that pitchers are either tempting fate or walking you. Right now, Torkelson isn’t doing either of those things.
Quality of Contact
When it comes to the quality of his contact, the easiest way for me to get my point across is with Baseball Savant’s percentile tool, because it paints a broad picture in this case. Here’s what that looked like for him in 2023: Lots of red on important things like barrel rate, hard-hit rate, xSLG, and so on. Average exit velocity isn’t a great statistic, but that’s what we have on here. As an additional point of comparison, the average exit velocity of his top 50% of batted balls was 102.7 mph. Now, here’s 2024: That top 50% EV is down below 100 mph this year. The thump just isn’t there. Now, I don’t think that all of this decline is real. Torkelson isn’t going to run a 10% line drive rate all year. His barrel rate will almost certainly increase; his big issue right now seems to be that he’s getting under the ball too frequently, and those kinds of timing problems ebb and flow throughout the season. But Torkelson isn’t a great player if he ends up back where he was last year. He put up a 107 wRC+, with underlying batted ball data that suggested he might be in the 115-125 region with better in-play luck. That kind of batting line at first base is basically an average player. That’s not what the Tigers are hoping for, and it’s a big change from the potential All-Star bat he looked like as a prospect. The only real way around it would be for Torkelson to go full Carlos Santana and start walking his way to value. But while he has a good batting eye, he doesn’t have that kind of eye. The path forward relies on power, and my expectations for that power have declined significantly this season.
J.T. Realmuto, C, Philadelphia Phillies
I’m not happy to be writing this blurb. I find Realmuto’s game delightful. The steals! The defense! Somehow being a good hitter despite all that. He’s been underrated for years, the best catcher in the game since his full-time debut in 2015, and I don’t think he’s regarded that way. But sadly, it’s starting to look like those days are gone. Last season was Realmuto’s worst since his 2015 rookie campaign. “Variance,” I told myself. “Could happen to anyone.” He struck out more, walked less, and got up to a league average batting line only because he still hits for good power. His defensive and baserunning value each declined sharply. He graded out as one of the worst receivers in baseball last year, and while that’s a noisy statistic, it constituted a big drop from when he was one of the best in the game in the preceding half decade. He went from being perhaps the best catcher at limiting opposing baserunners to merely average. A month into this season, none of these indicators have bounced back.
Michael King, SP, San Diego Padres
Before the year, we projected King as one of the best starters on the Padres, neck and neck with Dylan Cease and Joe Musgrove (also awful so far!) on a per-inning basis. It’s not hard to see what went wrong with King: all of his pitches look worse, and his command isn’t as good either. He averaged 95.1 mph on his fastball when he started for the Yankees last year, but that’s down to 93.1 so far as a Padre. He’s getting less movement on it despite a slower speed; you’d expect more. His sweeper lost two inches of run. He’s added a hard slider, but it hasn’t done much good. And his command is meaningfully less sharp. Chalk this one up to the dangers of forecasting.
