Riley Greene has never seen the ball like this before. You never know how someone will react to their first postseason experience – players have been known to press or freeze up – but Greene has done no such thing. He’s chasing pitches outside the strike zone about as frequently as he did in the regular season. Meanwhile, he’s locked in when pitchers challenge him. He’s swinging at 85% of pitches in the strike zone, up from about 66% during the regular season. And when he gets one right down the middle, he’s going for it: He’s taken 13 swings at 15 such pitches, also an 85% swing rate, up from 73% before October.
Just one problem: Greene is hitting .133/.278/.200 in the playoffs. He’s walking at about the same clip, and his strikeouts are barely down. Meanwhile, his power has completely disappeared. He has one extra-base hit, a double. He hasn’t barreled up a single ball. His bat speed is down two ticks from the regular season, and down nearly 2.5 mph from his second-half mark. He’s making more weak contact and less hard contact. These things don’t quite make sense together. Are we looking at a fluke of batted ball luck or a trend?
Now, let’s be honest with ourselves. It’s probably at least partly a fluke of batted ball luck. We’re talking about four games here, 18 plate appearances. You’re not supposed to read too much into samples that small, and if you do, you should focus on the most stable indicators you can find. On-base percentage? Slugging? Heck, strikeout rate? We haven’t seen nearly enough to take those at face value. But I do think something’s wrong, so I thought I’d dig a little deeper.
I’ll tell you right away, the bat speed bit I mentioned was a red herring. Bat speed and swing length are correlated to hit direction: pulled batted balls come from swings that meet the ball out in front of the plate, with generally longer swing lengths and faster swing speeds. That’s just physics. Here are Greene’s batted balls this postseason:
Want to register lower bat speed? Start going oppo with everything. I watched all of those swings to get an idea of what’s going on here. Some of them are just Greene being a good hitter. Here he is in a 1-2 count against Tanner Bibee:
That’s great work. With two strikes, he both shortened up and waited on his swing for a better chance at pitch identification. It’s hard to turn around a 94-mph fastball on the outer third, so he didn’t try to; he just stayed on plane and “hit the ball where it was pitched,” to use coaching parlance. This Matthew Boyd sinker on the other hand:
That’s a slower pitch, in an easier location, in a friendlier count. Greene didn’t post his best professional season by shooting balls like that the other way; he sprayed them to all fields with authority, particularly when he didn’t have his back against the wall. But, well, he also hit them the other way sometimes. He just got better results:
I picked that clip to show the inherent difficulty of evaluating hitters based on a small sample. Those two swings are strikingly similar. They both came on 91-mph fastballs that were just off of dead center. They both came in even counts, when Greene could hunt a pitch to hit. His swing against Boyd makes me think he was expecting something soft and then adjusted to a fastball. I’m not sure I would have made that choice against Boyd, who started lefties with fastballs more than half the time this year, but I can understand the thinking.
While I was able to find other times that Greene poked a fastball the other way to great success, I do think there’s something here. Small sample or no, not enough data to stabilize notwithstanding, it’s just true that Greene is sending the ball the opposite way far more frequently in the last four games than he usually does. Maybe it’s related to the way he’s being pitched.
Greene has faced two lefty starters and some lefty relievers already. A third of the pitches he’s seen have come with a platoon disadvantage, far higher than his career rate. That puts him on the defensive right from the start; like pretty much every lefty, he hits worse and pulls the ball less frequently against same-handed pitching. It gets a bit weirder from there.
There’s a general pitching rule that any youth coach can tell you: hard in and soft away. It refers to attacking hitters with fastballs inside and then secondary pitches that break away from them, to the outside edge of the plate or even outside. It’s hard to do that every time in practice, but as a general rule, most pitchers follow it. Here’s where the fastballs Greene saw this regular season were located:
And here are all the fastballs he’s seen in the playoffs:
To put it another way, 15% of the fastballs Greene faced in the regular season were strikes in the inner third of the zone. In the playoffs, he’s seen 39 fastballs. Exactly one of those has been on the inner third, and that was a demon cutter from Emmanuel Clase that dotted the inner edge at 101 and broke Greene’s bat. Normally, Greene feasts on these pitches.
He doesn’t whiff often, makes a ton of hard contact, and slugs .691 when he puts the ball in play. He’s not getting a chance to do that so far, and I imagine that has made for a difficult adjustment. To make matters even more confusing, pitchers are venturing inside with secondary pitches at double the rate they did in the regular season. Lefties are front-dooring him with sliders, while righties are throwing them to his back foot, or at least attacking the inside edge to keep him guessing when he leans out looking for fastballs.
It’s way too early to say that this is the way to beat Greene. Again, it’s been four games. Change the batted ball luck just slightly, or let him catch that Boyd sinker just a tiny bit more flush, and we might be talking about how he’s adapting to the way he’s pitched and punishing pitchers for their unconventional approach. But none of that has happened, and honestly, I don’t think he’s figured out how to handle it yet.
Here’s the good news for Tigers fans: Riley Greene is a superstar and a hitting genius. If he could be defeated by a simple tactic like locating fastballs somewhere else, he wouldn’t have popped 24 homers and slugged .479 in cavernous Comerica Park, a field that’s a miserable 16% below average when it comes to lefty home runs. If you show Greene the same look for a week straight, it’s a pretty good bet that he’ll adjust to it. When you watch Greene bat today, keep an eye on where the fastballs are. If the past few games are any indication, they’ll largely be up and away. And if they are, it’s Greene’s job to make the opposition pay, either by punching them the other way like he did against Bibee or by hammering the ones that leak over the middle of the plate.
So far, he hasn’t been up to the task. But it’s only a matter of time before he figures it out. The only question is whether it will happen in time to rescue Detroit’s moribund offense, which has scored fewer than three runs a game this October. He’ll have to adjust quickly – or hope for some more Tarik Skubal shutouts to give him more time to learn.
