Jordan Johnson-USA TODAY Sports
Baseball is big business and no team is infinitely patient with players who are struggling. While teams won’t generally describe it in such blunt terms, at the beginning of the season, every player has some unknown, invisible amount of leeway when it comes to poor performance. Established role players and fringe starters who just squeezed their way onto the big league roster in March may find themselves in the Pacific Coast or International League come late April or early May as they feel the heat of a poor start. As summer approaches, the names facing demotion become bigger, especially when those players are younger guys who still have minor league options remaining.
On Sunday night, two of those bigger names ran out of rope, at least for now: Spencer Torkelson and Edouard Julien are headed to Triple-A to play for smaller crowds in smaller towns. Before we examine what this pair of demotions means, I thought I’d put some numbers to the broader phenomena. I looked at the preseason ZiPS projections for players optioned during the season over the last 10 years. In nine of the 10 seasons, June was the month in which the players with the most combined projected WAR were sent to the minors. That holds true on a rate basis as well, with 0.75 projected WAR per June demoted player the highest monthly average.
Naturally, demoted players tend to be worse performers than those who keep their jobs. To use last year as an example, of the 1,091 demotions, only 19 involved players projected for at least 2 WAR. Just one such player, Brayan Bello, was optioned in April, but starting on May 10 with Jose Miranda, bigger demotions started populating the list, with Miranda, David Villar, Oswald Peraza, Brandon Pfaadt, Alek Manoah, Josh Rojas, and Luis Urías all hitting the minors from mid-May through the end of June. Only four two-win players were demoted in July, with Manoah’s second demotion on August 11 the final one.
The usual pattern has held this year. Only a single player project for 2 WAR was optioned in April (Jackson Holliday), but in the last week, six other players — in chronological order, James Outman, Bryce Elder, Jack Suwinski, Reid Detmers, and now Torkelson and Julien — have joined the list. Neither Torkelson nor Julien were fringe players with projections that looked too bullish – rather, they were two players who were expected to play key roles on playoff-relevant teams.
Still, in my eyes, Torkelson’s demotion was easily the more justified of the two. Formerly a top prospect, the Tigers first baseman lost much of that sheen after a brutal 2022. Last season didn’t start much better, but his Statcast numbers were rock-solid and the team’s patience appeared to be paying off when he put up an .855 OPS with 16 homers in August and September, a performance more in line with those measures.
Batting order doesn’t mean much in terms of how many runs a team will score, but where a player hits does reflect a team’s confidence in him, and Torkelson spent most of this April hitting second, third, or fourth in Detroit’s lineup. But he didn’t hit his first home run until the second week of May, and his line didn’t look that different from that rough 2022 season. No player bombs a team single-handedly, but Detroit had genuine reason to hope that the offense was on the upswing, with Torkelson and Riley Greene better established, Colt Keith in the lineup, and veterans like Gio Urshela and Mark Canha there to keep the lows from getting too low.
Detroit has hung around .500 despite the offense ranking 24th in baseball (95 wRC+) on the strength of their front-end pitching. While that be enough to keep a team competitive in the Central most years, the Guardians have won nearly two-thirds of their games, and both the Twins and (more surprisingly) the Royals have decent cushions on the Tigers. Sure, Detroit is lapping the White Sox, but that’s no more satisfying in 2024 than beating your five-year-old nephew at arm wrestling.
Unlike last year, there’s no happy underlying Statcast story that predicts a hot second half for Torkelson. A slugger with a hard-hit rate under 40% and a barrel rate under 5% can hardly be considered much of a slugger at all. How brutal are his overall Statcast numbers? Based on the Statcast data, ZiPS thinks that Torkelson should be hitting .203/.278/.292 this season, which is somehow even bleaker than his actual .201/.266/.330 line.
Like every movie based on a video game in the 1990s, Torkelson has earned his awfulness on merit this year. It’s difficult to be a good power hitter if you can’t hit a fastball, and Tork’s hitting .179 and slugging .292 against the hard stuff. If the “what” is easy, the why is harder. Torkelson’s bat speed remains in the 80th percentile, while his plate discipline numbers are essentially unchanged. The seeds of his struggles might be found a little deeper: a significant drop in his sweet spot rate (six percentage points), leading to more sad popups and lazy flies.
The Tigers will give Torkelson every chance to show he can still be a big part of the team’s plans, but he’ll do so as a Mud Hen for now. The updated ZiPS projections show Torkelson losing about 0.7 WAR a year since the start of 2024:
- 2025: .236/.315/.444, 2.0 WAR
- 2026: .238/.318/.446, 2.1 WAR
- 2027: .243/.324/.454, 2.4 WAR
- 2028: .241/.324/.449, 2.2 WAR
- 2029: .241/.325/.446, 2.1 WAR
That’s a drop-off from a projected 124 OPS+ in 2025 to a 110. While he still forecasts to be a real major leaguer again, there’s little margin for error, and stardom feels a lot more elusive than it did just two months ago. We now come to the Edouard Julien portion of the proceedings, and I’m far more grumbly here than I was about Torkelson.
At .207/.309/.367, Julien certainly isn’t matching his .263/.381/.459 line from last year, but then, nobody projected him to match his rookie line. With the drop-off on offense, that line amounts to a 99 wRC+, quite respectable for a second baseman. Among the 27 players this year to get 100 PA while playing second base, Julien is right in the middle of the pack in terms of WAR, at 13th of the 27. He’s also improved defensively at second, with a +4 OAA there through two months.
Unlike Torkelson, ZiPS sees Julien’s Statcast data implying better results than his actual line so far, with a zOPS of .717 compared to his actual .676. His defensive improvement — ZiPS was very skeptical about him at second — actually balances out the slight decline in his offensive outlook, and as a result, he’s still projected for the same 2025 WAR as he was back in March:
- 2025: .234/.353/.382, 3.3 WAR
- 2026: .234/.353/.387, 3.5 WAR
- 2027: .233/.353/.385, 3.5 WAR
- 2028: .229/.350/.380, 3.5 WAR
