Spencer Torkelson and Edouard Julien optioned to Triple-A

Baseball is big business and no team has infinite patience for struggling players. While teams usually won't describe it in such blunt terms, at the start of the season, every player has an unknown, invisible amount of leeway when it comes to poor performance. Deaf players and rookies who just entered 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 bad start. As the summer approaches, the names facing cuts are growing, especially if those players are minor leaguers who still have minor league options left. On Sunday night, two of those big names are out, at least for now: Spencer Torkelson and Edouard Julien are headed to Triple-A to play for small crowds in small towns.

Before we delve into what this pair of drops means, I thought I'd put the numbers in broad perspective. I looked at preseason ZiPS projections for players selected during the season over the past 10 years. In nine out of 10 seasons, June was the month when the players with the highest combined ERA were sent to the minors. That's true on average as well, with 0.75 WAR projected for each June dropped player being the highest monthly average. Naturally, laid-off players tend to do worse than those who keep their jobs. Using last year as an example, of the 1,091 layoffs, only 19 affected players were scheduled for at least 2 WAR. Just one such player, Brayan Bello, was selected in April, but since May 10 with Jose Miranda, major cuts began to fill the roster, with Miranda, David Villar, Oswald Peraza, Brandon Pfaadt, Alek Manoah, Josh Rojas, and Luis Urías. they all hit the kids from the middle of May until the end of June. Only four two-time winners were demoted in July, and Manoah was demoted for the second time on August 11 for the final time.

The general pattern holds this year. Only one player was selected for the 2 WAR project in April (Jackson Holliday), but last week, six other players – in chronological order, James Outman, Bryce Elder, Jack Suwinski, Reid Detmers, and now Torkelson and Julien – have four. joined the list.

Neither Torkelson nor Julien were the best-looking young players — rather, they were two players who were expected to play significant roles on playoff-bound teams. However, in my eyes, Torkelson's demotion was justified for both of these reasons. Once a top prospect, the Tigers first baseman lost a lot of that star after a brutal 2022. Last season didn't get off to the best start, but his Statcast numbers were solid and the team's patience seemed to pay off as he stepped up. .855 OPS with 16 homers in August and September, a performance very much in line with those ratings. The batting order doesn't say much about how many runs a team will score, but where a player hits shows the team's trust in him, and Torkelson has spent much of April batting 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 lineup doesn't look any different in that tough 2022 season.

No one player is a standout, but Detroit had real reason to hope the offense continues, with Torkelson and Riley Greene now more established, Colt Keith in the lineup, and veterans like Gio Urshela and Mark Canha there to keep the game going. to go down from being too low. Detroit is hanging around .500 despite an offense that ranks 24th in baseball (95 wRC+) in terms of their pitching power. While that's been enough to keep the team competitive in the Central for years, the Rangers have won nearly two-thirds of their games, and both the Twins and (more surprisingly) the Royals have decent streaks on the Tigers. Sure, Detroit plays the White Sox, but that's no more satisfying in 2024 than beating your five-year-old nephew at wrestling.

Unlike last year, there isn't a happy story under Statcast predicting a hot second half for Torkelson. A slugger with a slugging rate of less than 40% and a barrel rate of less than 5% would not be considered a slugger at all. How brutal are his overall Statcast numbers? Based on Statcast data, ZiPS thinks Torkelson should hit .203/.278/.292 this season, which is somewhat worse than his actual .201/.266/.330 line. Like every movie based on a video game in the 1990s, Torkelson got his due this year. It's hard to be a good power hitter if you can't hit the fastball, and Tork is hitting .179 and slugging .292 against tight ends. If “what” is easy, why is it difficult. Torkelson's batting average remains in the 80th percentile, while his plate numbers are unchanged. The seeds of his struggles may be found a little deeper: a significant drop in his sweet spot rate (six percent), which leads to miserable appearances and lazy flies.

The Tigers will give Torkelson every opportunity to show he can still be a big part of the team's plans, but he will do so as a Mud Hen for now. ZiPS's updated projections show Torkelson losing about 0.7 WAR per year starting in 2024:

That's a drop from a projected 124 OPS+ in 2025 to 110. Although he still predicts that he will become a real big player again, there are few mistakes, and popularity feels much more difficult than it did two months ago.

Now we come to Edouard Julien's part of the process, and I'm complaining more here than I was about Torkelson. And I'm not just saying that because my colleague Davy Andrews' little Julien earworm is the third most listened to baseball-related song in my music library, after Belle and Sebastian. Piazza, New York Catcher and Jonathan Coulton Kenesaw Mountain Landis. At .207/.309/.367, Julien certainly didn't match his .263/.381/.459 line from last year, but then, no one predicted that he would match his rookie line. On offense, that line equates to a 99 wRC+, 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 27. He also improved defensively at second, with a +4 OAA there by using two. months.

Unlike Torkelson, ZiPS sees Julien's Statcast data showing better results than his actual line so far, with a zOPS of .717 compared to his actual .676. His defensive improvement — ZiPS was highly skeptical of him the second time around — actually accounts for a slight decline in his offensive outlook, and as such, he's still slated for the same 2025 WAR that he returned in March:

No, Julien probably won't even hit a high batting average, but this is a .240 league, not a late 90's .270 league. That's a very good guess and the player you want on the roster, not riding buses to the middle cities in June.

In other words, Julien wasn't relegated to being one of the worst players in baseball this year, but simply for being a mediocre second baseman. Julien's been struggling lately, but “last month” is a pretty rough guess. And yes, the returning Royce Lewis plays the infield and the team's players are mostly veterans with no options left. But I don't see that as a compelling argument to demote Julien, and it's very conservative behavior for a team looking at two teams in the division. If you're not happy with Julien's 99 wRC+ this year, the team's current first baseman, Carlos Santana, has hit even worse over a five-year stretch, with a 94 wRC+ since the start of 2020. Sanana is also 38 years old. nor does it have close defensive value. Kyle Farmer's struggled to keep his OPS above .500, and Manuel Margot hit .209/.274/.264 out of a less-than-ideal role last year as a left fielder. None of these players are part of Minnesota's future, and they aren't doing much yet.

“But Dan, they all have big contracts!” So? You have to pay them no matter what, so the most important thing is whether they help you win baseball games or not. Just because you paid $15 for a cheeseburger you fumbled in a muddy puddle on the road doesn't mean you're obligated to finish it. The twins should rather pay Santana $3.5 million to go fishing or golf or hit the Marlins cleanup, same with Farmer and Margot. Julien may not match his 2023 production, but he is the player who gives the Twins the best chance to land the Royals and Guardians, and he will be playing for the St. Paul Saints for at least the next week or two.

The AL Central race probably doesn't hinge on whether or not Julien starts for a few weeks in June, but it's a very disappointing decision. For now, Willi Castro will likely start most of the second, but it sounds like with a little more thought, the Twins could have kept Julien, gotten playing time for both Castro and Miranda, and left the team with more roster space. up.

Maybe June, not April, is that brutal month, at least in baseball.