This story originally came from Jeff Seidel of the Detroit Free Press, who is down in Lakeland for Spring Training.
I try not to put too much emphasis on spring training. In general, every pitcher looks good in spring. They haven’t pitched in four months. Of course, stuff is going to look sharp. Every hitter is probably going to arrive in camp in pretty good shape. This is just how things work. So I remain skeptical about the heavy amount of swing and miss that exists in Riley Greene‘s game, but I am pleased to see that there’s at least an attempt being made to cut down on the strikeouts. Riley famously said last season that he didn’t care much about strikeouts. This quote was plastered all over social media after the Tigers experienced their September collapse a year ago.
While Riley’s counting totals were among the best of his career last season, as a whole, he was not nearly as valuable as he proved himself to be in 2024. It’s not just the strikeouts with Riley; it’s more so the chasing. I bring it up all the time, but there are a lot of great players in Major League Baseball who strike out at an above-average rate, but they often make up for it by drawing walks and hitting for power. Riley has proven himself to be a guy who can slug the baseball, but his on-base percentage in the second half of a year ago was below .300. The swing decisions and knowledge of the strike zone simply have to improve if he wants to put himself amongst the game's elite.
Riley‘s approach to cutting down on the strikeout seems pretty simple. He’s trying to avoid hitting home runs every single at-bat and spent a lot of time in the offseason making himself uncomfortable. It doesn’t guarantee success, but I think that’s the proper way to go around it. Riley Greene is a guy who has proven that he can hit mistakes. As weird as his swing looks, the bat does tend to stay in the zone for a long time, and when he makes contact, the ball is gonna find the barrel. But as we saw in the second half of last season, when you face good pitching, you’re not going to get a lot of mistakes, and opposing teams would either feed Riley a heavy dose of breaking balls, use a left-hander out of the bullpen, or both.
I got accused of picking on Riley Greene a little bit too much last season. But I’m hard on the ones I believe in, and Riley Greene's ceiling is far and away the highest of any established player currently on the Tigers roster. This is going to be a massive year for him. No one is going to call Riley Greene a bust or disappointment, but I think there is a belief that he has the potential to be a franchise player, and I don’t feel comfortable putting that label on somebody who’s going to strikeout 200 times a season. If he can maintain that consistency while still putting up the counting totals that he did a year ago, he could end up being one of the most dangerous hitters in baseball. Only time will tell.