MILWAUKEE — Riley Greene didn’t start Tuesday.
In a change from the first 21 games this season, the Detroit Tigers‘ 22-year-old center fielder — stuck in a slump — opened the second of three games against the Milwaukee Brewers at American Family Field sitting on the bench.
And yet, his positive demeanor in the clubhouse around the team, both before and after the game, didn’t change.
Manager A.J. Hinch put Greene’s struggles into perspective.
“He’s a young kid,” Hinch said before Tuesday’s 4-3 win. “We’ve got to ride this wave of not being perfect and not being at his best all the time. … I know much was said about him coming up, and we think he’s going to be a tremendous player, and we trust him. We trust him to do the work behind the scenes to get in a better position in the batter’s box. It’s only a matter of time.”
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Greene, the 2019 No. 5 overall pick, entered Tuesday’s game in the eighth inning as a defensive replacement — keeping his streak of playing in all 22 games alive — and received an at-bat, leading off the ninth inning.
Three pitches in, on a 1-1 changeup from right-hander Peter Strzelecki, the left-handed hitter pulled a weak grounder to the right side of the infield.
In 22 games, Greene is hitting .221 with two home runs, seven walks and 33 strikeouts — the most in the American League. It has been particularly rough since the first week of the season; over his past 16 games, he has a .175 average with one homer, five walks and 25 strikeouts.
Is it time for a change? Greene doesn’t think so.
“I’m in a good position to pull the trigger in the box,” he said before Tuesday’s game. “I’m just going to try to stay confident (mentally) and trust my swing and trust in my ability to hit and grind it out.”
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But there are problems.
His ground-ball rate — 58.5% — remains way too high and could be the product of mechanical issues with his left-handed swing against pitches on the inner half of the plate, especially when considering the bevy of pull-side ground balls.
Greene has sent 19 of his 53 balls in play to the right side of the field this season. Of those 19, 15 have been ground balls (78.9%), one was a fly ball (5.3%) and the rest were line drives (15.8%).
“Maybe like a week ago, or two weeks ago, there were some times where I was worried about elevating the ball, and I was trying to do it with my body,” Greene said. “I was really tilting and trying to swing up and get the ball in the air. That’s where I was really missing balls. I found that and was like, ‘All right, we gotta get back to the normal, maybe a line drive over the shortstop’s head instead of a homer.’ I’m working through it.”
The 80% ground-ball rate on pull-side balls in play is alarming. For a comparison, fellow second-year Tiger Spencer Torkelson, a righty hitter, has a 53.6% ground-ball rate on pull-side balls in play; Houston Astros All-Star Kyle Tucker, a lefty hitter like Greene, is at 40.7%.
For Greene’s entire 115-game career, spanning 511 plate appearances, he owns a 74.5% ground-ball rate on pull-side balls in play.
He also has hit 11 balls in play to the left side of the field and 23 balls up the middle this season; on those, he has a 27.3% ground-ball rate the opposite way and a 56.5% ground-ball rate to the middle.
“It just comes down to not missing a mistake,” Greene said. “That’s what it comes down to. I’ve been missing the mistakes, and you’re not going to get a pitch after that you really want to drive. In spring, I wasn’t missing anything. And you get to here, and you start missing them, and you got to try to just grind back into the count. … It just comes down to not missing those pitches.”
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Missing hittable pitches is arguably the biggest part of Greene’s struggles, and certainly the biggest difference between his 2022 and 2023 seasons. He hit .298 with an 82.4% contact rate on pitches inside the strike zone last season.
This season, Greene is hitting .246 with a 76.7% contact rate on pitches inside the strike zone.
That signals a potential timing issue.
“He’s swinging a lot, and he likes to swing,” Hinch said. “He is missing some balls in the zone that he normally hits, and consequently, that adds to some of the outs. And he won’t always do that. He’s too good of a hitter and too fluid of an athlete to not make adjustments. He’s going to do that.”
Here’s the good news: Greene reminded everyone on Tuesday — one day after a mental mistake on the bases cost the Tigers a run in the third inning — that he’s a team-first player.
Greene backed up his words with his actions.
He sprinted from the dugout to center field when his name was called as a defensive replacement in the eighth inning. He hustled to first base on the grounder to second base in the ninth inning. He celebrated the one-run victory with his teammates in the clubhouse.
“My goal is to help,” Greene said. “I don’t care if I strike out. If I walk and score, I help the team. That’s my goal at the end of the day. And I get pissed when I do things that don’t help the team. I’m not pissed at myself. I’m pissed that I couldn’t help the team in that situation. That’s where I get angry.”
Contact Evan Petzold at epetzold@freepress.com or follow him on Twitter @EvanPetzold.