One more Baez replacement candidate, durrently in AA so it would be a big jump to Detroit.
Next in line is the farm’s big 2024 event: Gage Workman at Double-A Erie. And pay close attention to what is happening here.
Workman, 24, was a fourth-round pick by the Tigers in 2020 after he played third base at Arizona State, across the diamond from Sun Devils first baseman Spencer Torkelson.
It was thought, by scouts even outside Detroit, that Workman could easily play an excellent big-league shortstop — if his abundant athleticism followed suit.
That has been the case.
Workman’s arm, hands, and range are all above-average. He has made a few errors this spring, but those have been written off by seasoned eyes as quirky miscues. Workman is an excellent defender.
What has changed, and has suddenly launched him into the picture in Detroit, is his once-ballyhooed bat.
Workman looked last year to be perhaps on his way out of baseball as strikeouts reached the 40% range and sabotaged the power a man 6-foot-4 and 200 pounds naturally could bring.
So, he went to work on a couple of heavy changes:
Workman stopped fiddling around as a switch-hitter. He went with his natural left-handed swing, exclusively. Big, big moment there in turning around a very good overall baseball player.
He did some work also with his left-handed attack (dropping a leg-kick, adding a toe-tap) and that has helped in producing these heavy numbers that were on display ahead of Sunday’s game at Erie: .293 batting average, a whopping .394 on-base average, with a .522 slugging percentage factoring in a gaudy .916 OPS.
Workman had four homers, seven doubles, and a triple in his 26 games. Most dramatically, his strikeout rate had dropped to 22.9%, with walks at 13.8%.
The analytics crowd could see also a wRC+ of 159 and an ISO of .228.
Those are sky-high numbers not to be considered in any way hollow or illusory.
They have failed to draft, or sign internationally, a shortstop who would have precluded the Báez bomb. Willy Adames could have and should have been that man, but he was dispensed in 2014 as part of the trade package that brought David Price to Detroit.
The Rays knew what they were getting in Adames. The Tigers figured they’d deal with shortstop in time.
Ten years later, they’re dealing with it, all right — in a blunder known as Javier Báez.
Shortstop and catcher offer the Tigers as evidence of how difficult it is to fill the two toughest positions on a big-league roster.
Báez will remind them of this through the next three years, at least as payroll goes.
