Riley Greene’s swing is the least of his problems right now

For the first three months of the 2025 season, Detroit Tigers star outfielder Riley Greene was off to the best start of his young career. Now, for most the past three months, Detroit Tigers star outfielder Riley Greene has been struggling. He heated up in August, cut down his strikeouts considerably, and concerns abated. However, in September his production has absolutely collapsed. As the Tigers embark on a difficult assignment to take out the inevitable Cleveland Guardians in Progressive Field in the Wild Card round, getting far without their most dangerous hitter is going to be very tough.

Greene’s slump started long before there was any pressure on the Tigers, but going into a stretch drive as a young player expected to lead his team’s offense and coming up woefully short is a tough place to be. Never a wordsmith with the media, beat writers have made hay from his “it is what it is” quotes to paint him as disinterested and unserious about his game. As a result, the criticism has gone from legitimate concerns about his swing and plate discipline, all the way to outright character assassination. It’s a lot more likely that he just doesn’t know what to say. This is still a young player making the major league minimum and struggling at hitting for probably the first time in his whole life. In front of journalists as in the batter’s box, the Tigers left fielder has largely looked like a deer in the headlights the past few weeks.

Greene simply has never been in this position. In his 25 years of life, baseball has been the center of his existence and he’s never failed. Only rarely has he even struggled for more than a few weeks at a time. Right now, it’s far more plausible that he just doesn’t know how to react or what to say. Rather than working on his PR chops and having a bunch of smooth answers at hand, most would prefer he continue to focus on getting out of this funk. To do that is probably going to take a serious and sudden change in approach, because Riley Greene’s problems are complicated.

Trouble with the heater

A lot of talk has focused on Greene’s uppercut bat path, but there’s nothing new going on with his swing. It’s the same swing that brought him great success. The problem is his approach and timing right now rather than his swing mechanics. Upper-cutting the ball has always been standard practice for good hitters, whether we’re talking Ted Williams, Tony Gwynn, Willie Mays, or Barry Bonds. To have the best chance of squaring up a pitch that is falling toward you, catching it on the upswing is pretty crucial.

There’s plenty of confusion about this because even knowing they are generally hitting the ball on an uppercut swing path, many great hitters still talk about taking a flat path directly to the baseball. This is the difference between feel and real. To avoid dipping their back shoulder too much and getting into extreme uppercut territory with poor extension through the zone, feeling as though they’re taking a flat or even a downward path to the ball rather than a more looping one often helps them drive the ball effectively without falling into extremes.

Of course, the bat path is never a single plane. You have to swing down to swing up, and the great hitters, Miguel Cabrera being the prime example in recent Tigers history, let the ball travel on the outer half and do catch those balls with only a slight uppercut at the end to drive the ball the opposite way on a line. The best contact in that direction produces low angle fly balls with backspin and carry. When they’re on time and catching the ball at the front of the plate, they drive the ball in the air to center field, and then high and deep to the pull field when they catch it out in front of the plate a little more. Obviously that’s where most damage is done, to the pull field in the air.

This is a long topic of it’s own, but it’s just a simple, measurable fact that the best hitters uppercut the ball. One only need look through the list of hitters attack angles to the ball as measured by Statcast to see that the best hitters in the game swing up into the ball to a significant degree just about every time. Greene has a 14 degree average attack angle into the ball. Kerry Carpenter is even steeper at 17 degrees, while Shohei Ohtani and numerous other good power hitters also check in with a steeper angle than Greene.

Where Greene does show that extreme angle is in Swing Path Tilt, which measures the angle the bat is moving 40 milliseconds before impact. At impact, Greene’s final uppercut move as he releases the bat into the ball, defined as “Attack Angle” in Statcast, isn’t unusual, but the tilt measurement says he is dropping his back shoulder and getting steeper to the contact point earlier than anyone in the game. The only player tied with Greene for a 43 degree tilt is Freddie Freeman, with Aaron Judge with the third most. But again, you see why they swing with that much tilt. Many of the best hitters in the game are those who get the barrel down early and working up to the ball the most. Probably Greene could stand to tone it down a little bit, but a radical overhaul in his swing is unwarranted, particularly in the middle of the season.

Greene hasn’t really changed his swing much since draft day, and he’s had a lot of success until things started to go badly in July. His swing mechanics were never going to explain why he’s struggled so much. I think there’s a solid argument that it would help him cover the whole zone more effectively if he dipped his back shoulder a little less and flattened things out a few degrees, but again, his Statcast data shows no notable change in his baseline swing path date throughout this season.

If there’s a major problem with his swing, it’s that he’s just not on time. He’s still seeing plenty of fastballs over the plate, but even when he recognizes them he’s late. He’s swinging the bat like he’s injured or just worn down, and yet his batspeed remains outstanding, and his swing hasn’t gotten longer the way it sometimes does when a hitter is compensating for an injury or some overall sluggishness. Yet pitchers with good fourseamers are just bullying him to a degree we’ve never seen, and it’s making him even prone to chasing breaking balls because he’s whiffing and fouling off too many heaters in the strike zone and trying to compensate by jumping anything soft and down.

Indeed looking through Gameday over the last few weeks, a consistent pattern emerges of Greene fouling off or popping up fourseamers early in counts. Even in some of his long 10-12 pitch at-bats recently, the length of the at-bat is largely because he’s fouling off fastballs over the heart of the plate and just cannot seem to get on time. Whether he needs to get set earlier or just be more selective in what he’s swinging at early in counts is hard to say, but right now pitchers with good fastballs can work him over without much fear of a big mistake unless they hang a breaking ball.

Poor swing decisions are killing Greene’s production

This is kind of a chicken and the egg problem. Is Greene chasing and expanding the zone because he’s missing hittable fastballs and having to try and start his swing sooner? Or is his fading plate discipline getting him into bad counts and forcing him to swing at pitcher’s pitches that he’s just not built to catch up to up in the zone? I suspect it’s the former, but the need to do damage on breaking stuff because he’s getting beat by the heat is probably leading him to chase breakers down in the dirt more than normal too.

Greene has focused on becoming more selective and limiting his chase over the last two seasons. In 2024 he was successful, chasing less, walking more, and generally swinging at better pitches to hit on average. Unfortunately, all that work has evaporated as the 2025 season has progressed, and he now looks a lot more like the free swinging rookie we saw back in 2022 where he did damage at times, but was very inconsistent as well.

Greene’s swinging strike rate is up, his walk rate is back down, his chase rate is the worst of his career, and as a result the strikeouts have gone from mediocre but acceptable for a power hitter at about 27 percent K-rate in 2023 and 2024, up to 30.7 percent in 2025.

Greene is chasing at a 31.3 percent rate, after posting a good chase rate of just 23.1 percent in 2024. The league average is 28.1 percent. Here is your smoking gun. As you might expect just by watching him, Riley Greene’s timing is off, he isn’t seeing the ball well, and it’s leading him to expand the zone and guess on more pitches. That’s a bad recipe. For a few months early this season, it wasn’t slowing him down and he looked like he was developing into a high average, 40 HR threat, but despite trimming his strikeouts some in the second half, he’s become far more pitchable leading to a steep collapse in his average and more importantly, his on-base percentage.

First Half: 397 PA, .284/.335/.544 -31.5 K% 141 wRC+

Second Half: 258 PA, .218/.279/.415 -29.5 K% 90 wRC+

The change pitchers have made probably won’t surprise you at this point. It’s pretty clear if you’ve watched a lot of Tigers baseball this season. Pitchers have thrown 38.5 fourseamers to Greene since July 1. Before that point they threw 32.3 percent fourseamers. Teams see the increased weakness against the high fourseamer, and they’re doing a better job exploiting it. Until he starts making them pay a little more, or is able to lay off the high fastball and force them down in the zone, there’s no real path out of this slump. Not all pitchers are capable of exploiting this certainly, but the Guardians are perfectly built to do so, and the fact that they have a multitude of quality left-handed relievers has them set up to defeat Riley Greene consistently.

RHP Gavin Williams, presumably the Guardians Game 1 starter, is basically the perfect prototype of a pitcher who can comfortably exploit Greene’s issues right now.

Here are Greene’s fourseam heatmaps from the start of the season through June 30, and then from July 1 to today. You’ll see that not only are pitchers going up in the zone more, they’re making a lot fewer mistakes in his hot zone down.

Riley Greene is not going to overhaul his swing in the middle of the season, and there really isn’t reason for any major changes. We’d love to see a little more of a two-strike approach where he shortens up to help him put the high fastball in play more effectively with two strikes. The Tigers in general have struggled with this after doing a much improved job of it in the first half. Still, Greene has been pretty successful despite that weakness until pretty recently.

Greene could try and lower his sightline to the pitcher by sinking into his knee bend more. That might help him track the high fastball better, cuing him that anything that leaves the pitchers hand heading on his sightline or above is either a ball or a strike at the top of the zone that he probably isn’t going to do much with anyway. It might also let him track those pitches down a little better. The other point of emphasis is trying to keep his shoulders a little flatter as he starts his swing rather than dipping his back shoulder quite as hard as he is lately.

However, it’s easy to sit here and make suggestions. There are a lot of moving parts involving his approach and timing, and a completely different adjustment might work better for him. Still, something has to change. If he’s tweaking things and trying some subtle adjustments to get his vision and timing back on track, it’s hard to see them.

Even for the best hitters, sometimes there are stretches where they just aren’t seeing the ball well or their timing is off. But when that goes on for three months it becomes a lot harder to expect them to just snap back into form. Whether the issue is with his timing or his pitch recognition out of the hand and overall approach, or also tied into his swing mechanics a bit, it’s all piling up on Riley Greene right now. He’s pressing and guessing to a degree we haven’t seen from him before.

Greene has to find a way to change things up and break the pattern he’s in right now. If that means taking a ton of pitches and just trying to work counts, so be it. The same old thing isn’t working. If he can do a better job of that, he might put more of the pressure back on opposing pitchers, and get himself some more mistakes to hit.

Until he gets his timing mechanism and discipline back on track, Riley Greene is going to remain very pitchable by pitchers with good riding fourseam fastballs in particular. Those types of power arms tend to be more prevalent on top pitching staffs in the postseason. That puts a tough choice in front of A.J. Hinch, because leaving Greene in the cleanup spot most days and hoping he figures it out hasn’t worked. Yet it’s hard to do much else right now. The Tigers offense is going to have a very hard time getting back on track in the Wild Card round without him.