When the Tigers acquired Isaac Paredes at the 2017 trade deadline, they were hoping for a middle-of-the-order bat on a future playoff team. That’s what they got. The team just isn’t theirs.
“He’s been traded for twice, so we can’t be dumb for trading for him the first time and dumb for trading him the second time,” A.J. Hinch said Wednesday on the Stoney & Jansen Show. “You either have your mapped-out plan or not.”
Paredes was in the Tigers’ plans as recently as last season. Now he’s a pain in their past, beyond the two homers he hit against them earlier this season. “That sucked,” said Hinch. Every homer he hits for the Rays is another punch to the Tigers’ rebuild, another shot to their player development system. And these are haymakers, left-field bombs that would fly over the fences even at Comerica Park.
“He’s had a tremendous first half,” said Hinch. “We always evaluate what we’ve seen in players while they’re under our watch and then when they go somewhere else and what they do. Number one is, we knew Isaac Paredes was a good player. Before I got here, how hyped up he was. He’d come up a couple different times. He had never hit for power. So to me, the curiosity is, what did they unlock that allowed him to hit for that pull power? It’s mostly all pull power down the left field line.”
Paredes hit his first two homers of the season in one game against the Tigers in May, matching his total in 57 games with his former team. He’s up to 13 bombs over this stretch, tied for second in the American League with Mike Trout and Yordan Alvarez. He’s fourth in the AL over the same span in wRC+, sandwiched between Jose Abreu and Rafael Devers. On the season, the 23-year-old has the exact same at-bat/homer pace as MLB home run leader Aaron Judge.
The Tigers dealt Paredes to the Rays in April for a proven big-league slugger in Austin Meadows, who’s yet to start slugging through an injury-plagued start in Detroit.
“When we came to the end of the spring and lost Riley Greene, the offensive need was very real and we had a chance to get a middle-of-the-order bat who’d hit a ton of home runs in Tampa," said Hinch. "Al (Avila) and I talked about it and we did it.
"Now, we didn’t think that Paredes was a wash-out. You don’t try to win the trade by giving them somebody bad and getting somebody good. They’re smart, too. But it makes you think about how we didn’t untap the power. And I think that’s where we look internally and (ask), what did we see, what did we not see?”
Everyone sees a different hitter in Paredes this season. Hinch also sees a different swing. By aiming to pull the ball more, Paredes has dramatically increased his barrel rate and hard-hit rate from last season. He hit seven balls with an exit velo of 100+ mph last year. He’s hit 22 of them this year. He never hit a ball with an exit velo of 110+ mph in parts of two seasons with the Tigers. He’s already hit four of them with the Rays.
“I think we have to figure out, was it something as simple as changing his sightline and trying to get him to pull the ball more?” said Hinch. “With our organization, he carved the ball a little bit more, tried to be a good hitter. He wanted to hit .300, wanted an OPS in the .800's by getting doubles.
"He looks like he’s launching to left field way more than I saw here. Even some of the balls last year with us, he’d swing as hard as he could and hit the ball to the warning track. For whatever reason, he didn’t barrel balls or hit balls over 100 mph exit velo, which is generally those guys that hit the ball out of the park."
Paredes isn’t hitting .300 with the Rays. He entered Wednesday at .257. Nor does he have an OPS in the .800’s. Try .902. He has emerged as the heaviest hitter on a team that’s pushing toward its fourth straight trip to the playoffs. The Tigers don’t have a heavy hitter to speak of amid their sixth straight losing season, though rookie Riley Greene sure looks like one. And while hopes remain high for Spencer Torkelson, the organization’s track record of identifying and developing hitters is spotty at best.
“I would disagree that we haven’t developed players,” said Hinch. “We have a number of homegrown guys on this team. Drafting in the Rule 5 for (Akil) Baddoo, that was pretty smart. And developing the young kids that we’ve had, the right picks at the top of the draft with Riley and Tork, Willi Castro is developing right in front of our eyes, even if it’s going to be a utility player.”
Baddoo is currently in Triple-A. Castro’s ceiling is what it is. Torkelson was a no-brainer draft pick at No. 1, Greene was pretty close to it at No. 5. Paredes was once the Tigers’ top hitting prospect, flashing his talent at the Futures Game on All-Star Weekend in 2019. He announced himself in the bigs a year later with a go-ahead grand slam against Cleveland in his fourth MLB game, a missile over the high left field wall at Progressive Field. It looked like a swing that would play in the majors.
Two years later, it looks like the swing the Tigers should have developed.