Gleyber Torres tried to swing in the cage on Saturday, but the discomfort in his left side came back, and the Tigers still do not know when their top-of-the-order bat will return. Torres has not played since May 2 and was placed on the injured list May 4 with a left oblique strain.
The setback matters because Detroit has not found a way to replace what Torres gives it. The Tigers entered Sunday’s doubleheader against the Orioles in a 2-15 skid, and their offense has gone flat without him, averaging 2.4 runs per game since he went out. They have been hitting under.200 as a group during the slump, produced seven hits or less in nine games before Sunday, and gone 15 for 115 with runners in scoring position since May 4. Eight of those games came with no hits in those spots.
Torres said he will rest Sunday and Monday and try swinging again Tuesday. He said he hopes next week they can start playing rehab games, but he sounded worn down by how long the recovery has taken. “It’s been awful,” Torres said. “Being here is not fun.” He added that he thought the absence would be brief but that it has dragged on, and called the situation frustrating because the injury is not fully healed and even normal activity still hurts. “Whatever I do is painful,” he said.
That is the friction inside the story: the Tigers need Torres back, but the injury is not letting him simply push through it. He said he has been able to play through pain in the past, yet this time the strain is different. For now, the club is left to keep scrambling around an offense that has not produced enough consistent contact or traffic on the bases to make up for what it lost at the top.
Manager AJ Hinch said Torres changes more than one lineup spot because of his presence, on-base skills and steady at-bats. “Everything changes when you lose someone with Gleyber’s presence,” Hinch said. “And we have to overcome that. We need somebody to get hot. We need somebody to get on base more often to start creating more good things.” He called that kind of production a stable part of the order, the sort of thing that settles a team when the rest of the lineup is searching.
The Tigers know the calendar now matters as much as the standings. They do not just need Torres healthy; they need him healthy soon enough to matter to an offense that has spent most of this stretch chasing one timely hit after another. Torres put it plainly: “We’ve got a special group right here but things aren’t going our way right now.”
Detroit’s next step is not dramatic. It is a swing on Tuesday, then the hope of rehab games next week, then a decision about whether the pain has finally eased enough for a return. Until then, the Tigers are trying to stop a skid without the hitter they were counting on to steady the top of the lineup.
