David Laurila’s weekly note column contains a conversation with Mickey Tettleton about Tigers prospect Spencer Torkelson:

I asked Templeton if Torkelson — already the consensus top hitting prospect in the Tigers system — reminds him of anybody he played with.

“Power-wise, I’d have to go back to Dean Palmer,” responded Tettleton. “I don’t know if you’ve been to Chatham, but you’d watch [Torkelson] take batting practice, and you’d think, ‘Man, this is a fly ball,’ and it would end up three quarters of the way up in the trees. He’s just got tremendous raw power. He’s a very intelligent college hitter [Arizona State] that just happens to have a world of talent swinging the bat.”

The Palmer comp is even more eye-opening when you consider an opinion Tettleton had shared with me a few minutes earlier. When I suggested that Cecil Fielder must have had the most-impressive power among his former teammates, Tettleton said it actually wasn’t. It was Palmer.

FanGraphs.com

Palmer owned a career isolated power of .221, and I will note that his career pretty much spanned the PED era. As we have seen in recent years, the players of the 1990s could have done the same thing with better launch angles. Fielder’s isolated power stood at .227, so I am with Laurila on being the more impressive power hitter.

Laurila also mentions the idea of the Calvinball loss. It’s another reason that wins and losses should be attributed just to teams, not to pitchers.