This player is responsible for more than a quarter of Tigers' offense

Detroit Tigers designated hitter Riley Greene.

The fourth-place Detroit Tigers average 3.91 runs per game — the 10th-worst figure in the big leagues — but when they have scored, there’s a decent chance 23-year-old outfielder Riley Greene was involved.

Of the the Tigers’ 133 runs scored through Sunday’s games, Greene is responsible for a little more than a quarter of them if you add his 26 runs scored and 16 RBI and subtract his eight home runs. That comes to 34, nearly 26 percent of all Detroit’s runs.

To provide context to that admittedly pre-modern analytics method, look at it this way: If a major league team averaged five runs per game over a 162-game season, it would score 810 runs.

So, 26 percent of 810 would be 211 runs created, an outstanding figure.

Nobody is saying Greene — the fifth pick of the 2019 MLB Draft — will ever reach that figure during his big-league career. However, accounting for more than a quarter of a major league team’s runs — even in the 34 games Greene has played this season — is something special.

Tigers manager A.J. Hinch thinks Greene’s is among the best young players in the big leagues.

“If there’s a day the guy is spraying the ball, he’s an on-base machine,” he said, per Cody Stavenhagen of The Athletic. “If it’s a day somebody wants to throw middle-middle, he can hit it out of the ballpark pole to pole. I think we know exactly what we have in Riley Greene, and I think it’s comforting knowing we have one of the premier young players in the game.”

Greene’s secondary statistics aren’t bad either: His average is only .269, but he has a .397 on-base percentage and a .538 slugging percentage for a .935 OPS. And Greene — who has batted all over the lineup this season for the offensively challenged team, is third in the A.L. with 25 walks. Per Baseball Reference, he is also second in the American League with a 2.4 Wins Above Replacement.

If he continues this pace, Greene should have All-Star-caliber numbers by the end of the season.

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