How much has Gleyber Torres really regressed?

Gleyber Torres has not been the same player since his excellent 2019 season. In 2019, Torres slashed .278/.337/.535 for an OPS of .871, 38 home runs, and a wRC+ of 125. Additionally, 2019 was an improvement for Torres from his very good 2018 rookie season, where he had an OPS of .820 and a wRC+ of 121. Prior to the 2020 and 2021 seasons, Torres looked like a budding superstar, but was he?

We need to look closer at Torres’s 2019 season to answer this question. Looking below at Torres’s 2019 and 2021 percentile rankings as reported by Baseball Savant below, we can compare his advanced metrics. In 2019, we can see that Torres was roughly league-average in exit velocity, slightly above…