When you think about it, Royce Lewis's 2023 season is pretty crazy.
After spending months on the mend from a second ACL surgery, in his first game back with the Twins in Houston, he shot a screamer into the right-field corner for a home run. He would hit 14 more over the subsequent 237 plate appearances in that regular season. He then added another homer in his first-ever postseason at-bat. In his second postseason at-bat, he did it again. He would tack on two more to his postseason résumé before the Twins were through.
We shouldn't be surprised by any of this. After all, the man started his professional career with a no-doubter in the backfields of Florida in his first-ever paid at bat.
Lewis's hit tool was always a strength. But this season, we may have seen it go from hitterish to full-out lethal. Consider this: If the season lasted from only August 15 to its usual conclusion, Royce Lewis's .607 slugging average would have been the 16th-highest in baseball, better than Shohei Ohtani's .603.
Ohtani, the owner of a new MVP trophy to polish, will soon receive a contract equivalent to a small island nation's GDP this offseason. (Seriously, the GDP of São Tomé and Príncipe, an island nation off the western coast of central Africa, was $526.7 million in the most recent report That’s your over/under.) Conversely, Lewis will clear around $770,000 in 2024 and live in a state with a brand-new flag. While the two players aren’t similar (yet) in terms of their off-field clout, they were highly similar in the power department for a glorious month-and-a-half.
We can create just about any narrative, when we carve out small sample sizes. The takeaway is that after Lewis returned from his oblique injury, he was a monster, and more than small-sample-size flukiness may be involved.
When Lewis was sidelined with an oblique injury, he worked his way back with the Saints. One might expect a player recovering from that type of injury to be protective, opting not to apply as much torque or withhold force to avoid aggravating the area. Rotation—the primary action of a swing—can easily make such injuries worse. If Lewis was trying to take it easy, though, no one could tell.
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