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Byron Buxton remains one of the most dynamic players in a Twins uniform when he’s on the field, but it’s been some time since we’ve seen the offensive highlight-reel player he’s shown he can be (or, ahem, could be). Age, injuries, and his offensive approach are all worth considering when we evaluate the offensive player he currently is. Should we be looking at Buxton differently?
Buxton has not been a consistent offensive contributor since the beginning of 2023.
He’s still capable of a big hit now and then, but we haven’t seen a sustained period of Buxton being one of the Twins' best hitters in a very long time. At 30 years old, a few factors should leave many wondering whether we will see another elite offensive season from the Twins center fielder.
Unfortunately, Buxton is as well-known for his time spent off the field as he is for the highlight-reel plays he’s involved in when healthy and playing. His list of past injuries includes his groin, foot, hamstring, hip, and, more recently, chronic knee issues. It’s difficult to imagine such a lengthy list of previous injuries not having a long-term effect on him. As Buxton’s power, quality of contact, and contact rate decline, you have to wonder if his body's wear and tear is the culprit.
Buxton is also a different hitter than we saw at his peak. It was always unfair to expect Buxton to repeat his 2021 season, in which he posted a 1.005 OPS in 61 games, but he completely transformed as a hitter over the last few years, and not in a way that one would expect much long-term success from.
After the 2021 season, Buxton appeared to make some changes to his approach, either because of injury or in search of some more sustainable way to achieve the same gaudy numbers he put up that year. His flyball rate skyrocketed from 38.4% to 51.1%, which would increase again in 2023. His pull rate increased from 53.8% to 58.2%. His plate approach became based on hunting for home runs, and ironically, his isolated slugging has dropped off precipitously every season since. Some of his flyball and pull rate tendencies aren’t quite as extreme this year, but he’s still in this mold of hitter.
Buxton has compiled nearly 500 plate appearances over the last two seasons and posted a .713 OPS. His on-base percentage is below .300, which isn’t surprising, considering he has an 8.5% walk rate and 31.4% strikeout rate during that time. Not even the slugging percentage, which is the entire goal of his plate approach, has been impressive during the last two seasons. His slugging is below .400 in 2024, as he continues a trend of three consecutive seasons of this number declining.
If he were still hitting the ball as hard at the best of times, or lifting it with authority at anywhere near the same frequency, we could confidently project that Buxton's power would rebound. It's just not there. Buxton's average exit velocity on batted balls was 92.9 MPH in 2022. It fell to 91.5 MPH in 2023, and so far this year, it's just 89.5. His 90th-percentile exit velocities have trended down, from 109.2 MPH in 2021 to 106.4 this season. Managing editor Matthew Trueblood created weighted sweet-spot exit velocity (wSSEV) to balance a hitter's ability to hit line drives and fly balls with their exit velocity on those batted balls, and Buxton's has utterly cratered since 2021, stepping down from 92.3 that year to the upper 80s the last two years, to 85.6 in 2024. He's gone from near-elite to below-average, in overall production and in underlying indices like this one.
This year, though his exit velocity on balls that result in outs have held pretty steady, those measurements taken on balls that ended up as hits show a marked decline from previous years.
This isn’t to say Buxton is no longer valuable; his defense alone makes him one of the Twins' better players. It is approaching time to accept that the days of Buxton carrying the lineup could be behind him. His free-swinging approach was never one that would age well, and it looks a lot like injuries have sped up his slide down the aging curve.
Selling out for pulled fly balls will still work occasionally, but that’s typically only a long-term success when accompanied by elite plate discipline. As Buxton relies on taking pitches out of the park, opposing pitchers have no reason to throw him anything he’s looking for, and there’s a real chance that his ability to punish these pitches has declined due to age and injury.
Whether injuries or an active choice forced it, Byron Buxton’s change at the plate has made him a boom-or-bust hitter. As we’ve seen him reach 30 years of age, the boom hasn’t been there enough, as we now have a lengthy sample size of him being a below-league-average hitter. Is this the new norm for Byron Buxton?
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