Luke Keaschall's Better Bat Speed Has Begotten Worse Results. Here's Why.

The plate appearance totals don't match up perfectly, but it's as close as you could ask it to be. Heading into Memorial Day, Luke Keaschall has played exactly 49 regular-season games in 2026, which is the same number he played in 2025. This time, he knows the daily grind of the majors better. This time, he hasn't had his progress interrupted by injuries. One would hope that he would be proving himself a robust part of the Twins' future, even if he couldn't quite replicate last year's tremendous rookie showing.

Instead, the comparison of his freshman and (incomplete) sophomore efforts looks like this:

• 2025: 207 PA, .302/.382/.445, 4 HR, 19 BB, 29 SO
• 2026: 201 PA, .233/.318/.307, 1 HR, 19 BB, 32 SO

He remains very good at putting the ball in play, but all the sting has been sapped from Keaschall's stick. He didn't exactly obliterate the ball last year, but his average exit velocity and his hard-hit rate are notably down this year. He overachieved in terms of hitting for both power and average last season, but even at a fundamental quality-of-contact level, he's seen a real degradation this year. Over the weekend, he was benched on consecutive days, as manager Derek Shelton elected to give him the same treatment he gave Matt Wallner and Royce Lewis during their own profound offensive struggles—right before each was shuttled off to the minors.

Keaschall is younger, has hit better and is more clearly a part of the team's vision for the future than either Lewis or Wallner, so he's not likely to be optioned any time soon. As Shelton commits to making playing time a question of merit and production, though, Keaschall is already losing out. Brooks Lee, Ryan Kreidler, Orlando Arcia and Tristan Gray may not be Murderer's Row, but they all have substantially better offensive numbers than Keaschall has this year—and Keaschall is, by a wide margin, the worst defensive infielder in the group.

All this is fairly shocking, because Keaschall actually came to camp this year having improved in what looked like the one area that would limit him as a hitter: bat speed. Last season, his average swing speed was just 66.9 miles per hour, according to Statcast—one of the lowest marks in the league. It's not possible to be any kind of power hitter with so little bat speed, so it looked as though Keaschall would need to use his speed and good placement of the ball even to consistently generate doubles in the majors. That he ran into four homers in a third of a season's playing time felt semi-miraculous.

In theory, he's made a major upgrade this spring. His average swing speed is now 69.2 MPH. That's still well below average, but batters who find the barrel often can produce power at that level. Spencer Horwitz, Michael Busch, Will Smith, Cody Bellinger, Trent Grisham and other guys who have proved themselves capable of 20-plus homers a year live in that range. Admittedly, none of those are great comps for Keaschall, in terms of body type, handedness or bat path, but the point stands. You can have a pretty high ceiling as a hitter, once you get to 69 MPH or so.

In practice, this has been nothing but bad for Keaschall—at least so far. Bat speed isn't primarily about the force you impart on the baseball because of that speed; you can generate just as hard a batted ball by squaring it up well. Bat speed matters, instead, because it lets you decide later and pull the trigger on the swing later—but so far, Keaschall has had no luck in redeeming that advantage for real value.

With no noticeable or measurable change in his swing path and a significant increase in his bat speed, our default expectation should be that Keaschall would make contact farther in front of his body this year than he did in 2025. Instead, his contact point is almost identical to where it was last year. That tells us that he's making proper theoretical use of the advantage he's gained by swinging faster; he's deciding later. In practice, though, that's creating more problems than it's solving.

Here's Keaschall handling a fastball down the middle the way a hitter like him should, last August.

This is Keaschall as we all came to know him as a rookie: direct to the ball, frighteningly accurate with the barrel, and (perhaps most importantly) consistently on time. Now, here he is against another fat heater, last month.

The temptation, when you see a batter foul a fastball off to the opposite field, is to say they were late on it. Watch closely, though. Keaschall wasn't late here. Rather, he was a hair early, in the timing and the shape of his newly accelerated swing. Set the moments at which he made contact on each pitch side-by-side, and you can see what I mean.

Keaschall's arms are actually more extended in the still on the right. He misses the barrel and clips the ball with the high/outside part of his bat because he's already rotated a hair too far. This is normal, if a bit unfortunate, for a hitter who's newly added some bat speed. It's great to swing faster, but you have to learn to stay on time, too.

That's a quick glimpse at the fight not to be too early, once you get faster. Now, here's how you can end up a little too late. Here are two cutters away from Keaschall, in early counts. One from last September:

And one from April:

Keaschall hit both balls pretty squarely, but as any modern hitting coach will tell you, the difference between a squarely-hit ball pulled in the air and one up the middle on the ground is the difference between payday and pain. Keaschall got around the first of these offerings; he couldn't do so on the second. He's swinging faster this year, but you can't just swing fast; you have to swing on time. Here's the moment at which Keaschall first begins the descent phase of his leg kick—when his swing really begins, as opposed to his load—on each pitch.

Last year, he was starting that part of his move before the pitch left the pitcher's hand. This year, it's more often coming just after release. The difference seems tiny, until you remember that the projectile he's trying to hit (at just the right angle, mind you) is coming in on the north side of 90 miles per hour and that the space in which he can produce the better kind of batted ball runs perhaps six inches from front to back.

Again, in the long run, this should still be a good thing. Being able to decide later should yield better swing decisions, and if Keaschall decides he still needs to cheat a bit more to produce the contact he wants, he can now sacrifice some contact for power that was unreachable when his swing was one of the five or six slowest in the game. There are no guarantees about getting this evolution right, of course. Plenty of players have gotten permanently broken by trying to shore up some weakness, insufficiently cognizant of the costs of that improvement or simply unable to pay them without going talent-broke. On balance, though, it's fair to stay optimistic about Keaschall as a hitter. This adjustment period has been painful, but it's part of the process of going from good to (knock on wood) great.