Rewrite Your Scouting Reports: Kody Clemens Has New Bat Speed, and the Power to Match

Kody Clemens came up big for the Twins Wednesday. with a three-run eighth-inning homer that gave the team a lead and launched them to their 10th straight win. That was fitting, because it was also a home run by Clemens (in the sixth inning of the Twins' May 3 game at Fenway Park) that effectively began the streak. A near-desperation pickup during the period when the Twins weren't sure of the statuses of either WIlli Castro or Carlos Correa and were unable to backfill their depleted roster with good options in their own system, Clemens has given them more than they might have fairly hoped for.

In 25 plate appearances with the Twins, Clemens is batting .227/.320/.591. He's struck out six times, but he also has two doubles, two home runs, one walk and two times hit by pitches. Don't expect the Twins to hand him an everyday job, or anything. He's a role player, with a relatively small role, at that. If he can continue filling in this impressively, though, it will have an outsized impact on the Twins' rebound from their season's woeful start.

Normally, it's a good idea to brush off a couple of big hits like this (from a player who turns 29 years old today) as fun and valuable but meaningless variance. Anchoring player evaluations to even huge homers like these two is a bad idea, and Clemens supplanting any of the younger players on the Twins roster would be foolish, if the time ever comes when several of those younger guys are hitting well and feeling healthy at the same time. In this case, though, there's some evidence that Clemens has undergone a real change. It might not make him a worthy starter, but we should try to get a firm understanding of it.

In 2024, Clemens had 208 tracked, competitive swings in the big leagues. They averaged 70.5 mph of swing speed, and a 7.3-foot swing length. Only 4.3% of his swings topped 75 mph, where real damage becomes much more frequent. He generated an average exit velocity of 89.4 mph, and maxed out at 108.4 mph. His production was lousy, even for a bench player, because he strikes out too much and hits for too low a batting average to make up for such modest power indicators.

This year, things are different. It's only been 42 tracked, competitive swings, but he's averaged 73.1 mph of swing speed and a slightly shorter swing length of 7.2 feet. A solid 16.7% of his swings have crossed that 75-mph threshold. His average exit velocity is 92 mph, and he's already set a new career max for exit velocity on an individual batted ball (109.0 mph), albeit by a tiny amount. 

Clemens doesn't have enough plate appearances to qualify for the leaderboard on Baseball Savant, but if he did, he'd have the fourth-largest change in bat speed from 2024 to 2025, behind only Nolan Schanuel, Brice Turang and Anthony Volpe. Those three younger hitters are all varying degrees of famous for having come into this season with overhauled swings, new quasi-magical bats, or a mere intention to do more damage. Turang hit just seven home runs all last season. This year, he's already cracked three. Volpe is already halfway to his total of 12 home runs from last year, and has 12 doubles to his name, too. Bat speed is good. Increasing bat speed, as long as it doesn't cost one the ability to put the bat on the ball, is a key way to reach a new gear at the plate.

Without an overhauled approach, Clemens still doesn't need to be part of the regular lineup. He strikes out a lot and walks very rarely. He's a bit of a mess at the plate. This season, though, he's become a much more dangerous mess. That's worth celebrating. The Twins helped him start going out and getting the ball better; his contact point has moved 2.9 inches toward the pitcher and 1.9 inches away from his center of mass than it was when he was with the Phillies, even earlier this year. That number is still likely to fluctuate quite a bit, given how small his sample of work with Minnesota is, so let's not get bogged down in it. The change in bat speed, however, can already be said to be very real. Because it's almost entirely within the hitter's control and not something that intentionally varies as widely from one pitch to the next as, say, pitch velocity, bat speed becomes telling over even very small samples.

Right now, Clemens is switching a quick stick—so much faster than in the past, and so far beyond the big-league average, that he can't help but run into some power. He's done it at truly perfect times for the Twins over the last week and a half. At this point, they have to expand his role just a little bit, to see how well he holds onto this progress and what further game-breaking value they can extract from it. This great an improvement in bat speed is worth a full scouting grade on the power scale, and if he keeps it, that pop will come in handy again before long.