Royce Lewis is Making History Almost Every Time He Swings the Bat

For the past couple of years, Minnesota Twins manager Rocco Baldelli has not been able to pencil Royce Lewis’s name into his lineup on a daily basis. When he has been able to do so, though, the superstar third baseman has almost always made a sizable impact.

Despite a humble attitude of being happy just to be a big-leaguer, Lewis is so much more. He has battled adversity, and dealt with multiple starts and stops throughout his career. Recently, he went through a 4-for-23 rehab assignment with Triple-A St. Paul that had some questioning what he would bring back to the lineup.

The answer has been per-game production that would rank among the greatest to ever play the game.

Through 14 games this season, Lewis already has eight home runs. He slugged one in each half of a doubleheader against the Oakland Athletics on Father’s Day, and another Wednesday night. He owns an otherworldly 1.339 OPS. Accumulating 1.4 fWAR to this point, he’s been the Twins' fourth-most productive hitter, despite missing most of the season to date.

To bring some perspective to just how impressive this run is, extrapolating numbers to a 162 game pace is jaw-dropping:

• 16.2 fWAR
• 93 home runs
• 23 doubles
• 139 RBI

The pace at which Lewis is making solid contact is staggering. It’s obviously unsustainable, but that doesn’t meant the percentages aren’t incredibly appealing to look at:

• 42.1% of hits have left the yard
• 16% of at bats have been home runs
• 14.0% of plate appearances have resulted in round trippers

For a player who took hitting grand slams to a new level last season, and elevated even further during an exciting postseason run, Lewis opened the 2024 season with a blast and picked right up where he left off when returning from injury. His 18.6% barrel rate is a career-high and it’s being propped up by a career-best 46.5% hard hit rate. He’s chasing (just under 29%) and whiffing (25.5%) at a manageable rate. Essentially forcing pitchers to play into his hands, he’s punishing them every chance he gets. His strikeout-to-walk ratio looked a bit problematic early last season, but this year, he has avoided strikeouts while adding walks. Dialed-in doesn’t even begin to describe where the 25-year-old is at right now.

A season ago, the Twins got Lewis for just 58 games after a late start. He’s played basically the same number of games this year as he did in 2022, before suffering a freak ACL tear. The only thing that has ever been able to hold him back at the highest level is injury. If he stays on the field just a bit more often, he's going to become one of the most unconventional MVP candidates in recent memory.

For all the twists and turns Lewis has taken to get to this point, the fun he is having right now (and results he is producing) are certainly making it all worth it.