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There once was a player drafted second overall, who produced roughly to expectations over a 14 year career that included MVP votes, an All-Star appearance, and a World Series. His career OPS was .873, and he was a serviceable defender in right field. His career on-base percentage was a robust .384, just a hair under Joe Mauer’s .388. That player was J.D. Drew.
Drew was an odd case. He did have just the one All-Star appearance, but twice, he produced an OPS north of 1.000. In fact, in his best season, 2004, he hit 31 home runs in 645 plate appearances and slashed .305/.436/.569. While he finished sixth for the MVP vote that year, he did not make the All-Star team, despite better numbers in the first half. What gives?
The reasons and excuses why Drew did not receive the recognition a player of his skill level deserves are abundant, and kind of sad. The first is that he was stoic. He didn’t show a lot of emotion when he played, and was liable to strikeout looking and walk back to the dugout like he was next in line at the DMV. Fans don’t like that; they want players to take every negative outcome as a personal affront. Other players can feel this way, too, and in Drew’s case, even his manager, Tony La Russa, was publicly frustrated with a perceived “lack of passion.”
The second issue people had with Drew is that he always seemed to have a nagging injury and wasn’t going to fight his front office on being placed on the injured list. He wanted to play closer to 100%, because anything significantly less than that would hurt his team. He played 104 games in his rookie season, 109 in his third, 100 in his fifth, 72 in his seventh, and 109 in his 10th. He wasn’t exactly Byron Buxton, but he did consistently miss quite a bit of time, in an era where that would get you called 'soft'. Stars of the day would always sprinkle in some outlier seasons marred by an injury they didn’t admit to until the season was over. Drew didn’t, and for that he became the poster boy for the prima donna hitter who made a lot of money and couldn’t post.
That leads us to the third thing that made J.D. Drew an underappreciated star: He was a draft holdout and a Scott Boras client, back before Boras was a household name. He demanded $10 million to sign with the Philadelphia Phillies as the second overall pick, and they offered about a quarter of that, leading Drew to play the 1997 season with our very own St. Paul Saints.
After signing with the Cardinals the next year, Drew quickly made his way to the majors, but sat out against the Phillies, the team he spurned, with a dubious hand injury. He then got the team’s bullpen catcher to wear his jersey to ward off the battery-throwing masses in Philly, only to be found out and heckled mercilessly. In a way, the heckling never stopped.
As Drew got older, his baserunning (which had made him a 30-30 guy in college) became very station-to-station, with him not wanting to risk an injury that he would get mocked and called soft for. He took fewer risks in the outfield, becoming a below-average defender in his later years. He just stood in the batter's box, made good swing decisions, looked tired, and went home when the game was over.
As I contemplated the career of J.D. Drew, I started to wonder: What would happen if a baseball team had a lineup composed of nine J.D. Drews?
From a sabermetric perspective, the results would be unstoppable. A team with an .873 collective OPS, with each hitter averaging 25 home runs per 162 games while getting on base at a .384 clip would be astounding. Plug those numbers into a ZIPS or PECOTA projection, and surely that team would dominate, with even an average pitching staff.
Except that just ain’t the way baseball works. If you want to know the downside of a team full of J.D. Drews, witness the collapse of the 2024 Minnesota Twins. Player after player, leaning into their back leg and waiting for a mistake, going station to station on the bases, being passive not just in their approach but in their overall mentality as competitors, consistently out-executed by opponents that would appear less talented.
Sure, that's a lot of conjecture, but I've watched enough Cleveland Guardians games to know the difference. Twenty years ago, even 10 years ago, I would have dismissed this as complete and utter nonsense, but you need sparkplugs to win baseball games over a long season. Just having a bunch of good hitters isn’t enough, not for 162 games. Something needs to light the fire, because odd things happen in baseball. Squibbers ruin good pitching outings and rockets find gloves. You need a hair-on-fire, manic, obnoxious nightmare of a human being who plays crazy over-the-top baseball--whose will to beat the other team exceeds his actual talent level. You might need a couple of those guys.
It might help to define what I’m talking about here. I think “Energy guy” might be the best descriptor using established baseball terminology. Energy guys are usually fast (Jarren Duran), but not always (Josh Naylor). They are demonstrative and do not wait for the game to come to them. In other words, their plan at the plate is, “If this pitcher does this, then I am doing this first pitch,” rather than “I hope I get ahead in the count and he throws me a fastball belt-high.”
The Twins have one energy guy, in Buxton, and he (ahem) isn't always available. Sure, some guys have tried to fit the mold, but it hasn’t worked. Matt Wallner had some heinous bat flips, stole some crucial bases, and beat out a couple of sure double plays that really got the boys goin’. But as talented as he is, he’s too big, too bland, and too dependent on a pitcher putting a pitch somewhere he can hit it. He’s also a tinkerer, a guy constantly making minor changes to his swing to get it just right.
Brooks Lee is similar, constantly fine-tuning his swings from both sides of the plate, and being quite honest about which was working at any point. He does have some passion to his game that we saw in September a few times, but those instances were few and far between.
Like Wallner and Lee, Carlos Correa is a technician, not a sparkplug. So is Ryan Jeffers, at a lower level of performance. Same for Trevor Larnach, who had a great year, and tried to act as an energy guy at times, but that isn’t his personality. He drives the ball and takes walks; he isn’t the type to lean out over the plate and flip a down-and-away slider over the third baseman when that kind of result would just kill the opponent.
José Miranda can be a clutch bad-ball hitter, but he needs to be healthy to do so, and that just hasn’t happened for any length of time thus far in his career.
In 2023, Edouard Julien, Royce Lewis and Willi Castro sparked the team out of its first-half doldrums, but Julien is the definition of passive at the plate; Lewis never got his legs under him in the second half of 2024 (and was kind of whiny about it); and Castro perpetually looked like he needed to sit down for a minute following his All-Star selection, due to back troubles.
The departing Max Kepler is J.D. Drew reincarnated, but with less talent.
Christian Vázquez and Kyle Farmer were the team’s primary energy guys for various stretches, but they just aren’t good enough hitters for that to matter, nor do they possess anything resembling speed.
The fact is, baseball is not played in a vacuum. It’s played between the ears, and certain guys provide value from a mental standpoint that others just don’t. The Mets are in the NLCS because they were sparked by minor league free agent José Iglesias. Keith Law doesn’t think he’s the reason, but every Mets player thinks he is, and that counts (Having Francisco Lindor doesn’t hurt, either. That's an energy guy, too.) The Yankees' whole dynamic changed with the addition of Jazz Chisholm. The Padres had Jackson Merrill, Luis Arraez and Manny Machado, and it seems as though the Guardians entirely consist of energy guys.
Maybe momentum isn’t really a thing, but confidence is. If I’m in the on-deck circle down a run, and I see a player who doubles as the team’s mascot bloop a single over the second baseman and go crazy at first base, my mentality is completely shifted. There is blood in the water. The crowd is into it, the dugout is screaming, the opposing manager is pacing and the pitcher is liable to make a mistake. That’s what the Twins didn’t have this year. You can’t quantify upsetting a pitcher’s rhythm or shaking their confidence, but that’s a huge part of baseball. When a pitcher gets rattled, that’s when selective, talented, stationary hitters like Drew do their best work. As the 2023 Guardians showed, you need both types.
Now for the Twins, Nick Gordon, Jorge Polanco and Arraez are gone and the pipeline for energy guys is questionable at best. Emmanuel Rodriguez will make his debut next year, but his approach at the plate is ultra-patient and doubters worry he may be too passive. Top ten global prospect Walker Jenkins is a pure hitter who works counts and drives the ball, and J.D. Drew might be a good comp for him if things break right.
Given payroll limitations, DaShawn Keirsey Jr. might have a larger role next year regardless of whether the team wants to double down on a lineup full of even-keeled mistake hunters who are skeptical there is such a thing as a “double steal.” Keirsey is fast, aggressive and has tons of tattoos. He’s the closest thing this team has to what they lack.
My hope is that the team leaves its pitching alone, especially the top three starters. The big move needs to come from the core (or future core) of its lineup. Lewis, Julien, Jeffers, Wallner and Larnach should all be on the table, as well as Rodriguez and maybe even Jenkins. It’s not that any of those players have a bad future ahead of them, but this team needs to diversify its lineup with speed, athleticism, and most importantly, energy. Otherwise, they are going to continue with months-long hitting slumps and job-insecure hitting coaches, and we'll continue wondering why it doesn't quite work.
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