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There's not a shortage of comps for Brooks Lee's swing. From the left side and from the right, he has roughly 35th-percentile bat speed and a slightly flatter swing plane than the average hitter. Over 60 big-league hitters met those basic criteria last season, from one or both sides of the plate. What's difficult is finding players who swing that way, and are good.
Such creatures do exist. I limited a search to the 200 players with the slowest swings (among those with at leat 100 competitive swings from one side of the plate) and looked for those with swing planes as flat as Lee's or flatter, using Baseball Savant's bat tracking data. José Ramírez fits the criteria, from the left side. So does Jose Altuve. So do Brendan Donovan, Sal Frelick and Caleb Durbin. Reds sparkplug TJ Friedl and high-average speedster Xavier Edwards are on the list. You can see the pattern. You can probably also see the problem.
Last season, Friedl was an above-average hitter, but it was largely due to his 11.8% walk rate and 16 times being hit by pitches. Durbin, too, relied on getting hit by pitches a lot. More importantly, though, all of these guys have good plate discipline, and/or are much better athletes than Lee. In fact, almost the entire list of hitters whose swing speeds and tilt match his are defense-first guys, like Johan Rojas of the Phillies; Nick Allen, now of Houston; DaShawn Keirsey Jr.; and Christian Vázquez. The guys who succeed with swings like the one Lee deploys from each side are hand-eye coordination freaks, have superb approaches, use their legs to beat defenses, or fit all of those descriptors.
By contrast, Lee is a below-average baseball athlete. He's stretched at shortstop, and having him play it for a full season in 2026 is likely to both make the Twins' infield more porous and wear him down at the plate. He doesn't throw or run well. Worse, he's not good at controlling the strike zone. He chases pitches outside the zone more than an average batter, and doesn't make much contact when he does. Within the zone, he makes a lot of contact, but it's not optimized. In his first full season in the majors, he hit more balls on the ground and pulled fewer of his flies than in his 2024 stint.
What Lee does well is square up the ball, but he gives up too much bat speed to do it, and because his swings are both fairly inefficient, he also has to decide early in order to get the barrel to the hitting zone on time. That leads to too many poor swing decisions for a player whose swing itself can't drive his offensive profile. He needs to make big changes, to increase his bat speed, trading some contact within the zone for more power; and to his approach, to reduce the frequency of bad contact and pitcher-friendly counts.
All of that is still at least vaguely possible, because even though he was supposed to be a polished collegiate hitter when the Twins took him in 2022, he's still just 24 years old. He could turn a corner, with a better plan and enough openness to what the Twins recommend to him. Right now, though, it's unfair to expect him to be good in 2026. He batted .236/.285/.370 in 2025, and because real and important weaknesses underpinned that line, we should expect about the same this year, until we see evidence of the major changes he needs to make.
Can a team contend for the postseason with a shortstop who posts a .655 OPS? Of course. Any one player on a roster can be (more or less) made up for by another. The Twins don't have the depth to make it very likely that they stay in the race without a breakout from Lee, though. He's not a good defender, and he plays one of the three most important defensive positions on the diamond. Big-league teams aren't chains; they can survive a weak spot in a way a chain can't survive a weak link. Lee is a marked weakness for this team, though, and right now, they haven't surrounded him with enough strength to hide that weakness. They don't have good defenders flanking him on the infield; they don't have the lineup depth to let him hit ninth and forget about him. They need the best version of Lee, which means a major set of physical and mental adjustments and some good luck in the health department. Otherwise, they'll need to pin their hopes on Kaelen Culpepper—but he won't be ready for the majors soon enough to save this season if Lee imperils it.
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