This Will Not Go On Much Longer

To be fair to Matt Wallner, the Twins have seen a crazy number of left-handed pitchers so far this year. Of the 109 plate appearances Wallner has accumulated over the team's first 31 games, a whopping 40 have come against southpaws. In 2024 (admittedly, an injury-disrupted year), Wallner only had 40 confrontations with fellow lefties all season. There's no question that being the lefty batter tasked with absorbing more of those left-on-left matchups than other Twins batters has contributed to Wallner's slow start. He also got hit in the ribcage with a mid-90s fastball two weeks ago, and can be seen most days since in the clubhouse with a huge wrap around his torso, suggesting there's considerable residual soreness there. All of that matters. It's not a set of excuses; it's a set of legitimate explanations for some of what's happening.

The problem, of course, is that what's happening is untenable, no matter what's causing it. It's also getting hard to convince yourself that it will ever change. Wallner will turn 29 years old this winter. Though they haven't come without major interruptions, he has over 1,000 plate appearances in the majors. Right now, he doesn't look like a big league-caliber player—in either half of any given inning. Wallner is batting .168/.275/.284 this season, and striking out 38% of the time. He's lost speed this year and was never good at getting going, anyway, so he's become the worst defensive outfielder in the big leagues, with no serious rival. 

Last year, I wrote about Wallner's bat path flattening out, and the negative effects thereof. This season, it's flattened out even more. He's also lost some bat speed, though surely, part of that is due to both seeing more lefties (harder to swing with full conviction when you pick the ball up later) and the lingering issues from that plunking. He's just not a functional hitter right now, either.

Defenders of Wallner are fond of observing that hitters with high strikeout rates can look disproportionately bad during cold spells, and that he's gotten equally hot at times in the past. That's true, to some extent, but it's not as helpful if you try to apply it broadly to all strikeout-prone hitters as if you analyze each player as an individual. Nor does it remain equally true over time. Wallner's swing is losing its ability to generate consistently lethal contact, even when he gets on time. His approach and pitch recognition have never been all that good, which has been proved for all to see since the advent of the ABS system. And again, he's almost 29. Players age faster than ever in the modern game, and Wallner is already moving out of his prime, physically. It's probably true that, given another 100 plate appearances, he would get on a streak and deliver enough power to invite the team to invest another 200 plate appearances in him. Now that the defense has gone terribly sour (and having seen that there's always another low valley after the next peak), though, that feels more like a threat than a promise: more wasted time, rather than a long-awaited breakthrough.

As tantalizing as a homegrown, local product with light-tower power is, the allure is fading, for everyone involved. Even Derek Shelton, who tried to show abundant faith in Wallner by making him an everyday player to begin the season, is moving away from that plan now. Emmanuel Rodriguez is showing the same elite power potential Wallner once had, with Triple-A St. Paul. He's more disciplined than Wallner, and much, much more athletic. The Twins need better defense in the outfield, and they need a lefty slugger with more upside than Wallner offers at this point in his career. Rodriguez offers it.

It's going to be awkward. It's going to be sad. Wallner has a minor-league option remaining, but once you admit that he can't hit in the big leagues after this long at that level and that you can no longer justify playing him, it's tough to think of any demotion as temporary or edifying. It's getting clearer all the time that Wallner (rather than Trevor Larnach or Austin Martin) will be the first player replaced by a top prospect arriving at Target Field, and the time for that replacement is extremely close. In all likelihood, we're seeing the final days of Matt Wallner's Twins career. That's exciting, because he'll give way to a player with every chance to be better than him right away and much more long-term upside. It's also an uneasy situation, though, and a sad ending for a player who was a key cog on one of the teams Twins fans will remember fondly: the 2023 streak-busters. He was great for that team. He's just not helping this one anymore.