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The frustration is palpable for Matt Wallner. He's screaming silently into his helmet during his customary two-strike timeouts. He's scowling as he walks back to the dugout following fruitless at-bats. He's in a major slump, and he knows it. For the 27-year-old slugger, it's a surprisingly unfamiliar feeling.
Prolonged slumps are usually part-and-parcel for a low-contact, high-strikeout power bat like Wallner. Theoretically, you're going to have periods where balls in play aren't falling in while the strikeouts continue to mount, leading to glaring droughts in production. It's the kind of thing that drove fans mad with Miguel Sanó, despite his productive overall track record. But Wallner has been mostly able to steer clear of the extended dry spells. Minor-league pitchers could never suppress him for long, as he built up a .905 OPS in the Twins system. In the majors, Wallner was pretty steady through his first 175 or so games, even though one of his few very short slumps (2-for-25 to open the 2024 campaign) earned him banishment to the minors for half the season.
By the time he returned from a rare injured list stint earlier this season, Wallner had established himself as one of the very best hitters in baseball during his young career, producing at the level of perennial MVP contenders. You don't accomplish that if you're prone to deep slumps. Wallner kept them at bay, and kept mashing. But since coming off the IL in late May, the right fielder has fallen into unfamiliar territory: he's been in the pits for about a month now.
Wallner had an .847 OPS when he got hurt and he raised it to .896 by homering four times in his first eight games back. There was certainly no sign then that anything was amiss. But in 24 games since, he is slashing just .147/.217/.320 with three homers. His overall numbers have sagged to the level of a merely average big-league batter.
You might assume the strikeouts spiked out of control, but that's not really the case. Wallner has struck out 27 times in 83 plate appearances during this stretch (33%), which is exactly in line with his career norm. Instead, his batted-ball luck has betrayed him, as Wallner's .153 BABIP since coming off the IL is dead last among 186 MLB hitters.
It's a major reality shift for a player who, prior to the injury, had the fifth-highest BABIP among all MLB hitters (.361) since he debuted in September of 2022. That wasn't by accident: Wallner crushed the ball and got rewarded for it, much like the leader on that list Aaron Judge (.375 BABIP). By this same token, Wallner's extreme drop-off in outcomes for the past month-plus has not been by accident; he's making much lower-quality contact and hitting into a lot more easy outs. Anecdotally, it seems like opposing pitchers are focusing less on trying to get him to swing and miss, and more on getting him to put the ball in play weakly, thus neutralizing Wallner's greatest strength. Whatever the interplay, can he adjust?
Wallner is in no danger of being demoted to the minors for this slump. The Twins know that getting him back on his game holds the key to unlocking the much-improved second half they need as a team. They need him to get right in the big-league crucible, this time.
Every great hitter faces a reckoning at some point: a stretch where the formula that once made them dominant no longer yields results. For Wallner, this is that moment. He’s not striking out more than usual, but the quality of contact just isn’t there, and opposing pitchers appear to be exploiting it. Whether it’s a matter of timing, mechanics, approach, or all of the above, Wallner now finds himself in unfamiliar waters: not just in a slump, but in search of a counterpunch. The Twins are betting he’ll find it soon, because their ceiling in the second half may hinge on it.
For more on Wallner's slump and the underpinnings of his decreased batted-ball production, check out Matt Trueblood's piece on Wallner's swing plane, from June.
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