Why Breakout Turned to Bust for Victor Caratini and Ryan Kreidler

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The Twins started the 2026 season with Brooks Lee at shortstop, Royce Lewis at third base, and Luke Keaschall at second. That, to say the least, didn't work. By mid-May, Lewis was at Triple-A St. Paul, and it was clear that Lee needed to move to the hot corner. Keaschall slowly got pushed to the outfield. That left a vacuum on the infield, and whne Tristan Gray proved a poor stopper for that gap, in stepped Ryan Kreidler.

Over the offseason, Kreidler underwent a major swing change. He flattened the plane of his stroke, boosting his bat speed, and the early returns on those adjustments were superb. He played only sparingly, but at the end of June, Kreidler was batting .287/.357/.505. In 112 plate appearances, he had 10 extra-base hits (half of which were homers), 10 walks and just 19 strikeouts. The team never treated him like the solution to all their problems, exactly, but he certainly looked like a solution to some problems as the calendar turned to July.

Meanwhile, Victor Caratini actually did look like the solution to the Twins' problems. They didn't have a choice but to install him as a regular, but when Ryan Jeffers broke his hamate bone on May 18, Caratini took over full-time catching duty, and he took off like a shot. Before Jeffers went down, Caratini had batted an execrable .192/.294/.231, but he stepped up in a huge way in Jeffers's stead. From the game in which Jeffers got hurt through the All-Star break, Caratini got 138 plate appearances. He batted .282/.370/496, with 13 extra-base hits, 16 walks and 26 strikeouts. He was the linchpin of the lineup as they improbably stayed afloat.

Then, the clock struck midnight on the Cinderella stories for both Kreidler and Caratini. From July 1 through the end of the season, Kreidler was catastrophically bad. He got 155 plate appearances, but batted .169/.234/.289. In 43 more trips to the dish than he'd had in his superb first half, he produced no more extra-base hits and just one more walk, while whiffing 23 more times. He looked like a late-blooming, dynamic (albeit flawed) role player, until he didn't.

Caratini's ascent was never quite as improbable. He was a low-wattage signing over the winter, but he did get a two-year deal. Depending on your feelings about him as an individual and the class as a whole, he was either the best backup available or a quasi-regular; that's why he merited more than a one-year offer. He's been around a long time. Still, his summer surge was thrilling—which made his late-season spiral even more deflating than it would otherwise have been. Caratini made Kreidler look like a fearsome slugger in the second half. After the break, he batted .179/.263/.198, with just two extra-base hits in 118 plate appearances. He walked eight times in that span; he struck out 30 times. The closest thing to a functioning offensive skill he had was getting in the way of the ball; he was hit by four pitches.

These two players symbolize the Twins' season, in some ways. They performed better than expected for a while, but when they ran out of gas, it wasn't pretty. Specifically, they seemed to benefit from the Twins' offensive instruction for a while. The new hitting coach coalition the team assembled in the first year under Derek Shelton had several successes, and for a while, Kreidler and Caratini looked like they would number among them.

Eventually, though, both guys ran into the same problem: a grooved swing. Unfortunately, the Twins have to come in for some of the blame on that. They helped each develop and approach and a stroke that would maximize the damage they could do when they got their pitch. Teams eventually learned not to give them that pitch, though, and neither player had the plasticity to respond successfully.

Of the 338 batters with the most swings this year, Kreidler had the smallest range in average swing tilt from hacks at low pitches to those against high ones. Swing tilt is the angle between an imaginary horizontal line drawn through the handle of the bat and the actual bat position, just before contact, and while it sounds like a small thing, it's important. How much tilt a hitter has in their swing influences where they can most effectively meet the ball, and to what parts of the field they can effectively hit it. It shapes the margin for error of the swing, in a sense, and the ability to manipulate that tilt is an important part of maximizing margin for error, overall. At the opposite end of the leaderboard from Kreidler, in this metric, is exactly the person you'd expect: Luis Arraez. When he geared up to produce more bat speed and flattened out his swing this year, Kreidler lost the ability to bend that swing and hit pitches in all areas of the zone, vertically.

Caratini was second-worst in the league, right behind Kreidler. Each player took some good advice from Twins coaches this year, but they also got waylaid. By engineering their swings to hammer pitches between the mid-thigh and the belly button, they made themselves more vulnerable to everything else—and, eventually, to manipulations of timing, too, as they tried to make changes but fell short. Adaptability is a vital part of hitting, and neither Caratini nor Kreidler did it well this year. They did find some benefits in the process. For a stretch, each was the best version of himself. If the Twins want to get more sustained success from next year's crop of reclamation or development projects, though, they'll need to be emphasize more flexibility as they provide feedback on mechanics and approach—or get some players with a bit more pure talent than Kreidler and Caratini possess.

Both hitters focused an above-average share of their swings in the middle of the zone, which is good. They were aware that their swings weren't especially maneuverable, and they tried to devise a plan to survive that shortcoming. They couldn't outrun it, though. As the team heads into the offseason, the front office has been enthusiastic about what they achieved on the hitting side this year. There were some unequivocal successes, along with these qualified ones, so much of that self-satisfaction is justified. If they want to know where they still have some heavy lifting to do, though, they need look no further than the craters left by the way Caratini and Kreidler crashed to Earth late in the year.