Matthew Trueblood

Image courtesy of © Matt Blewett-Imagn Images The Twins officially optioned Royce Lewis to Triple-A St. Paul on May 18. That very day, they lost Ryan Jeffers to a broken hamate bone. At that point, they were already a sub-.500 team, and the trend arrows were all pointing in the wrong direction. Many assumed, reasonably, that the team was about to collapse. It nearly did, too. After hanging tough for about a week, Minnesota lost 10 of 13 and fell all the way to 30-38, fading even in an extremely forgiving AL Wild Card race. They were on the brink. Since then, however, they've turned things around admirably. Lewis returned from the minors on June 1, and is hitting .269/.328/.500 since. Jeffers just returned for the final series before the All-Star break, and even while he was gone, hard-working fallback plan Alex Jackson kept the team afloat. They're 18-11 since hitting their nadir in mid-June. They're right back in the thick of the race, with guys they'd hoped to count on but been forced to live without (Lewis, Jeffers, Bailey Ober) back in the mix, to boot. That invites a new question: How can they keep this going? The pace at which the team has played for the last month is impressive, but they have to sustain it for a while to climb into a safe position in the jostle for playoff berths. That should be easier, in theory, because they're a stronger roster coming out of the break than they were until just before it—and certainly than they were in May and the first part of June. They've reorganized the team defensively, fixed Lewis's bat, and reinstated Jeffers and Ober from the injured list. Alas, regression will tug on their capes as they endeavor to take flight. To be as good a team as they've been of late, they have to improve their roster—or at least the deployment of their current one—to stave off the pull toward average (or worse) that will afflict several members of the team. Here are three ways the Twins can proactively swat at the gnats of regression during this summer heat wave, to keep enjoying that heat without being bitten or pestered into irrelevance. Make Royce Lewis a Platoon Bat The very first suggestion—first because I feel it has the greatest potential to help the team sustain its overachievement—comes with some friction. Lewis is an ebullient teammate, but he's not without ego, and this would come as a blow to that. It could sour some of the clubhouse sweetness that has given the team such positive energy the last several weeks. However, with Jeffers returning to the roster, it has to be a real consideration. The coincidence of Lewis being optioned and Jeffers being hurt means that we've yet to see how the lineup best works when they have the revived Lewis (but no longer as a third baseman, with Brooks Lee having taken up that post) and Jeffers each available. With Jeffers back in the fold, Victor Caratini is free to contribute at first base again—especially since the club is carrying three catchers at the moment. When a right-handed hurler starts for the opponents, the best version of this lineup doesn't contain Lewis. Even since he returned to the majors, much of his value has come from crushing left-handed pitching. Here are the key stat lines for Twins hitters against righty pitchers since June 1: Lewis: .258/.311/.464, 7.5% walk rate, 26.4% strikeout rate, .308 BABIP Caratini: .313/.420/.567, 13.6%, 12.3%, .315 Josh Bell: .293/.346/.596, 7.5%, 19.6%, .319 Kody Clemens: .288/.321/.644, 5.4%, 17.9%, .263 Jeffers will remain the regular catcher, unless the team trades him before the August 3 trade deadline—which is unlikely, according to multiple league sources. That makes sense, but it means that Caratini is likely to find some playing time elsewhere, and that has knock-on effects. Lewis can't make a strong case to play over Bell (with Caratini as the DH), Clemens (at second) or Caratini. Yes, some of the players listed here have been hitting better than they're likely to hit the rest of the way against righties, but then again, how confident are you that Lewis won't regress a bit, himself? Against righties, the everyday lineup should look like this: Trevor Larnach - LF Byron Buxton - CF Kody Clemens - 2B Ryan Jeffers - C Josh Bell - DH Victor Caratini - 1B Brooks Lee - 3B Ryan Kreidler - SS Luke Keaschall - RF If Buxton doesn't return from the injured list immediately, the team could resume the project it rapidly abandoned last month and try Lewis out at second for a while, with Clemens sliding back out to center field. Even in that case, though, playing Lewis wouldn't be the optimal deployment of their talent. Alan Roden is batting .269/.402/.471 against righties between Triple-A St. Paul and the majors this year. The sample is small, but the promise is real, and an alignment in which Roden plays center and Clemens is at second is stronger defensively than one with Lewis at second, anyway. This whole conversation highlights the fact that Lewis's hot streak since rejoining the team might only play him out of town. We don't have to tackle that notion in full right now. Suffice it to say that if Lewis is around, he should be in a roving, lefty-mashing role at least while the team is at this level of health and availability. He's their best option against southpaws. You can't say the same on the big side of the platoon. Shift Mike Paredes to the Bullpen, and End the Woo-Suk Go Experiment Because more pitching injuries seem to jump out at this team every time they turn the corner, the temptation to send Mike Paredes back to St. Paul to stay stretched out will be strong. The team will reinstate Cole Sands from the injured list soon, barring a setback in his rehab assignment, and Connor Prielipp could be close on Sands's heels. Optioning Paredes would allow him to stay available for bulk appearances and keep an extra arm in the organization; Go can't be optioned to the minors. Paredes is the better pitcher, though. If you put all the pitches each hurler throws into a shared ranking, Paredes's sweeper and changeup would be first and second, ahead of anything Go throws. If the team hopes to compete into September or even reach October, they need a further infusion of pitching depth, anyway. They shouldn't prioritize preserving shaky depth over optimizing the skills of the players they have. Making Paredes a full-time reliever would give them a genuinely useful right-handed relief boost and leave flexibility for them to piggyback starts with Ober and/or Prielipp. It's the best short-term management plan for that roster spot, once Prielipp is healthy enough to resume his role as the fifth starter. Start Ryan Kreidler at Shortstop Every Day Until Kaelen Culpepper gets healthy again and has his nagging butt issue figured out (it's a glute muscle injury, but 'butt issue' is funnier, right?), the Twins should give Ryan Kreidler all the playing time at shortstop. There's no need to keep auditioning Tristan Gray there; there's no need to so much as keep Gray on the roster. When Buxton is activated (whether that comes immediately or in a week or so), Gray should be the rsoter casualty. Keeping Alex Jackson around until the trade deadline plan is fully solidified is a must. Roden and Austin Martin have clear utility for the team, even if it's limited to specific roles and their playing time will be a bit sparse. Gray, whose approach has collapsed and whose glove at shortstop has been unimpressive, has no such defense for being farmed out. By contrast, there are concrete reasons to play Kreidler more often, including against righties. For one thing, he's not hitting lefties at all. He's actually been much better against right-handed pitchers this year. He didn't hit well at all in the final stretch before the break, but neither did Gray. Offensively and defensively, Kreidler has been the superior player for weeks, now. He's also more versatile, and thus more worthy of keeping around whenever Culpepper does get the call. In the meantime, though, Kreidler should play every day. Lee can be the backup plan, for a little while. Each of these recommendations are about roster decision points. This one will come down to the Twins having the guts to jettison Gray when they reinstate Buxton, keeping three catchers and a bunch of guys they don't particularly like at various infield spots. Keaschall is an outfielder now; so is Martin. Clemens has slid as far up the defensive spectrum as is at all possible for him. Lee and Lewis are already playing different spots from the ones at which they began the campaign, and the new roles are demotions. Across the board, this is a team with flaws. They're 48-49 for a reason. With some momentum and improving health, however, they have a chance to make the playoffs, anyway. They ought to seize it, and that means making some changes that precede and even replace traditional "buyer"-coded trades. View full article

Image courtesy of © Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images Alex Jackson will make his 15th start of the season Thursday afternoon, as the Twins go for a pivotal sweep of the Guardians at Target Field. Surprisingly, that doesn't feel ominous in the least. Jackson came into this season as a .153/.239/.288 hitter—a former top-10 overall pick turned journeyman, whom the Twins became the seventh team to trade for in a paripatetic 12-year pro career. Even after they dealt for him, the team went out and added Victor Caratini to supplant him as the backup to Ryan Jeffers, stashing Jackson at Triple-A St. Paul to start the season. Now, though, he's become a surprisingly vital ingredient in the team's unexpected surge toward the postseason. In his first 14 starts behind the plate, Jackson is 9-5. For the second year in a row, he's showing plus bat speed, and results to match. He's batting .314/.340/.431. He's struck out 15 times and drawn zero walks in 53 plate appearances, so that batting line isn't exactly sustainable, but to suggest he'll revert to his previous career norms would be to rashly dismiss what has been not only a tangible improvement, but an impressive bit of hard-won hustle value. Jackson is a plus athlete for a catcher. He even has average-plus raw sprint speed, according to Statcast. That makes his surge in bat speed, which happened last year in Baltimore, unsurprising; he just needed longer than initially hoped to learn how to get off his 'A' swing. More surprisng, though, is the way he's applied that athleticism every time he takes the field, with a relentlessness and tenacity that have endeared him to fans, teammates and coaches alike. Jackson has three bunt hits this season. He also hustles down the line on ground balls harder than anyone else on the team. On Saturday against the Yankees, for instance—despite searing heat, the demands of catching under those conditions, and a preposterous combination of hidebound rulemaking and poor preparation that meant the Twins could each wear only one jersey during the game, rather than changing once or twice over nine innings as catchers usually do in such heat—Jackson busted it out of the box on a routine double-play ball in the sixth inning. He beat it out, keeping a rally going. The Twins didn't even go on to score in the frame, but that moment was one distillation of a trend that has been on full display whenever Jackson gets onto the field: effort and hustle in the extreme. TDY1eXFfWGw0TUFRPT1fQUFNQUFGWlFYd1lBRDFzRVhnQUhVQUpTQUFBR0J3Y0FCZ1pVVTFVQ0JRUUdWbFJR.mp4 The bunts Jackson has laid down and the grounders on which he's put pressure on the defense by running hard are good examples of the same traits he shows behind the plate: unselfish dedication to the team. It's an impressive attitude for a player who has rarely stayed with any organization for very long and didn't get especially generous treatment from the one he's in now. Jackson hasn't been a great defender, in the measurable ways. He's not a good pitch framer, and hasn't navigated the ABS system well. He's not excellent at blocking pitches, though he does have an elite throwing arm. In terms of managing a young and not-very-talented pitching staff, though, he's been great. Between the hustle on offense and the situation management on defense, he's gotten the team over the hump nine times in 14 tries since coming up to take Jeffers's spot when the starting catcher got hurt. Yes, the Twins clearly still trust Caratini more. No, this won't necessarily stop them from demoting Jackson (even at the risk of losing him on waivers) when Jeffers returns from the IL. However, when you're a fringy playoff hopeful with a star-caliber catcher and that guy goes down for over six weeks, you brace for a handful of extra losses. In 15 starts, you have to accept that you might lose 10. If the Twins were 4-10 in Jackson's starts, entering Thursday, they'd be lagging the Tigers, in fourth place in the AL Central. They'd be 5.5 games out of the final AL Wild Card spot, with several teams clustered ahead of them. As it is, they're 2 games back in the division and a half-game behind the Rangers for the last prospective playoff berth. Not all of that difference is attributable to Jackson, of course. The team has stepped up in various ways over the last few weeks to salvage their season, staying alive longer than was expected of them. They've also gotten a bit lucky, along the way. But Jackson's motor and his surprising competence are echoes of what the team got right from the moment they acquired Kody Clemens, and of what they've gotten from Ryan Kreidler since turning to him in a similar pinch earlier this year. They're giving chances to guys who had nearly run out of them, and those guys are finding success. That's a testament to the team's scouting and analytics groups and to their coaches, but it's also a testament to the dedication, perseverance and baseball IQ of those players. Jackson is as good a symbol of that as anyone. He's the guy the team saw something in and proactively acquired, but whom they didn't quite trust until they were left with no alternative—and who has essentially saved their season, once the chance to do so arose. View full article

I do find it really odd that they've chosen right for him, especially in their home park, where the right fielder's range isn't as important as their ability to field the ball off the wall and make a quick throw, or make a strong peg from the corner. I can only surmise that they don't want to displace or displease Larnach right now. I would hazard a guess that LK will spend much of the last two months in left, instead. Or center? The old Bill James thing was, "If you can throw, but not run, you play right. If you can run, but not throw, you play left. If you can do both, you play center." I agree with Sam that Keaschall's arm will stay below-average even as an outfielder, but I could see it getting to the point where he could play center without causing a problem.

I broadly agree. I think they'll be trying to replace him pretty much for as long as he's a regular, even if that's not the way they present or even conceive of it. But it's certainly a good sign that he's been playable this year. Last year's Brooks Lee didn't belong on a major-league diamond.

Image courtesy of © Jerome Miron-Imagn Images Technically speaking, in his third big-league season, Brooks Lee is playing his third different primary position. He's wearing his third jersey number. It's third base at which he appears to be settling in for the long haul. But the key number around Lee will always be two: two swings, two plans at the plate, two tracks on which he's trying to simultaneously develop into a solid big-leaguer. This year, he's 2-for-2, which is why he's finally becoming that solid player the team expected and hoped for. As a rookie in 2024, Lee found time at three infield spots and showed flashes of a natural feel for the barrel. Overall, though, he hit an anemic .221/.265/.320. It was ugly. His approach was horrendous. He looked not so much overmatched, as confused, which isn't all that surprising. He was a 23-year-old who'd only had about 800 total professional plate appearances before he arrived in the bigs, and as a switch-hitter with two pretty different plans from the two sides of the dish, he needed more reps than that. Despite the atrocious numbers, that first exposure to the majors seemed likely to be good for him. If the seeds of success were sown in that soil of failure, though, the tree didn't bear fruit in 2025. Lee batted just .236/.285/.370 last season, playing virtually full-time in his first full season with the parent club. Technically, it was forward progress, but it felt woefully insufficient, especially as he demonstrated that his athleticism would be a lasting limitation on his value as a defender and baserunner. He was a bad player, even if he was a little less bad than he'd been the year before—and it was harder to wave away the badness on the basis of injuries or inexperience. That's what makes this year so refreshing. He's not some sudden superstar, but you don't have to squint to see the progress or hunt and plead to make the case that he's a viable regular. The move to third base is good for him, defensively. More importantly, he's batting .242/.297/.429. You'll rarely hear me praise a player with merely moderate defensive value and power whose OBP comes in on the light side of .300, but Lee has made some important strides that are much easier to see below the surface. Specifically, as is true of so many switch-hitters, you have to break him down into his two component selves to properly understand him. From the left side, Lee has made some vital improvements in the way he addresses the ball. His swing isn't massively overhauled, but it's a tick faster, and his timing is better. Here are the distributions of his swing timing on fastballs when batting left-handed for his three seasons in the majors: From left to right, these images show: the frequency with which Lee centers the ball on his barrel, horizontally; the frequency with which he's on time, as opposed to early or late; and the frequency with which he hits the ball off the center, the top or bottom side of the bat, or misses above or below it. The easiest way to see what he's changed, in this case, comes on the left, where Lee has gone from most often hitting the ball just toward the end of his bat from the sweet spot when he came up in 2024 to most often hitting the ball just toward the label or handle. Like most hitters, Lee mostly centers up fastballs well, in general, but the fact that he's more often catching the fastball toward the hands a little now tells us something important about what he's looking for and how flexible his approach is. Remember, as a switch-hitter, he's only facing righties when he bats lefty. Being on time for the fastball (as he's done more consistently this year, which you can see in the center image) but catching it slightly off the center of the barrel toward the hands means that he's extending better through the ball. That might mean slightly less hard contact on the heater, but then come the breaking balls: Breaking stuff moves in on a switch-hitter at all times, and Lee is getting them in on his label a bit more this year, but look at the righthand image. He's hitting the ball with the center of the bat, vertically, more often than last year, too. He's not swinging over the top of it as much or as often. And the story is different on offspeed stuff, but similar: Lee's hitting the top half of the ball a bit more on changeups and splitters this season, which might sound bad—but that's coming instead of whiffing altogether, which he's doing less often. Put the whole profile together, and Lee has a much better batted-ball profile from the left side this season. Here's his spray chart from the left side for last year: And here's the same image for 2026 to date: Lee hasn't hit the ball harder this year, left-handed. He's not even effecting a huge change in the frequency with which he lifts the ball. When he does hit it in the air, though, it's much more often going to the pull field, rather than to center. When he hits it well (at least 88 MPH off the bat and a launch angle of at least 10°), he's hitting it on a line more often, rather than hitting the bottom of the ball and flying out lazily. Here's the distribution of his launch angles on such batted balls in 2025: And here's 2026: This stuff is why Lee batted .220/.278/.365 last season from the left side, but is at .253/.299/.463 this season. He's tapped into more power and more overall value on contact. From the left side, he's a low-OBP guy, but the power is legitimate. Twenty of his 25 extra-base hits this year have come as a lefty. From the right side, alas, there's been no significant change to bat path, timing and contact profile. Indeed, there's been (so far) no actual improvement. He had a .677 OPS against lefties last year; he has a .642 OPS against them this year. But there's been one important change: Lee knows what he's looking for now. From the right side, he's become more selective within the zone, which has more than doubled his walk rate from last year, from 3.4% to 7.5%. He's not actually swinging less often, as a whole. He's not even chasing less often. By being willing to let some pitches his righty swing can't generate any punch on go by, though, Lee has made himself a viable hitter from the right side, with more upside. He's striking out less, in addition to walking more. The contact is pretty empty, but he's gotten slightly unlucky from that side, too. This version of Lee can be a useful player for multiple big-league seasons. He might always be the infielder you're hoping to replace with a better one, but plenty of good teams go far with players they always hoped to replace but never got around to actually shaking. Lee's two positions this year mirror his two different swings and two different approaches. He's made two different adjustments this year, based on handedness, and he's increasingly looking like a useful player—even though he's had to do two (or more) things at once almost since the moment he put on a uniform. View full article

Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images© Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images The second pitch Zebby Matthews threw Monday night in Minneapolis was a changeup. It leaped off the bat of Shohei Ohtani, and came down 414 feet away, long gone for a leadoff home run. Matthews missed his spot badly, and Ohtani made him pay with a rising line drive to the plaza beyond right field. That wasn't just a one-off, either. Matthews didn't have command of his changeup (almost) all night. He would throw another change to Freddie Freeman later in the first frame; two to Kyle Tucker and one to Tommy Edman in the second; and two to Ryan Ward in the fifth. All six of those pitches missed the zone, and none of them induced a chase. He succeeded only in falling behind with the pitch, and had to shelve it entirely in the third and fourth innings of his outing. Yet, Matthews found a way to hang around. He turned to a slightly hybridized version of his slider that had more movement than his cutter but was harder than his usual slider. he spotted his four-seamer well to all quadrants. Against a top-heavy but lethal Dodgers lineup, he got through the first five innings without giving up another run after that Ohtani shot. In the sixth, not having the change working finally caught up to him. After missing with both a four-seamer and a cutter to Freeman, he left another cutter in the middle of the zone on a 2-0 count. Freeman hammered a game-winning homer, putting the Dodgers up 2-1. All night, as it turned out, only homers by Ohtani, Freeman and Byron Buxton dented the scoreboard. But Matthews recovered nicely. After the Freeman bomb, he walked Mookie Betts, but the breaking of the tie also broke some tension for him. He and catcher Victor Caratini decided to come back to the changeup, doubling up on it to start Max Muncy's at-bat. Both pitches were called strikes. Muncy lined out. Derek Shelton let Matthews keep working, even though he'd already thrown 97 pitches at that point. Alex Call singled, but Matthews then got a flyout from Edman and struck out catcher Chuckie Robinson to escape the jam. In the end, Matthews put up six innings of two-run ball, and threw a career-high 108 pitches. More importantly, he found a way to survive without a pitch he usually throws about a quarter of the time against left-handed batters. If he successfully establishes himself as a mid-rotation starter for the Twins this year, bookmark Monday night's start. It was a huge step forward. The Twins lost, but Matthews gave them every chance to beat the two-time defending World Series champions. He did it without a pitch he'll have a better version of most of the time, through some good on-the-mound problem-solving. He rewarded his manager's faith and discovered a new capacity to pitch beyond his previous limits. View full article

Image courtesy of © Jerome Miron-Imagn Images Over the years, a somewhat facile narrative has attached itself to Josh Bell: every season, he has one good half, and one bad one. It's not quite true, of course. No player's career divides up that neatly; people just tend to generalize to save themselves time when nuance seems unduly weighty. Bell has had some years in which his first- and second-half splits stood in stark contrast to each other, but even using a generous definition of "good" (anything over an .800 OPS) and an unforgiving definition of "bad" (anything under .750), Bell has four "neutral" halves in his eight full seasons of play, to go with six of each of the other two types. In this table, I've bolded halves that count as "good" by the criteria I just described, and italicized the ones that count as "bad." Results Table Rk Split Year ▲ G PA BA OBP SLG 1 1st Half 2017 88 339 .239 .322 .472 2 2nd Half 2017 71 281 .274 .349 .460 3 1st Half 2018 96 374 .261 .342 .396 4 2nd Half 2018 52 209 .263 .383 .440 5 1st Half 2019 88 388 .302 .376 .648 6 2nd Half 2019 55 225 .233 .351 .429 7 1st Half 2021 73 274 .245 .310 .446 8 2nd Half 2021 71 294 .277 .381 .506 9 1st Half 2022 93 394 .311 .390 .504 10 2nd Half 2022 63 253 .194 .317 .289 11 1st Half 2023 82 332 .230 .319 .381 12 2nd Half 2023 68 285 .266 .332 .461 13 1st Half 2024 94 396 .228 .289 .356 14 2nd Half 2024 51 207 .292 .379 .506 15 1st Half 2025 84 326 .219 .307 .372 16 2nd Half 2025 56 207 .267 .353 .489 17 1st Half 2026 70 276 .232 .286 .366 Provided by Stathead: Found with Stathead. See Full Results. Generated 6/16/2026. As Twins fans are finding out, though, facile narratives obscure more complex realities. Bell isn't a guy who just plays at a solid, high level for three months, then slumps for three, or vice-versa. He goes through the same undulations as most hitters; he just has some things that stretch the periods of those rises and falls. For one, he's a switch-hitter. For another, he's always had good (though not elite) plate discipline. Those things set a high floor for him, but the switch-hitting (along with his swing path from each side) also sets a lowish ceiling; he can't reliably produce pulled fly balls in a way that yields lasting power and could make him an elite slugger. Thus, we've already seen Bell go through a streak and a slump in his brief tenure with the Minnesota Twins. He started the season red-hot, then went ice-cold. That's not some acceleration of his career norms for performance variance; he had multiple slumps (and neatly counterbalancing streaks) in 2024 and 2025. As yu can see, though, Bell is on the upswing again. In fact, after Monday night's 2-for-4 showing (including a three-run homer), he's now batting .218/.314/.490 over the last 30 days, with five home runs and five doubles in 102 plate appearances. He's not walking much. In fact, he's swinging quite a bit more than his norm, which is a trend we had better keep an eye on. Still, Bell has entered another productive phase of his sinusoidal batting curve, and his three-run homer Monday night against MacKenzie Gore of the Rangers was a good example of how it's happening. Gore tried to backfoot a breaking ball to Bell, but left it in the lower, inside quadrant of the strike zone. That's a costly mistake to any right-handed batter with power, but especially one who's locked in right now. In fairness to Gore and the Rangers, though, they were trying something clever. On the previous pitch (a 1-0 fastball), Bell had challenged a strike call. It was a heater down and in, but it nipped the corner, and Bell's challenge failed. In addition to leveling the count, that appeal told Texas that Bell wasn't seeing the ball especially well down in that spot. Going back to it with another fastball would be one way to take advantage of that, but they were trying the cousin of that strategy: a pitch that would look like the fastball in the same spot, but then dive under Bell's bat. They asked him, in effect, to get himself out (or at least into a 1-2 hole) by chasing a pitch for which he'd been primed by the previous pitch itself and his own frustrating failure to overturn its outcome. We'll never know what would have happened if Gore had executed better. My guess, though, is that Bell would have just spat on that offering and gotten ahead, anyway. Though the Rangers might have been right to perceive that Bell saw that fastball poorly, they were wrong to conclude that it was because of the location. Here's how we know. New Statcast metrics available at Baseball Savant show us not only by how much batters miss when they whiff, but how their swing timings are distributed within any given sample. We can see how consistently the hitter centers their swing to put the barrel of the bat in the path of the ball, horizontally; how often they line it up vertically; and how often they're on time (versus being early or late) for the pitch. Here are Bell's swing timing distributions by month, for right-handed swings only. This month (and, if I were to re-run this and show you the distribution isolating the time since the middle of May, rather than breaking it up by month for easier visual comparison, you'd see the same thing), Bell is a danger to all left-handed pitchers. See how the orange distribution curves representing June rise higher and are more centered in each of the first two images, relative to the previous months? That's Bell consistently finding the barrel and being on time, whereas he was often early or late and working out to the end of the bat in the two previous months. He's locked in, and when you're on time and the ball is on the center of the barrel, exit velocity is going to follow. Charts like this are going to help us understand and explain slumps and streaks much better than we have in the past; Bell's resurgence in power is no surprise given what we see here. When he's had any trouble at all from the right side, this month, he's found it by getting underneath the ball. Southpaws have had some luck throwing it over his bat, both inside: MTZOVlZfWGw0TUFRPT1fVWxJRFZGd0FWZ0VBQUZBSFhnQUhVZzVUQUFCUlYxWUFWd01CQlZBTUFBVmRBd01E.mp4 and outside: Uk85cm9fWGw0TUFRPT1fQXdJSEJnRlFYMUFBWGxvQlZBQUhCUU5lQUFOUVV3TUFVd01FQWdOVVUxSlJWQUpm.mp4 At this moment, if you try to get Bell out as a right-handed batter by throwing a breaking ball below the zone, you're only setting yourself up for failure. He's not chasing those, and when you miss, he's lined up to punish you ferociously for it. Gore erred as much by even attempting to throw that tricky curveball as by mislocating it. That worked out wonderfully for the Twins, though, and it illustrates another thing we can see more clearly as we get more comfortable with the new Statcast data: everyone's scouting report should be changing often. Sometimes, the back-foot breaking ball is the right pitch to Bell. Right now, he has that covered. The Twins need Bell to continue producing the way he has over the last month. Whether they end up hanging around in the woebegone AL Central or are looking to trade Bell in July or August, they need his bat to keep humming. He's not some unique case of a player tidily cutting their season in half and choosing to hit in just one of the two, but he's certainly prone to long stretches of cold or hot hitting. During the latter type of run, he can win games for you on his own—as he did, practically, in the very first inning Monday night. View full article

Hey that's right! It *IS* Culpepper's butt that is injured!

Exactly. Increasingly, this feels like a draft with a clear top 3, so being 3rd guarantees you access to the top tier. Personally, I like Emerson a lot, and HE feels like the one most likely to fall into their laps...

What I'm really trying to tell you is that Lewis might never belong in a regular big-league lineup again. He needs to be open to position changes because the team is (rightfully) no longer holding his old one open for him. Moving him around isn't about finding a way to get his bat in the lineup, from the team's perspetive. It's about him still having a career, because versatility is one way bad players can hang around a while.