Matthew Trueblood

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.

Boy, I just don't see what you're seeing in what Tom wrote. It seems like a very clear-eyed, even-handed take on a player in a very real career crisis! You're sort of acting like Tom is making up the major climb that now lies before Royce, but look at this more reasonably. Lewis has been an atrocious hitter for the last 21 months now, going all the way to August 2024. Lee isn't a viable shortstop, but he's hitting enough that they need to keep giving him some chance to show whether he can stick. Third base is probably his best spot. The team sent Lewis down and installed Lee at his old position! This isn't some flight of fancy; it's what the actual big-league team just did. I think you've gotta grapple with reality a little more here. Royce doesn't have a clear path back to the majors and his most likely one is not as the everyday third baseman. He needs versatility, or a new defensive home where he fits better into someone's plans, even if it's not the Twins'. I don't think any other org is out there hoping to pounce on him for a full-time job at third, either.

I disagree with you about Kreidler, and maybe Gray, too. I believe in Keaschall's bat long-term, but he's still in a tough adjustment phase. I don't think Lee is ever going to be a consistently average-plus hitter. I think the far superior defense should be plenty of motivation for them to keep using Kreidler and Gray in all advantageous matchups (Kreidler every day, Gray against all righties) for a while, to find out what they have there. I'm fine with letting Arcia ride the bench, mostly, but if he keeps hitting like this, you might need to fit him in for OFFENSIVE purposes—and he's certainly a better defender than Keaschall at second, anyway.

Absolutely. I think the best defensive alignment they could field, by far, is Gray at third, Kreidler at short and Arcia at second. I wonder if we see that a few more times in the days ahead.

Give me good results over bad results every time, but I will say, he hasn't been right this month, either. The quality of contact isn't there. The directionality is still off. And behind the scenes, neither Keaschall nor the Twins are satisfied with the progress.

Hitting .270 without power or defensive value is a good way to end up either starting for a very bad team or riding the shuttle between the majors and AAA for a good one...

Image courtesy of © Jordan Johnson-Imagn Images The plate appearance totals don't match up perfectly, but it's as close as you could ask it to be. Heading into Memorial Day, Luke Keaschall has played exactly 49 regular-season games in 2026, which is the same number he played in 2025. This time, he knows the daily grind of the majors better. This time, he hasn't had his progress interrupted by injuries. One would hope that he would be proving himself a robust part of the Twins' future, even if he couldn't quite replicate last year's tremendous rookie showing. Instead, the comparison of his freshman and (incomplete) sophomore efforts looks like this: 2025: 207 PA, .302/.382/.445, 4 HR, 19 BB, 29 SO 2026: 201 PA, .233/.318/.307, 1 HR, 19 BB, 32 SO He remains very good at putting the ball in play, but all the sting has been sapped from Keaschall's stick. He didn't exactly obliterate the ball last year, but his average exit velocity and his hard-hit rate are notably down this year. He overachieved in terms of hitting for both power and average last season, but even at a fundamental quality-of-contact level, he's seen a real degradation this year. Over the weekend, he was benched on consecutive days, as manager Derek Shelton elected to give him the same treatment he gave Matt Wallner and Royce Lewis during their own profound offensive struggles—right before each was shuttled off to the minors. Keaschall is younger, has hit better and is more clearly a part of the team's vision for the future than either Lewis or Wallner, so he's not likely to be optioned any time soon. As Shelton commits to making playing time a question of merit and production, though, Keaschall is already losing out. Brooks Lee, Ryan Kreidler, Orlando Arcia and Tristan Gray may not be Murderer's Row, but they all have substantially better offensive numbers than Keaschall has this year—and Keaschall is, by a wide margin, the worst defensive infielder in the group. All this is fairly shocking, because Keaschall actually came to camp this year having improved in what looked like the one area that would limit him as a hitter: bat speed. Last season, his average swing speed was just 66.9 miles per hour, according to Statcast—one of the lowest marks in the league. It's not possible to be any kind of power hitter with so little bat speed, so it looked as though Keaschall would need to use his speed and good placement of the ball even to consistently generate doubles in the majors. That he ran into four homers in a third of a season's playing time felt semi-miraculous. In theory, he's made a major upgrade this spring. His average swing speed is now 69.2 MPH. That's still well below average, but batters who find the barrel often can produce power at that level. Spencer Horwitz, Michael Busch, Will Smith, Cody Bellinger, Trent Grisham and other guys who have proved themselves capable of 20-plus homers a year live in that range. Admittedly, none of those are great comps for Keaschall, in terms of body type, handedness or bat path, but the point stands. You can have a pretty high ceiling as a hitter, once you get to 69 MPH or so. In practice, this has been nothing but bad for Keaschall—at least so far. Bat speed isn't primarily about the force you impart on the baseball because of that speed; you can generate just as hard a batted ball by squaring it up well. Bat speed matters, instead, because it lets you decide later and pull the trigger on the swing later—but so far, Keaschall has had no luck in redeeming that advantage for real value. With no noticeable or measurable change in his swing path and a significant increase in his bat speed, our default expectation should be that Keaschall would make contact farther in front of his body this year than he did in 2025. Instead, his contact point is almost identical to where it was last year. That tells us that he's making proper theoretical use of the advantage he's gained by swinging faster; he's deciding later. In practice, though, that's creating more problems than it's solving. Here's Keaschall handling a fastball down the middle the way a hitter like him should, last August. ZzY4bmxfWGw0TUFRPT1fRGdsWUFnQlZBMWNBQ2xVS1VBQUhDUVlIQUZnQlZBSUFWMXdDVXdJQkJnVlNWQWRW.mp4 This is Keaschall as we all came to know him as a rookie: direct to the ball, frighteningly accurate with the barrel, and (perhaps most importantly) consistently on time. Now, here he is against another fat heater, last month. bGJ3a0JfWGw0TUFRPT1fQlZkVlhGVURVVkFBQVZFQ1V3QUhVdzVRQUFOVFYxY0FCbEJSVWdBTlZ3VldCQUlD.mp4 The temptation, when you see a batter foul a fastball off to the opposite field, is to say they were late on it. Watch closely, though. Keaschall wasn't late here. Rather, he was a hair early, in the timing and the shape of his newly accelerated swing. Set the moments at which he made contact on each pitch side-by-side, and you can see what I mean. Keaschall's arms are actually more extended in the still on the right. He misses the barrel and clips the ball with the high/outside part of his bat because he's already rotated a hair too far. This is normal, if a bit unfortunate, for a hitter who's newly added some bat speed. It's great to swing faster, but you have to learn to stay on time, too. That's a quick glimpse at the fight not to be too early, once you get faster. Now, here's how you can end up a little too late. Here are two cutters away from Keaschall, in early counts. One from last September: b0daM1hfV0ZRVkV3dEdEUT09X0J3aFdBRkVBVkFZQUQxSUxWZ0FIQTFRREFBQlRBbFlBQlFjQ0F3b0ZCbEpWQUF0Vw==.mp4 And one from April: cU93MFFfWGw0TUFRPT1fQXdZSEFsUlFVUVlBRGdNSFZRQUhWUTlmQUZrR0FBTUFBUWNHVkZCWEFRRUJCd1JU.mp4 Keaschall hit both balls pretty squarely, but as any modern hitting coach will tell you, the difference between a squarely-hit ball pulled in the air and one up the middle on the ground is the difference between payday and pain. Keaschall got around the first of these offerings; he couldn't do so on the second. He's swinging faster this year, but you can't just swing fast; you have to swing on time. Here's the moment at which Keaschall first begins the descent phase of his leg kick—when his swing really begins, as opposed to his load—on each pitch. Last year, he was starting that part of his move before the pitch left the pitcher's hand. This year, it's more often coming just after release. The difference seems tiny, until you remember that the projectile he's trying to hit (at just the right angle, mind you) is coming in on the north side of 90 miles per hour and that the space in which he can produce the better kind of batted ball runs perhaps six inches from front to back. Again, in the long run, this should still be a good thing. Being able to decide later should yield better swing decisions, and if Keaschall decides he still needs to cheat a bit more to produce the contact he wants, he can now sacrifice some contact for power that was unreachable when his swing was one of the five or six slowest in the game. There are no guarantees about getting this evolution right, of course. Plenty of players have gotten permanently broken by trying to shore up some weakness, insufficiently cognizant of the costs of that improvement or simply unable to pay them without going talent-broke. On balance, though, it's fair to stay optimistic about Keaschall as a hitter. This adjustment period has been painful, but it's part of the process of going from good to (knock on wood) great. View full article

Versatility never hurts but Royce needs such an offensive overhaul. Why complicate it by asking him to learn a new position that also puts more pressure on the bat? I already thought demoting him was a head start on sending him somewhere (anywhere?) else this summer, but moving Lee to third so soon after they did it only increases my conviction about that.

It's a bit interesting that they waited until Tristan Gray left for paternity leave to do it, though. I wonder if Lee will slide back to short (for a bit) once Gray returns, or whether it'll now be Gray and Kreidler alternating at short with Lee at third.

And, since he's not really good defensively at any spot and has no speed, not even that. He has to hit to be a big-leaguer at all.