Matthew Trueblood

The sarcastic point he's making—which I assume is along the lines of "All this over a guy with a 5.28 ERA?"—is halfway valid. But I really do think Prielipp has shown all the markings of a guy who could end up as a future No. 2.

Image courtesy of Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images Athleticism spreads across a baseball diamond in predictable ways. There are always outliers, because some geniuses find ways to succeed in unexpected places via their savvy, and because teams sometimes align their talent in strange ways for any number of reasons, but we know where the best athletes need to be during baseball games—and which kinds of athletes are most needed in which places. For instance, your tall, languid guy usually shouldn't be at third base. Nor should your fast but underpowered guy play there. No, speed goes in the outfield, and it goes up the middle. Arm strength is important on the left side of the infield and in the outfield. Those are extreme examples, and extremes always make things seem obvious. Most real-life cases are more nuanced. Take, for instance, Brooks Lee. A stocky but strapping switch-hitter, Lee entered professional baseball as a shortstop. That was where he played in high school and in college, where he was an elite athlete. Even in the minors, he was an above-average runner and thrower (and hitter, for that matter), relative to all the players around him. Eventually, though, he came to the big leagues, and compared only to the 50 or so best players at each position in the Western hemisphere, his profile becomes a bit less impressive. As we know, the Twins tried Lee at shortstop. It didn't work. In fact, it didn't work twice, but the team only fully recognized the failure the second time, when he cost them several runs over the first month and a half of the 2026 season. That's when they moved him to third base, and everything changed. In 400 innings at shortstop this year, Lee was worth -9 Defensive Runs Saved (DRS), according to Sports Info Solutions. In 738 innings at third base, he's been worth 7 DRS. The change is enormous. Only J.P. Crawford and Trea Turner have hurt their teams more as shortstop defenders than Lee did, despite how short a time he spent there. Only Matt Chapman, Alex Bregman, Caleb Durbin and Maikel García have saved their clubs more runs at the hot corner than Lee has, despite 16 players logging more innings at the position than he has. Lee, as it turns out, is an extremely good fit for third base, even though he was an extremely bad fit for the spot that neighbors it on the infield. The values are extreme; so is the difference in the eye test. Yet, the reason for it is that Lee isn't extreme, himself, in any regard; he's just above- and below-average at things that make him much better-suited to one place than to the other. Here are the average sprint speeds and arm strengths of players at each position, for 2026. Position Sprint Speed (ft./sec.) Arm Strength (MPH) Catcher 26.1 80.3 First Base 26.3 79.4 Second Base 27.7 79.2 Third Base 27.1 84.9 Shortstop 27.9 86.2 Left Field 28 87.6 Center Field 28.7 89.5 Right Field 28.1 90.5 D.H. 26.1 — Pitcher — 94.7 As you would have guessed if I had asked you to do so blindly, outfielders are the fastest players on the field. Catchers, first basemen and designated hitters are the slowest. There's also an interesting hierarchy among the three more difficult infield spots, though. Shortstops are the fastest, with second basemen close behind; third basemen can be (and are) slower. Reading the arm strength column is trickier. As anyone familiar with the game already knows, outfielders need strong arms, but they also enjoy the benefit of being able to load up and fire on their most important throws, generating greater raw arm strength readings than one finds on the infield—where a quick exchange and release is paramount. The latter is even more true of catchers, whose most important throws come when trying to throw out basestealers. Thus, while infielders generate lower raw velocity readings, it's safe to say that shortstop and catcher are the positions (other than pitcher, of course) where arm strength is most important, and where teams put their strongest arms, all else equal. Even between infielders, though, these averages are apples and oranges. Players who play both second base and third base tend to throw 5-7 MPH harder from third than from second, for the obvious reason: the throw is longer. That means that it takes more oomph to get the ball to the first baseman, and that the runner has a greater chance to beat out a weak throw from the left side than from the right. We see a lower average arm strength among second basemen than among third basemen for the same reason as that which leads the same player's average throw to be harder from third than from second. Compare shortstops and third basemen, though, and the dynamic changes. As you can see, shortstops have stronger arms, on average. That's because, though the third baseman is all the way across the diamond, they're often playing shallower than a shortstop; they more often make relatively short throws with their momentum taking them in the general direction of first base; and their longest, toughest throws tend to come from more set positions and after ranging less far than a shortstop's longest and toughest throws. Yet, of the seven players who have spent meaningful time at both third and short this year, none throw harder when playing short than when playing third. On the contrary: Two (Willi Castro and J.P. Crawford) throw almost exactly as hard, regardless of position; Three (Kevin McGonigle, Bo Bichette and Joey Ortiz) throw between 1 and 2 MPH faster when playing third base; and Two (David Hamilton and Lee) throw over 3 MPH harder from the hot corner. The game demands that exceptional athletes with elite throwing arms play shortstop. It does not, however, demand that those players use every ounce of their throwing power on most plays. In fact, third base requires a stronger arm on a median play than shortstop does. The shortstop just has to be a better thrower in order to convert the occasional, fairly extreme play. Lee is an interesting case study, then. His sprint speed (26.4 feet per second) is virtually untenable for a shortstop, but just barely below-average for a third baseman. His arm is far below the average shortstop's, but not far at all below the average third baseman's—not because he's unable to uncork a strong throw, per se, but because he throws so much harder from third than from short. And why is that? Now, we've arrived at the crux of it. It's because Lee isn't fast enough. A lot of the balls on which Lee should have had to make stronger throws from shortstop ended up in left field, because he never got to them. Some others ended up in his glove, but he didn't even make a throw because he'd had to leave his feet to make the play and felt he had no chance to get his man. There were still times, even at short, where you could see that Lee is a fine low-to-the-ground athlete and has a strong arm, just as he has above-average bat speed and surprising power at the plate. He does, theoretically, have the arm for short; the raw strength and rotational capacity is there. He just needed to have the advantage of having been shaded into the hole, so he could actually reach a ball that otherwise would have eluded him, and so that he could set his feet to make that throw. UHY2TzNfWGw0TUFRPT1fVWdaU0JWTUZWUXNBQ3dFREF3QUhWQUlIQUZrQVVsWUFBbE5UVWxJTkFWZFZCRllE.mp4 Shortstops, who tend to have both kinds of baseball athleticism bound up into one body, can make that same play after having started the play a step farther toward second base. They'd have the area to their left better-covered, and they could still flag down this ball, turn enough to be accurate, and uncork a strong throw without being in the strong position Lee enjoyed when he threw out Ernie Clement on this play. That's what's missing for Lee. When he must throw on the move, he can't get much on it. When he must move a lot to get to a ball in the first place, there's a good chance he won't reach it. At shortstop, those are fatal flaws. At third, they're fairly unimportant. Most of the throws he makes on the move some as he ranges to his left, and are therefore short and fairly easy. Most of the balls that test his range are to that side, too; he can use the foul line as an extra defender. For some players forced to move off shortstop, second base makes more sense. For some, playing third doesn't solve many problems, because they have extremely good arm strength (good enough for short, even) but not the hands or the decision-making ability to be any better elsewhere on the dirt than they are at short. Lee is not elite, because his arm is still average or worse, but he's a very good third baseman, because his only shortcoming as a shortstop is being a step too slow. He's showed the utility of his arm since moving to third, and even a slight reduction in the range required of him has turned him from subpar to superb. In the long run, Marek Houston and Kaelen Culpepper might conspire to threaten Lee's playing time even at third. For now, though, he's entrenched, and his job security is well-earned. He's not a great hitter, but he looks to be above-average in the right role, batting higher in the lineup against right-handed pitchers and lower against lefties. He's already hit a career-best 22 home runs this year, and has a good chance to get to 25. On both sides of the ledger, having the right things asked of him has revealed the best version of Lee, lending us insight into what makes various roles on a team different and interesting. He began the year a fringe big-leaguer who was a drag on the team. He could finish it as a solid prospective piece of an evolving roster. View full article

Image courtesy of Nick Wosika-Imagn Images The first thing you notice about Walker Jenkins is his size. In a profession where almost everyone is big and strong, he looks big and strong even by comparison. When the Twins called him up late last week, they placed Jenkins's locker between those of Kody Clemens and Trevor Larnach in the home clubhouse, and Jenkins practically dwarfed both—no small feat, where the 6-foot-3 Larnach is concerned. It's not that Jenkins is exceptionally big, in absolute terms. He just takes up space, in that special way some athletes do. He's only as tall as Larnach, but he stands taller. He's long-limbed, broad-chested and broad-shouldered. While he moves plenty well to play center field throughout his early 20s, it's easy to see why most scouts expect him to move to right field later in his career. He's so big that he'll have to slow down a bit, in time. Bigness defines him in the batter's box, too. From the press box, watching Jenkins set up in the batter's box was eye-opening, because he's much more spread-out than might be apparent from the center-field camera. As some huge players do, he seems to take up the whole box; he's almost too big to be held. In fact, only a small handful of players who have played in the majors this year start with more space between their feet than Jenkins does, in his stance. Most notable among that group: the Mets' Juan Soto. Here's how Soto sets up in the box, using Statcast's visualization of stance data. Here's the same visual for Jenkins, who is almost exactly as open in his setup and has almost an identical distance between his feet as Soto. Jenkins's swing doesn't look anything like Soto's, though. Whereas Soto spreads out that way to get into a deep crouch and swing flat and fast, Jenkins's stroke seems geared toward loft. His average tilt on 17 competitive swings over the three games was 35°, which is steeper than average. His attack angle (the vertical angle between the ground and the movement of the barrel at the time of contact) is steeper than average, too, and his attack direction (the horizontal angle of his barrel at contact) is more to the pull side of the diamond than average. Perhaps because Jenkins landed with the Twins via the MLB Draft Lottery, he's been comped to Joe Mauer on his way up the chain to the majors. However, this stroke—which might not be the one he settles into; it was just one adrenaline-soaked weekend—looks more like a tall and lithe left-handed batter who's still active: the Yankees' Cody Bellinger. Here's a sample swing from Jenkins: cU93R2dfWGw0TUFRPT1fQWxSWlVBWlhYbEVBRGxkVVZ3QUhBRmNGQUFCWFVnVUFCVlVFQnd0V1ZGSmRCUVJT.mp4 And here's one from Bellinger, who's much more upright and has his feet much closer together in his stance but then moves so similarly to Jenkins: YVlkUW5fWGw0TUFRPT1fVXdsV0FWQU1VZ1FBWEFCVVVBQUhBVkpWQUFBRFdsRUFCUVFFQWxCUUFRZFZDUXNF.mp4 Bellinger's swing tilt and attack angle are almost identical to Jenkins's, though he doesn't average as much pull orientation as Jenkins did over his first week. It looks like Jenkins has above-average (but not elite) bat speed, and will set up in a spread-out stance to give himself stability as he attacks the ball, looking to both be patient and lift the ball with power to the pull field. It's too early to get overconfident about what kind of hitter Jenkins is, or what kind he might become. In just a few days, though, we can glean real insight into those questions, thanks to the detail and depth of new tracking data. The Twins will hope to get more actual production over the next four weeks than they got over these three games, but Jenkins deserved slightly better results than he got in his first series as a major leaguer. He's also showing some valuable and fascinating similarities to a few of the game's best hitters. Already, there's plenty to be optimistic about. View full article

The man's base salary is $15 million a year. A $20,000 bonus is to him as $100 is to a person making $75,000 a year. Would you come to work injured, knowing you'd be criticized for underperformance as well as being in pain, for $100?

Culpepper and Jenkins can feed off each other, if nothing else, right?

It's true, though the Tiggers of Twins Daily are just as dangerous imo.

Image courtesy of © Kyle Ross-Imagn Images Not long ago, I made the case for appreciating Luke Keaschall as a bit of a throwback: a player who can really, really hit, and who is therefore worth making room for at all times—even though he's going to hurt you no matter where you put him in the field. However, that piece was about Keaschall, the defensive nomad, and especially Keaschall, the right fielder who might well become a left fielder next season. The time Keaschall spent in center field, while Byron Buxton was on the injured list, was on another level of awful—an untenable one, akin to his work at second base before the team moved him into the grass earlier in the season. Keaschall's bat is worth forcing into the lineup, but you have to do it by hiding him in a corner outfield spot, or at designated hitter. He can't be your center fielder. The Twins know that, too. Once Buxton returned from the IL earlier this month, they shunted Keaschall back to right. They kept playing Buxton in center whenever he was fit enough to be in the lineup, despite his own obvious limitations, because they knew they didn't have another viable center fielder on the active roster. All the while, momentum built toward a Walker Jenkins promotion, which would give the team a much more solid defensive option in center on non-Buxton days down the stretch. (For that matter, so would promoting Emmanuel Rodriguez.) If the team had been playing at home this week, Jenkins might have been called up already. Instead, though, the team has been on a six-game, eight-day road trip to San Diego and West Sacramento. They clearly preferred to survive this trip with their existing outfield options, including Buxton, Keaschall, Trevor Larnach, Alan Roden, and utility men Kody Clemens and Ryan Kreidler. It sounds silly, but even in the midst of a pennant race, teams try not to turn the roster inside-out during trips that involve difficult or lengthy travel. It's not about costs, of course. It's a little bit about logistics. Most of all, though, it's about the rhythm of the season and the tenor of a clubhouse. Big changes work best when they happen on off days, and they work best when they don't change the layout of a clubhouse in which a team is already only spending a few days. That Minnesota was playing the Athletics in quasi-minor-league surroundings made that an especially important consideration this week. Thus, when Buxton pulled up lame Tuesday night, it had to hit the top people in the Twins front office like a sock full of nickels. The timing was terrible. It was clear, even as Buxton limped off the field, that he would be unavailable Wednesday. That left the team with an unwelcome dilemma: make a quick move and get Jenkins (or Rodriguez) to West Sacramento in under 24 hours, only to leave town another few hours later; or ride it out for one more game without the only center fielder they really trust. As you already know, they chose the latter. Keaschall started in center Wednesday night. It was a copout, in a way. The team was just kicking the can down the road. That's understandable, under the circumstances, and they could easily have gotten away with it. Unfortunately, the universe was in a bad mood, and it decided to punish their choice harshly. In fairness, though, Keaschall made them an appealing target for that kind of karmic thwack to the forehead. The rubber game of a series the Twins could not afford to lose was decided in the bottom of the sixth inning. There was already danger afoot, some of it caused by Keaschall. The A;s had collected three hits in the frame, including one fly ball that landed well in front of Keaschall partially because Keaschall had been playing exceptionally deep. They'd pulled to within one run; it was 4-3 Twins. There were two outs and two on, and Andrew Morris just needed to find one more out to escape the jam. Alika Williams hit a long fly ball to center. You already know what happened. MnI5T05fWGw0TUFRPT1fQWdjSEJWVUhBZ1lBQ1ZJR0FnQUhBRkFFQUZsUkFBUUFCbGNDVlFVRkFRcFFCd0VG.mp4 Keaschall didn't take a good initial angle, and he didn't adjust quite enough. He still (basically) got there, though—and then failed to catch it, anyway. Statcast will be a bit more generous to him once it accounts for the fact that he was going back on the ball and was close to the wall, but its initial assessment is that the ball had an 85% catch probability, based on the hang time and where Keaschall began the play. Even if you call it a 50/50 proposition, the fact is that Keaschall didn't catch it. Two runs scored, and the A's had the lead they would hold onto for the rest of the game. If that ball is caught, the Twins have a 70% chance of winning the game, based on win expectancy matrices from Tom Tango. Once he didn't, the A's had a 73.8% chance. That's a difference of 43.2% in win probability for the Twins, and if we call the play a coin-flip for an average center fielder, we can say that when the ball left Williams's bat, the game itself was a near coin-flip. Keaschall's failure to make the play had a -0.216 WPA, though official WPA only assigns value to hitters and pitchers and ignores defense. Having Keaschall in center cost the Twins that game. In the wake of that loss, the team woke up Thursday with just a 7.1% chance to make the postseason, according to Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA-fueled projected standings. That figure was 31.5% just a week ago. Losing five of six on the road trip torpedoed the team's chances, and a major reason for one of those losses was a very avoidable failure based on the team being too patient—not quite desperate enough, to put it one way. This isn't the only game Keaschall has cost the team with his glove this year. In addition to some atrocious plays at second and in right, he also failed to catch a ball that has to be caught in the bottom of the eighth inning against the Brewers earlier this month. It fell in front of him for a single, and that hit later turned into the game-winning run for the Brewers. NnlNZWRfWGw0TUFRPT1fVjFkUVUxMEdWZ1FBQUZCUVhnQUhCRlJRQUZnQVdsVUFCbEFBVkZKVEJGZFZCQUlG.mp4 Playing Keaschall in center as much as they have is a case of the team being too willing to roll the dice and play the long game. That's part of the responsibility the front office faces, in a year when they're hardly a juggernaut. They have to think about the long-term future. This is not a year in which to go all-in. But another of their responsibilities is to recognize places where they can give this year's team the best possible chance to convert on their opportunity to reach the postseason, without hurting their future prospects. This was one of those chances. They should already have called up Jenkins, who could be taking playing time from their lousy left-hitting corner outfielders and covering for them defensively in center. They should certainly have called him up when Buxton got hurt Tuesday night. They didn't, and if they miss the playoffs by one game, we can also say they missed it by one play—a ball that should have been caught, and would have been, had the right player been placed there to catch it. View full article

I mean.... maybe he did. Maybe he had a lot more than that! Again, I just want to be clear that we don't know. Official pitch-by-pitch records don't exist. Even newspaper accounts at the time very rarely (and not always accurately; you can easily find two different notes of what the count was when a hitter came up with a clutch hit or something) provided sufficient detail to be confident that any inning lasted any specific number of pitches. It's just not something we can say with any certainty about the game before about 40 years ago.

I would argue it's *not* safe to say that, which is why we have some caveats in this piece. The league doesn't know any better than Dan does. "in history" means, for feats/stats that center on knowing the outcome of each pitch, since 1988; there's no complete data set anywhere of all pitch outcomes before that. I do wish that were made clearer, including by Cory last night. We tried to elucidate it here.

Image courtesy of David Frerker-Imagn Images Willie Mays didn't start Game 2 of the 1973 World Series. He was almost a mascot by that point, playing out the string for the Mets as they won their second unexpected pennant in five years. At age 42, he'd been limited to playing first base and serving as a pinch-hitter for the final two months of the regular season, and even in those roles, he hadn't looked especially good. He did play a few innings in center at the end of the NLCS, and he got the start in Game 1 against the Oakland A's. However, he committed an ugly error in that first game of the Fall Classic, and it seemed like he might never step into the outfield again. New York had to call upon him to pinch-run in the top of the ninth, though, after starting center fielder Don Hahn was injured. Promptly, as he tried to accelerate and go from first to third on a single to right, he stumbled and nearly fell just before reaching second; he had to settle for going station-to-station. When he went out to center in the bottom of the ninth, he whiffed on a fly ball to left-center and fell down after missing it. Later, in extra innings, he missed another catchable ball and stumbled again. The Mets won that game in 12 innings, thanks in part to a hit by Mays. For many, though, that game was a tragic and devastating end to the greatest career in baseball history. That 12th-inning hit was the last Mays recorded in the bigs; he was kept out of the outfield for the balance of the series. For decades thereafter, that sequence was considered the epitome of a player sticking around too long—of being so thoroughly hollowed out that it was hard not to feel it taint the memory of the legendary player they once were. Things are not that dire for Byron Buxton—we hope. He's 10 years younger now than Mays was then. He still shows flashes of being a great athlete. The first half of this season was a dazzling display of what he can do: He had 25 home runs by June 22. Since that date, though, Buxton hasn't homered, and he has a .519 OPS. He's made two trips to the injured list, and played only 25 games in the last two months and change. There have been times when he looks completely unable to do the things he's always done, from beating out infield singles and would-be double play balls to flagging down fly balls to the gaps. He's had good days, or at least good plays, but he's never truly looked like himself long enough for anyone to muster much hope. On Tuesday night in West Sacramento (as conceptually close to doing it in Oakland, where Mays last played, as one can get right now), Buxton tried to cut off a Henry Bolte line drive ticketed for the wall in deepest right-center. Bolte had really caught it on the screws, at 112 MPH off the bat, and maybe Buxton tried a late acceleration because he realized he was in danger of being beaten. Maybe, since he was closing on the ball when something changed, he was preparing to bend low or to slide to snare the ball on the bounce. Either way, Buxton went to make a move, and then he didn't make one. Instead, he wound up standing near the wall in right-center, moving minimally and waiting for the trainer to arrive from the dugout. Bolte's hit had turned into an easy triple. Buxton limped to the gate in left field and back toward the visitors' clubhouse. Given his relative youth and the state of modern sports medicine, Buxton probably wasn't departing center field for the last time. He might be done out there for 2026, though. It's clear that he has a major injury to his right hip. Just as Mays's frailty was exposed by the fact that he couldn't keep his feet, the fact that Buxton couldn't get down to play the ball off his feet feels foreboding. All the historic evocations of that moment were unwelcome and uncomfortable. Buxton certainly isn't on Mays's level, but Mays is one of the giants of the game, in whose shadow all great center fielders toil and to whom everyone aspires to earn a comparison. Buxton has the remarkable power and speed that made Mays so captivating, and at their best, each was the best defensive center fielder in their league. Whatever Buxton has been playing through, it looks like his ability to do so has to be reevaluated. It's worth wondering whether, in a few years, we'll remember this as the moment when Buxton's time as a center fielder came to an ignominious end. It's not quite Mays and the World Series, but it felt just as sad and wrong. View full article

That's where he's playing now, and he still sucks...

Not gonna happen. I mean, he'll improve a bit, but that's always gonna be a 30 arm.

That's *true*, and I apologize if I didn't mske it clear enough, but I view it as a feature, not a bug.

Image courtesy of Ed Szczepanski-Imagn Images Since the moment Luke Keaschall arrived in the majors, fans have wanted him to be a star. He can really, really hit, and everyone loves a guy who can really, really hit. Keaschall also happens to be handsome and proudly scrappy, using the Rocky theme as his walkup music and hustling for doubles in a way that isn't eyewash but also will never be mistaken for a languid glide. He was bound to be a fan favorite, but most Twins fans—and all Twins fans who remember Michael Cuddyer and Nick Punto with the clear eyes of hindsight, and most modern baseball fans, really—were wary of making him one simply because he could hit for average. A bit more is asked of the modern star. In fact, a bit more is demanded. We've gotten very good at measuring and evaluating performance in baseball, which has made the game smarter and more efficient. It's made sneakily good players rich and worse players a bit less rich. It's allowed teams like (and sometimes even including) the Twins to compete with bigger-market, bigger-spending behemoths. It's sanded off many a rough edge. One of those rough edges, though, is a thing worth missing a little bit. Along the way, the game has grown terrifically impatient with the good little hitter who can't field any position worth a damn. This used to be a fairly common and well-tolerated archetype. It has become an extremely rare creature. Who Are the Best Good-Hit, Bad-Glove Players in Baseball History? As it happens, there are exactly 50 players who have had at least one season since 1969 in which they: Played at least 50 games at a position other than first base or DH, signaling that they had some real defensive responsibilities; Posted an isolated power (ISO) figure under .150, meaning they didn't get much value from sheer slugging; Amassed at least 2.5 offensive Wins Above Replacement (oWAR), according to Baseball Reference, evidence of real difference-making ability at the plate; and Gave back at least 1.5 WAR via lousy defense, or below-average defense at a not-very-important position (-1.5 dWAR or worse). It's a wonderful list, so before diving deeper into the subject, let's savor it together. Query Results Table Rk Player Count From To Ind. Seasons Link 1 Lou Brock 4 1970 1973 Seasons List 2 José Cardenal 3 1970 1975 Seasons List 3 Tommy Harper 3 1969 1972 Seasons List 4 Derek Jeter 2 2005 2007 Seasons List 5 Roger Cedeño 2 1999 2001 Seasons List 6 Derek Bell 2 1994 1995 Seasons List 7 Brett Butler 2 1993 1995 Seasons List 8 Tony Gwynn 2 1989 1995 Seasons List 9 Phil Bradley 2 1986 1989 Seasons List 10 Jorge Orta 2 1976 1977 Seasons List 11 Ralph Garr 2 1972 1977 Seasons List 12 Carlos May 2 1970 1972 Seasons List 13 Luke Keaschall 1 2026 2026 Seasons List 14 Alec Bohm 1 2022 2022 Seasons List 15 Yandy Díaz 1 2022 2022 Seasons List 16 Josh Rojas 1 2021 2021 Seasons List 17 Brad Miller 1 2015 2015 Seasons List 18 Dexter Fowler 1 2014 2014 Seasons List 19 Jose Altuve 1 2012 2012 Seasons List 20 Nick Markakis 1 2010 2010 Seasons List 21 Chris Coghlan 1 2009 2009 Seasons List 22 Felipe López 1 2006 2006 Seasons List 23 Matt Lawton 1 2004 2004 Seasons List 24 Ray Durham 1 1999 1999 Seasons List 25 Steve Finley 1 1995 1995 Seasons List Rk Player Count From To Ind. Seasons Link 26 Tim Raines 1 1995 1995 Seasons List 27 Dion James 1 1993 1993 Seasons List 28 Robin Yount 1 1986 1986 Seasons List 29 Keith Moreland 1 1985 1985 Seasons List 30 Gary Matthews 1 1984 1984 Seasons List 31 Lonnie Smith 1 1984 1984 Seasons List 32 César Cedeño 1 1982 1982 Seasons List 33 Steve Kemp 1 1982 1982 Seasons List 34 Al Cowens 1 1979 1979 Seasons List 35 Ken Landreaux 1 1979 1979 Seasons List 36 Dwayne Murphy 1 1979 1979 Seasons List 37 Dan Ford 1 1978 1978 Seasons List 38 Gene Richards 1 1978 1978 Seasons List 39 Alan Bannister 1 1977 1977 Seasons List 40 Ron LeFlore 1 1977 1977 Seasons List 41 Ken Griffey 1 1976 1976 Seasons List 42 Johnny Grubb 1 1976 1976 Seasons List 43 Ken Singleton 1 1976 1976 Seasons List 44 Rusty Staub 1 1976 1976 Seasons List 45 Bobby Murcer 1 1975 1975 Seasons List 46 Don Baylor 1 1974 1974 Seasons List 47 Billy Williams 1 1973 1973 Seasons List 48 Pat Kelly 1 1972 1972 Seasons List 49 Richie Scheinblum 1 1972 1972 Seasons List 50 Ron Hunt 1 1970 1970 Seasons List Provided by Stathead: Found with Stathead. See Full Results. Generated 8/24/2026. There are a couple of old friends here; it's nice to see old friends. Are you old enough to remember Dan Ford? In his last season with the Twins, he was this level of good wood but hard leather. Maybe Matt Lawton is more in your wheelhouse, though. He could really hit, in his prime, but boy, he could be a butcher in the outfield, too, right? It's easy to make this list longer. Just remove the limit on ISO. What I wanted, though, was to see whether and to what extent we've lost the not-so-slugging guy who can rake, but can't play defense no matter where you put him. Back when defensive assessments relied mostly on error counts and the eye test, to be sure, more poor fielders stayed on the field, especially if they benefited from the halo effect of being good hitters. Back then, though, teams also didn't always know a good hitter from a bad one. A guy might rack up a high but empty batting average and play for quite a while, despite not really adding much to the offense. Keaschall isn't that kind of player. He can genuinely hit, and he genuinely makes the lineup better, especially now that he's hitting at the top of it. He just can't help—or even avoid hurting—the team when it's the other team's turn at bat. Historically, most of the players who get the chance to play in such a one-sided role do so either at a position where defense doesn't matter much (first base or DH) or in a league where you have to accept some tradeoffs. For instance, in the NL, some teams used to be willing to absorb a bad defender in left field to avoid having two weak spots in their lineup, since the pitchers then had to bat for themselves. Being great early in your career also bought you the right to get old (gracefully or not) while still playing a position you could no longer handle, especially if the alternative was losing a job altogether. Thence come the many entries for Lou Brock, and the pair for Derek Jeter. For a long time, though, there were also a couple of guys in the league at any given time who were dreadful defenders even in their 20s, but who nonetheless held onto everyday jobs. The above list contains prime seasons from Jose Altuve, Ken Griffey Sr., and Lonnie Smith. Chris Coghlan won the 2009 NL Rookie of the Year Award as a crack-and-clank guy: lots of solid contact, lots of ugly plays in the field. By and large, that player type has now been completely excised from the game. José Cardenal's career would be in real jeopardy if he came up today, rather than in the 1960s. Derek Bell's would be on the ropes, if he hadn't come up in the 1990s. Analytics sometimes make the perfect the enemy of the good, by highlighting what players do poorly and making those shortcomings their defining characteristics. However, neither teams nor fans are entirely wrong to think that way, in an era like this one. Cardenal (1970, 1973) and Bell (1994-95) had multiple seasons as excellent hitters and atrocious defenders, but each did that in the shadow of expansion years. There were five seasons in which the league had at least three crack-and-clank dudes: 1970, 1972, 1976, 1977 and 1979. The combination of uncertainty about defensive value and the thinning-out of talent pools via expansion in 1969 and 1977 made those profiles viable in those years. It's been almost 30 years since MLB last expanded; the league doesn't have as much use for Keaschall types right now. How Luke Keaschall is Achieving More Power Still, on balance, I think Keaschall deserves a bit of a break. He's a terrible defender. He's never going to not be a terrible defender. His nickname should be Boulder; it captures both his sturdy physique and his rock-hard hands. He's not going to show up next spring and be a good outfielder, even if he puts in considerable work this winter. There's nothing he does well in the field. He might come off this list next season, anyway, though, because his power is beginning to blossom. Over the last month, his ISO is .180—forget .150. His bat speed is up this season. Psrtially because of that (and partially because he's figured out how opponents want to attack him), he's learned how to get his bat working uphill more at contact and to pull the ball more consistently, while still utilizing his steep swing to get on top of the ball deep in the hitting zone and drive some pitches to right field. Here's a visualization of his swing at the contact point last year, via Statcast: Here's the same dataviz for 2026. Note the more upright body position, more powerful extension of the arms, the orientation of the bat, and that higher bat speed. Loosen the original crack-and-clank parameters I laid out to allow any ISO under .200, and some names you're much more comfortable with appear on the list in their 20s. Randy Arozarena had a great year in 2022. Shin-Soo Choo had one in 2012. And in 2004 and 2005, another right-handed hitter who was always hit-over-power and offense-over-defense slots into the list: Michael Young. That might just be the perfect comparator for Keaschall. He's a man out of time, but he can still find his way to being an above-average player. The Twins will have to accept some red on the run-prevention side of the ledger to realize his full overall value, but Keaschall is trending toward being a Young-like player: someone who can compete for batting titles and produce moderate power, with athleticism that augments the offensive profile—even if the glove never seems to find any benefit from it. As a lover of many player profiles slowly going extinct under modern pressure to be perfect, I'm rooting for one more crack-and-clank guy to make good. View full article

Image courtesy of Ken Blaze-Imagn Images Hitting, in 2026, is all about conviction. Conviction, in turn, is about confidence. Sometimes, it even needs to be about arrogance. Trevor Larnach has always been a hitter defined by extremes, and taking hitting to extremes means walking that tightrope of braided confidence and arrogance across the abyss of self-doubt and overthinking. It means getting from the batter's box to second base without looking down. He's never struck that balance better than he did for the first four months of this season, but suddenly, he's caught a toe, turned his head, and finds himself freefalling. If all that sounds a bit grandiose, well, that's life in the big leagues—and life, especially, in the heat of an unexpected push toward the playoffs. Larnach was not supposed to be a key cog in a Twins offense charting its course for October, but here we are. He entered the season as a platoon bat on whom the organization had gone lukewarm, if not quite cold; Derek Shelton named Matt Wallner as the left-hitting corner outfielder who would play even against lefties. Larnach would have to earn his keep. Earn it he did, though. Wallner has spent the last 100-plus days in St. Paul, while Larnach emerged over the first half as a fixture at the top of Shelton's lineup card against right-handed starters. He weathered the lefty-heavy early stretch of the season by drawing oodles of walks, but as April's frost yielded to May's mere chill, Larnach warmed up faster than the weather. By July 1, he was batting .284/.376/.428. You want more power than that from your lumbering left fielder, but you can't argue with those numbers. Then, a funny thing happened: he got even hotter. In his first 60 plate appearances of July, he hit .333/.400/.574, with seven extra-base hits. There was the power. His star turn was underway. There are two ways to explain what's happened since—which is, in a word, calamity. In the last four weeks, over 68 plate appearances, Larnach is batting .127/.191/.222. One way to explain that is that he got greedy. Fueled by that July surge and home runs on back-to-back days even to begin August, he got big. He got pull-happy. He got a little "dig me" in him, as big-leaguers say, and that loss of focus pulled him out of the narrow groove in which he found all that success in the first place. The other explanation is sadder—or maybe the two explanations are equally sad, but this one casts Larnach as a more sympathetic figure. Right around the time that he plunged into the abyss we talked about a minute ago, the Twins agreed to trade him to the Astros in a deal that would have netted them reliever Bryan Abreu. Houston owner Jim Crane, whose Batman villain name would be The Meddler, stepped in and scuppered the deal, and the Twins pivoted. They found their high-leverage reliever in Toronto, instead, and gave up prospects for Jeff Hoffman, electing to keep Larnach. It's not clear that that choice was all that active, though. Two league sources said the team talked to the Padres about Larnach on deadline day, so the team remained open to moving him in certain deals. That the nixed Larnach-Abreu swap went so widely public and became such hard evidence of the team's willingness to give up on him, though, has to have been difficult. In this second reading of the moment when he toppled off the tightrope, it was a crisis of confidence that did it—and his own team is guilty of having caused that crisis. Which of those two explanations you favor might depend on your generosity of spirit, or your mood, or what you think you know about ballplayers and their egos. The hard evidence tells a clear story about what's happened, but why is a much more muddled question. Let's tackle the 'what,' briefly; I'll leave the 'why' to you. Larnach has always been an extreme fastball hitter. When he came to the majors, he obliterated fastballs—but he was exceptionally vulnerable to anything else. He whiffed on breaking and offspeed stuff at such untenable rates that he often looked doomed to Quadruple-A status; he sold out for the heater. He also had, back then, an exceptionally steep swing. His plan was to hit line drives and fly balls by sitting on and finding fastballs; his conviction stemmed from his confidence that he could do that consistently enough to overcome his shortcomings elsewhere. Eventually, the league proved to him that that wasn't going to happen. You can count on one hand the number of players in each generation who tallywhack fastballs with such reliability and precision that they can be lousy against spin and changes of speed and still survive in the majors; Larnach learned that he isn't one of those sunkissed few. Instead, he moderated his swing, and his approach. Since the beginning of 2024, we've seen him reduce his whiff rates on non-fastballs, and since the start of 2025, he's been a flatter swinger, a change aimed at being more modular—more adaptable. Not all of that has happened consciously; Larnach is a very feel-oriented hitter. But that's what's happened. However, he's retained his extremity in one dimension. In fact, he's more pull-oriented than ever. Larnach's swing can sometimes produce slicing liners the other way, but those are accidents. Few batters anywhere in the majors get the bat head around the ball as much as Larnach does; his whole attack is centered on being early and directing his contact toward the pull field. As you can see, that hasn't become less true this year, but more so. What does it mean to be a fastball hitter who's also a dead pull hitter? It means living on conviction. It means being so certain of the pitch you sit on each time the pitcher winds up that no part of your body or mind is elsewhere. It means visualizing hard contact, by knowing your swing and knowing the timing of the pitch you're about to get. It means the arrogance of believing you see the future, even though obviously, that's impossible. For a while, Larnach had that going. You can see how it trended up, as he claimed his place of prominence in the lineup over the season's first few weeks and then started seeing more right-handed pitchers. You can see how it spiked when he got so red-hot for most of July. And then, you can see what's happened since. It's all written in the curvature of his ideal attack angle rate, which basically tells us how often Larnach was on time with his swing over any given period. 'On time,' here, means that his bat was working uphill at the angle he wants, which means that he met the ball where he meant to. For many other hitters, being as oriented to the pull field as Larnach always is would leave them feeling early, but you can see multiple periods this year during which that was not an issue for Larnach. By no coincidence, Larnach's actual production maps pretty neatly to the chart above. Here's his rolling average for weighted on-base average. He found enough value by drawing walks and avoiding strikeouts early (and then took long enough to tap into his power, in the middle third of the season) to avoid such a sharp rise and fall, but the gist is the same: good, then great, then ughhhhh. What happens to a hitter when they lose their conviction? What becomes of the extreme beats when they're tamed by their own self-doubt? You've heard that answer a hundred times, over the years: guys get caught 'in-between'. For Larnach, that's meant being 'on time' for the fastball as much as ever, by Statcast's swing timing reckoning—but for him, that means he's really been late more often. As you can see on the right, below, he's also been underneath the heater much too much of late. You could start to see that lostness creep into swings against breaking stuff, too. It's one thing to be a little late and underneath the fastball; it's another to end up underneath a breaking pitch, on which you're also radically early. That's what happened here: OHliak1fWGw0TUFRPT1fQkZCVFVGWlFCd2NBV1FSUlZBQUhVRmNGQUZnRFVRTUFDbEFCVXdwVVVsVmNBbFpX.mp4 And here: bGJ3d25fWGw0TUFRPT1fQkZBRUJRY0FCd0lBRFFFQ1ZRQUhWUUJUQUFBR1VRQUFBRlZXQmxZRVVGVlJCMVJR.mp4 Those aren't the misses of a guy who was sitting fastball. They're the misses of a guy who was sitting on the fastball's speed, but trying to cover the breaking ball's shape, and ended up doing nothing right at all. Those are the swings of a hitter caught in-between—of a hitter who's lost conviction. Again, there are multiple valid theories about why this has happened, and I don't propose a definitive answer either way. I can only say for certain what has gone wrong, but that feels like enough. Could Larnach rediscover that conviction, and reestablish his first-half swagger? Yes, it's possible. But the Twins are running out of time, and he's been a black hole in their lineup for too long already. They need to make other arrangements. Shelton has already arrived at this conclusion. He benched Larnach Sunday, despite Walker Buehler starting for the Padres. That's just one game, but it's the start of something. Minnesota should strongly consider calling up Walker Jenkins to meet the team Tuesday in West Sacramento. Jenkins doesn't have to take Luke Keaschall's playing time in right field, and he doesn't have to play any more in center than is made absolutely necessary by Byron Buxton's balky hip. He can and should play left field, at the expense of the exposed Larnach. Maybe the Twins broke Larnach. Maybe he was going to break on his own. Either way, he's fallen into a funk from which hitters like him struggle to recover, and the team doesn't have time to hope he proves to be that exceptional case this time. Jenkins is ready, and all the possible hurdles are out of the way. It's time to give him the left-field job, lest the team itself end up caught in-between. View full article

Image courtesy of Jeffrey Becker-Imagn Images The first days of Royce Lewis's transition to first base were ugly. There are sitll times when it's ugly. He's inexperienced on the right side of the infield and in the mental game of that position, which is very different from the other spots on the dirt, and it shows. He's made the wrong play, or taken the wrong first step, more than once. He's learning on the job at that spot, just as Luke Keaschall is in the outfield. There are some moments, though, when you can see the real and durable benefit of having a player who still thinks of himself as "a shortstop playing first base." Specifically, as was highlighted when Baseball Savant rolled out new Statcast data this week documenting players' skills receiving throws at first base, Lewis is good at converting outs on throws from his teammates—and significantly better than the player his reemergence at that spot has displaced, Kody Clemens. According to Statcast, Lewis has already been worth 1 Out Above Average (OAA) as a receiver at first base, where he's had 164 tracked opportunities. Before Lewis moved to first and (mostly) pushed Clemens to second base, the latter had 142 tracked chances as a receiver at first, and was worth -2 OAA on those plays. Let's take a look at how and why. Clemens was fine on throws that were on target to him. A relatively athletic 6 feet tall and with ample experience around the bag (almost 1,500 professional innings at first base), Clemens has the basic toolkit to be a solid receiver. However, he struggled mightily on throws he had to field on the bounce, throughout the early part of the season. Statcast subdivides such plays into Bounce plays (where the ball skips at least 15 feet before the base) and scoops (where it bounces between 5 and 15 feet from the bag), but Clemens didn't experience much difference. He was worth -1.7 OAA on each type of play. Most of that lost value came from one correctable but (for whatever reason) enduring error in the way Clemens addressed the ball in those situations. He strongly preferred to work with his glove hand in front of his left leg as he anchored himself at first base, and to pick low throws backhanded. WnhuTk9fWGw0TUFRPT1fQXdVRFVRSU1VZ1VBWGx0VVZBQUhDVlZWQUFNTUJsVUFCbDFVQlFjRUNGZGRCZ1Zm.mp4 It's rare that you can put it this bluntly when it comes to how the best baseball players on Earth do their jobs, but this is simply wrong. A first baseman should stay relatively upright when they first reach the base, withholding their stride and lunge as long as possible so they can direct it toward the incoming throw. Most of the time, that allows one to field the ball with the glove in the forehand, fingers-down position. Only if a throw is tracking toward being wide by several feet should you turn your hips and reach for the hop with your thumb down. In the video above, you can see by his forward lean that Clemens committed himself too soon. If you have to play the ball backhanded, it's nice to be forward that way, so your front leg doesn't get in the way of being low enough to field the bounce cleanly, but that's a more difficult play than the throw required him to make. If he'd positioned his body more neutral and strode down through the ball later, with his glove hand freer to move and on the outside of his left leg, he could have picked this fairly easily. Nor was the above an isolated case. Here's an even more glaring one. Everything about this play, from where Lewis fielded the ball (and thus, the angle of the incoming throw) to the initial trajectory of the ball out of his hand, should have told Clemens to field the ball outside his leg, forehanded. Instead, he whiffed on the bounce because he mistimed the difficult maneuver of snatching it backhanded and turning the glove to secure the catch. MTZOVlZfWGw0TUFRPT1fQXdjRlhBWlFVbEFBQ2dFREJ3QUhBQUZXQUZoVFcxWUFBRkZXQUFNRlV3b0dWZ1ZV.mp4 A great many errors and infield singles involve some shared blame, and it's not entirely Clemens's fault that his record of playing bounces and scoops was so dreary. Neither of the throws above were good ones, even though Clemens should have done better with each. Statcast captures some of this, by estimating the expected out rate on all plays involving an infield throw and catch. That's how they assign responsibility and allot OAA in either direction. It also gives us some insight into how easy (or not) teammates made the job for any given first baseman. Overall, in his opportunities, Lewis has an expected out rate of 95.3%, 1.0 percentage points above the league average. Clemens's mark is 91.9%. Teamnmates (including and especially Lewis) made Clemens's job harder than it is for most first basemen; teammates (including Clemens) have made Lewis's job much easier. Not all of that is even captured by the numbers. There's a rhythm to infield playmaking, and shaky defense wrecks it. Sometimes, Clemens had to navigate not only an off-target throw, but one that arrived much later than he'd expected when he first read the ball off the bat and put his head down to break toward the base. Here's Lewis falling down on a ball he fielded cleanly, making a tough short-hop throw even harder to handle because the timing of the play was so disrupted. TzA0VmxfWGw0TUFRPT1fQkZkVlhGSU5Yd2NBWEFOVUFnQUhVdzlWQUFNTVcxWUFBRklEQUFKUVZWRlhDVkVD.mp4 There was more than one play similar to the above for Clemens early in the year, with both Lewis and Luke Keaschall often botching their first touch and having to rush a throw because they'd already half-ruined the play. Statcast can't really account for the way a first baseman's perception is thrown off when a teammate unexpectedly bobbles, drops or hitches en route to making a throw, but those things matter. It also can't capture the added deception of Lewis's fairly hideous overhand throwing motion from third base, which contributed to more than one misstep or missed catch by Clemens. However, that strangely unaddressed tendency to backhand balls that shouldn't have been fielded that way was the main driver of Clemens's failures to field throws well enough at first. Here's one where Lewis makes an imperfect but very long throw, and is essentially on target. Clemens just has to field the ball on his forehand side. He's so uncomfortable doing that that he falls over trying. R0JyM2pfWGw0TUFRPT1fQjFJRVUxRUVYZ29BQVZFR1VBQUhVQVpXQUZoUkIxUUFCd0VDVXdwVVVBWUJBRkJl.mp4 Again, that's supposed to be—is, really—the easier way to field that ball. Clemens is so habituated to the opposite that he couldn't handle it. He made life too hard on himself on low throws, and the way the team filled out its lineup card for most of the early season, there were too many low throws to make that a tenable state of affairs. For all his throwing trouble and the awkwardness of his playmaking at the hot corner, though, Lewis is a natural as a picker at first base. Here he is not only correctly choosing a time to backhand a ball, but making the play better. He doesn't lunge as early, and when he picks the short hop, he does so with his body moving fluidly through the ball. YVlkWjdfWGw0TUFRPT1fVlFBSFZRRUVYMUFBRGxwV1hnQUhVd2NBQUFNRUFWa0FDbE1CVlFCUkF3QlFBVmRY.mp4 This is a great instruction in one of the subtleties of athleticism, too. Lewis and Clemens are both 6 feet tall, as documented by the league for the purposes of applying an ABS strike zone to each. They're the same height, in the books and in real life, but Lewis's arms and legs are longer. That shows up in a big way when you see him make plays like the above, in contrast with the way Clemens has to attempt the same plays. Some of it is better mechanics, and perhaps better instincts or better coaching. Some of it is proportions working better for one player than for another of the same height. Again, though, Lewis does things the right way at first base, too, in a way Clemens didn't. Here he is making easy work of a throw that skipped to him, by simply playing it on the correct side of his body. M3k2MnlfWGw0TUFRPT1fVWdOWlVRZFFVQVFBWEZaWFZ3QUhBZzlXQUFBQ0JWZ0FDMU1FQmd0UUJnVURDVk5X.mp4 Here's an even better play, on which his instinct to stay back a bit longer and then make a fast, decisive move toward the ball (on the forehand side) was the finishing touch on a great play. (The runner was initially ruled safe, but a replay overturned that call.) WERadzlfWGw0TUFRPT1fQndWVEJWZFNWVk1BV1ZBRVZ3QUhWUU1DQUFBRUJWY0FVRkFCQkFZRkJBWmNWQVlD.mp4 There have been some miscues, but Lewis has been more than solid in this regard; he's been great. In his first week at first after being recalled in June, there was one play where he should have slid along the edge of the bag better and caught a high Keaschall throw while holding the base, for an out. On July 1, he simply clanked a routine throw for an error in Houston. Take away those two plays, though, and he rates even better than the 1 OAA of net value mentioned above. He's been every bit as good as a first-base receiver as Clemens was bad. For the Twins, this is a major development, and it bears watching down the stretch. Lewis is batting .274/.336/.481 since his return from the minors on June 6. That's production you'll happily take from an everyday first baseman. He's also a plus in this previously nebulous area of defense, and if he shows better range and feel for situational play as he racks up reps at the spot, he becomes a very valuable player again, in a somewhat unexpected way. Injuries defined Lewis's early career. He himself still brings them up frequently. For the bulk of the last two and a half seasons, though, he's been healthy. There were long stretches in there where it looked like he might have no viable defensive home; there were long stretches where it looked like he might not hit enough to remain a regular. Now, however, he's looking a lot like a good (if not quite star-caliber) first baseman, with some newfound durability and value on both sides of the ball. He seems to have cleared some important mental hurdles. His body is holding up better than it did before. When the team moved Lewis to first at the start of the summer, they did so (basically) as a Hail Mary. They needed to reinvigorate their lineup, and he was smashing Triple-A pitching. They needed someone to take over first base, allowing Clemens to spend his time at positions he plays better, but they didn't like what they saw defensively from either Josh Bell or Victor Caratini. Putting Lewis at that position was a last-ditch attempt to get anything good out of a player who was becoming a plausible trade candidate or a non-tender candidate come fall. As it turns out, that prayer might have been answered. Lewis might just have a medium-term home in the Twins' plans, and they might end up very glad that circumstances conspired to put their most fragile could-be slugger at a position he wouldn't have volunteered to play—but which suits his body and his skill set quite well. View full article

Image courtesy of Jordan Johnson-Imagn Images By big-league standards, Kaelen Culpepper is not a big guy. When he was drafted, he was listed as 6 feet tall, but after being officially measured (as every hitter has to be, these days, to make the ABS system work), he's now 5-foot-10. He's not scrawny, by any means, but he's also far from stocky. If a player Culpepper's size is going to fit anywhere on the diamond, it's likely to be on the middle infield, but even middle infielders are getting taller and broader-shouldered. Culpepper's size is a constraint on his value. To be great, he has to find ways to make up for being smaller than a lot of the guys to whom one might first be inclined to compare him. Happily, he knows exactly what those ways are. "I'm a twitchy athlete," Culpepper said. "I'm explosive. I've got a lot of torque." In other words (and in more specific terminology), while he might not be huge or conventionally powerful, Culpepper is exactly the kind of athlete who thrives most in the rotational sport that is baseball. He can generate much more bat speed and much stronger throws than you would guess, comparing the physiques or even sheer, linear power measurements between him and players like Royce Lewis or Ryan Kreidler. Although he's not putting up huge numbers over his first few weeks in the majors, Culpepper has impressed his teammates, coaches and fans with his feel for the game and his poise. He's also flashed the tools that made him a fast-rising prospect on national rankings late in his progression to the big leagues, including an average bat speed of 74 MPH—well above the league average—and some strong throws from the left side of the infield. To understand him better and see where the upside is for the balance of the season, let's take a closer look at Culpepper's swing. This is a single Culpepper hit Monday night against Atlanta. For reasons we'll break down, it's a good place to start in an effort to understand his moves in the box. ZU53THlfWGw0TUFRPT1fRGdKV1VWMENCUVlBQVFFQlhnQUhWQTlYQUFBQkFBQUFVMXhUVVZaVVZGRmRCVkZX.mp4 Firstly, note his setup and his stride. For a short guy, he's fairly spread-out in his stance, but the leg kick and stride are especially aggressive. How much a hitter gets into their legs says a lot about what kind of pitches they're trying to hit and what parts of the kinetic chain are most important to them. Notice that Culpepper chooses to slightly outwardly rotate his front knee and point his toe toward the ball as he lands with that front foot, and how much he turns and drops his back knee toward the ground as he does so. That big movement in the lower half is where he gets his power; it's the foundation of the torque that we already touched on. "I have to clear my hips," Culpepper explained. "I have to make sure I get through there, to get the most out of my swing. I have to keep my back foot down, and open up enough." He's not alone among shorter hitters in using his legs to generate power. Shorter levers means that more of one's bat speed has to come from torque, and torque has to come from stretching the bands of the body. While much more thickly built, Andrew Vaughn of the Brewers is also 5-foot-10. Not coincidentally, he also gets deep into his legs when he swings; the low drop of the back knee is the visual giveaway when watching from the center-field camera. MnI0T1BfWGw0TUFRPT1fQkZCU1Z3RUFBMVFBWEFkVVZBQUhCUUFDQUZsVEFWa0FCUWRYQmdaVENBTlJWRk1G.mp4 If you're thinking that the upper half works differently for these two hitters, though, you're right. Culpepper lets his hands get away from his body a bit earlier in his swing than Vaughn does. If he wants to generate bat speed as good as Vaughn's or better, despite Vaughn having more raw power in his legs, Culpepper has to allow a bit more length in his swing. He had to lunge slightly at the first hit we looked at, because it was a breaking ball in a two-strike count, but you can really see how proactively he extends his arms early in his swing when watching him attack a fastball. OHliak1fWGw0TUFRPT1fVndsUlZsQlhVd0lBRFZSV1hnQUhVQWRRQUFCV0J3SUFVd01FVlZFRUIxRUFBUWNF.mp4 "I'm trying to stay inside the ball," Culpepper said. "But at the same time, I want to cover a guy's best heater, and then know I can adjust and handle the breaking ball; I've always been able to do that." When you see a pitch stand him up like that, you can see a slightly different comp, can't you? This one strikes a bit closer to home. Here, look: Uk85OGFfWGw0TUFRPT1fQmdSVVZGRUVVZ2NBQVZkWEF3QUhCbFJYQUZrQ1ZnVUFDMTBDQmdvRVVGQlRDQUlE.mp4 Byron Buxton starts and ends taller on most swings than does Culpepper. The younger man said he's never thought of his swing as mapping neatly to Buxton's. However, when it comes to the way they address the ball—and, therefore, to the pitches they handle and the direction in which their best contact tends to go—there are important similarities. "You're always looking to hit it hard back up the middle," Culpepper said. "I don't try to think about where I'm gonna hit it too much; I want to just see the ball and get the good part to it." In reality, though, all of Culpepper's hits in his career to date have gone to the pull side, and all but one of them has come on pitches from the middle of the plate out. Buxton is the same way: a rare pull hitter who's hunting for the ball away. Both guys let their hands get away from their bodies relatively early in their swing, and their best contact comes when they catch the ball out front, with their arms extended and the barrel turned slightly toward left field. Culpepper is even more extreme than Buxton in this regard, though. Taller and with more tilt in his stroke, Buxton can stay through the ball longer and catch it a bit flatter, in terms of attack angle and direction. Culpepper, though not telling himself to do so, succeeds by getting into a slightly steeper move earlier and reaching for the ball in front of his frame more. That's common among hitters who get into their legs the way he does. If you stride that aggressively, you get to a powerful position in your swing later than most hitters, and it's important not to let the ball get too deep into your kitchen. It comes down, really, to knowing the window within which you're going to make solid contact. Here's Culpepper's first career double, on a changeup left right in the heart of the zone. Watch the way he manages the torque of his swing with the front shoulder and trunk and maximizes his extension with the top hand and back side. eHl3a3pfWGw0TUFRPT1fQTFCU1ZBQlJYbFlBRFFNRVVRQUhBZ0JUQUZrSEIxQUFBRnhSQ1FZR1YxVlVDUUJV.mp4 For a smallish guy, Culpepper has great plate coverage, but it takes an unusual form. Given his size, he has great bat speed, but it has to be built from the ground up on every swing. For someone unlikely to post huge exit velocities, he should have plenty of power, and he can bolster the bottom of the Twins' lineup the rest of the way, but he'll have to keep showing the ability to spoil stuff on the inner part of the plate and let non-strikes go, so he can get hold of the mistake out over the plate when opponents make one. He has the right mindset for it, at the very least. "I'm just trying to do everything with a smile on my face," he said. "It's the same game here [as in the minors], but it's definitely an adjustment. The crowds are so much bigger; there's a lot more adrenaline. I'm way more tired after games. You can feel how important these games are. So I'm just enjoying it." View full article