29 August 2023
Baseball players are generally happy to talk to reporters — or least are more willing to — when things are going well for them. This might be why Royce Lewis is always so chipper.
When he’s playing baseball, healthy and on the field, it always seems to be going well for Lewis. Since first being promoted to Class AAA in 2022, Lewis is hitting .315 with 20 home runs and 57 RBIs in 99 games between Wichita, St. Paul and Minnesota. And since returning from his second anterior cruciate ligament surgery on May 29, the rookie infielder hasn’t gone more than two games without a hit — and as many as two only twice — in the big leagues.
There are more than a few reasons to believe the Twins might finally be turning a corner, and Lewis is a big one. Because of two serious knee injuries, his track record is light on quantity — he played his 50th big league game in parts of two seasons on Monday against Cleveland — but deep in quality.
Is it too early to anoint the No. 1 pick in the 2017 amateur draft a star? Of course. But for now, he’s giving the Twins something they didn’t have at this point last season, namely, Royce Lewis.
Asked about this before Monday’s 6:40 p.m. first pitch, Lewis said, “Maybe last year, maybe I don’t even crack the team.”
He always knows just the right thing to say.
Roughly two hours later, Lewis hit his second grand slam in as many days as the Twins erased a 4-0 deficit in the second inning, hammering a hanging breaking ball from right-hander Xavion Curry into the bullpen for a 6-4 lead.
I am not Mike Ratcliff, or Terry Ryan, so cannot pretend to quantify what separates a good baseball player from a star. But whatever it is, Lewis seems to have it. There seems to be no stage too big, and no situation too tight for Lewis, who just turned 24 on June 5.
In his first game back from a year-long rehab, Lewis hit a two-run homer with two outs in the ninth inning to spur a 7-5 victory at Houston.
Lewis was 1 for 6 on Sunday, but his hit was a sixth-inning grand slam that pulled Minnesota to within 5-4 and kickstarted a 7-6, 13-inning victory over Texas. On Monday, he became the only Twins player — not Harmon Killebrew, Kirby Puckett or Kent Hrbek — to hit grand slams in consecutive games.
This is the kind of swat the Twins need to close out the Central Division over the next 27 games, and what they need to break an MLB record 18-game playoff skid once the postseason starts the first week in October.
First, the Twins need to eliminate Cleveland from their rear-view mirror. Minnesota started Monday with a six-game lead on their closest American Central rival, and Monday marked the first of six games of the next nine between the two teams.
“Of course, I’m excited,” he said. “You play your whole life for a chance to win a World Series, and it looks like we have a big opportunity to do that, and this is a big week for us.”
Lewis, of course, isn’t the only reason the Twins have been better, and it’s not just hitting. But the pitching, especially from the starters, has been uniformly excellent this season, so the hitting has stood out since the Twins started the unofficial second half by winning 9 of 11.
Fellow rookies Matt Wallner (10 homers, 23 RBIs) and Edouard Julien (.304 batting average, 23 runs) have been big since the break, and fourth-year catcher Ryan Jeffers, still only 26, seems to have harnessed his unique power (.321 BA, 1.008 OPS).
And it’s impossible to overestimate having Jorge Polanco back. The infielder was sidelined by a knee injury after Aug. 27 last season, and the Twins went 14-23 down the stretch. A professional hitter, he seems to make the offense go, and on Monday his three-run, third-deck home run off left-hander Daniel Norris gave the Twins a 10-6 lead in the fourth inning.
But it’s hard not to keep coming back to Lewis, whose success this season, because of the two knee injuries, seems to be seen through an opaque sheet — as if fans aren’t quite sure it’s real because he might get hurt again. Or because it’s only 50 games.
But after three at-bats on Monday, Lewis was hitting .319 with an .889 OPS. Had Lewis done this before his first knee injury, suffered during spring training in 2021, Twins fans would be buying No. 23 jerseys in bulk.
Maybe the grand slams will change that. One thing is certain, though. If the Twins close this thing out and advance to the postseason, Lewis won’t be intimidated by the bunting.