It’s still weird to look at the Minnesota Twins and go, “Yeah, this team should mash,” but that’s the baseline expectation in the 2020s. Since the 2019 Bomba Squad, the Twins haven’t finished lower than 14th in home runs. Heading into the season with Byron Buxton, Carlos Correa, Matt Wallner, and someday, Royce Lewis, that trend should continue.
Any article written in April has to include the qualifiers “it’s early” and “small sample size.” Still, the Twins entered Thursday tied for 23rd in baseball with eight home runs, and three of them have come courtesy of Harrison Bader. That leaves Buxton, Wallner, Willi Castro, Jose Miranda, and Ty France with one apiece. Ouch.
That power outage has resulted in the lineup letting the pitching down in the past week or so after rebounding from a rough first time through the rotation. Two wins against the Kansas City Royals were within their grasp, but the big fly never came, and Minnesota stranded 13 runners en route to scoring three runs in two games.
There’s an old-school crowd that would like to see the team revert to small ball to generate scoring instead of waiting for the dinger to bail them out. There might be something to that; the Twins are 27th in baseball with a .201 batting average. Still, we can’t really expect the team to change what it does. They’re built around getting fly balls and sending them out of the park. That’s how Buxton, Wallner, and Lewis thrive, even through the booms and busts.
Are the boom times coming soon, as Wednesday’s two homers might suggest? The good news for the Twins is that their habits aren’t changing much. The Twins have been seventh in home runs over the past three seasons, and their extreme fly-ball rate largely fuels that. Their 39.2% fly ball percentage was tied for sixth during that time, with 12.4% of them leaving the park.
Again, it’s early, but the fly ball machine isn’t stopping in 2025. The Twins lift 43.7% of their balls in play into the air, which is fifth in MLB. They’re also pulling the ball at the same rate, with their 42.3% figure remaining stable compared with the last three years. The usual suspects are also fueling this, with Wallner putting 57.7% of his balls skyward, and Buxton is at 56.0%. Even Castro is nearing 60% (58.6%), which is trending toward his best season.
But even with all these fly balls, the Twins see just 6.3% of them turning into home runs. That’s about half Minnesota’s rate over the last three seasons.
So, what gives?
It’s all about contact hitting… in a manner of speaking. Twins hitters haven’t just hit the ball in the air over the past three years; they hit the ball hard. FanGraphs’ Hard Contact percentage was 32.9%, fifth in baseball. Per Statcast, only the Atlanta Braves, New York Yankees, and Los Angeles Dodgers have had more barrels than Minnesota.
This year? Not so much. The Twins are tied for 17th in Hard Contact% (31.4%) and, more concerningly, 10th in Soft Contact% (17.4%). As for barrels, the Twins are tied for 17th with 23, nine of which come from Bader (five) and France (four). Correa, Wallner, and Eddie Julien have three each, and then Buxton is the only other player with multiple barrels.
Of these players, the biggest early red flag belongs to Buxton, and not just for his 37.2 strikeout percentage. When he makes contact, 24.1% of his batted balls qualify as soft contact, his highest rate since his rookie season in 2015. That’s a far cry from his track record from 2019 to 2024, where he ranked 62nd among 364 qualified hitters with a 37.9 Hard Contact%. Buxton’s been prone to slumps, but is the bat just slow to wake up, or is age perhaps starting to catch up with the 31-year-old? We’ll see.
Again, you have to qualify everything at this point of the season. There’s plenty of time for averages and rates to rebound and stabilize. Weird stuff happens every April, and you must ride out the slumps. But between the 4-9 start and Pablo Lopez‘s injury, there’s not much wiggle room left for the Twins to get their bats going. It’s mashing time.
