Finally, a Hit for Royce Lewis

Royce Lewis almost had another grand slam. With the bases loaded in the top of the seventh inning in Sacramento on Tuesday night, A’s righty Tyler Ferguson left a sweeper on the outside edge of the strike zone, and the Twins third baseman — who two years ago hit four grand slams in an 18-day span — didn’t miss it. A’s center fielder Denzel Clarke couldn’t reach the 100-mph, 392-foot drive into the left-center gap in time. Instead, both Clarke and the ball caromed off the wall in quick succession, the sphere a couple feet short of leaving the yard but still good enough to produce a two-run double that expanded the Minnesota lead to 8-3 and finally broke Lewis’ latest string of futility after 32 at-bats.

“It was good to see the ball hit the grass or the dirt [or] the wall,” Lewis said. “Just anything other than a glove.”

Lewis, who turns 26 on Thursday, has become all too familiar with such grueling stretches. This is his third time since the start of last September that he’s endured a hitless streak of at least 22 at-bats, though unlike the first two, he was at least hitting the ball reasonably hard during this one:

Such are the latest twists and turns in the brief career of Lewis, whose litany of injuries — mostly leg injuries — has limited him to 174 games across parts of four major league seasons. At times, he’s looked every bit as good as you might’ve hoped he would, considering his status as the first pick in the 2017 amateur draft. Despite losing all of 2021 and most of ’22 to tears of his anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee, he starred for the Twins when he returned to action in ’23. That season, he hit a tantalizing .309/.372/.548 (154 wRC+) with 15 homers (including the four slams) in 58 games, helping Minnesota win the AL Central and the Wild Card series, the franchise’s first postseason series victory in 21 years. That stellar performance was limited by his missing a month and a half due to an oblique strain and ending the regular season on the injured list with a left hamstring strain, though he returned to hit four home runs in six playoff games.

It’s been gut-wrenching at times to watch such tribulations. Lewis homered in his first plate appearance on Opening Day 2024, then after hitting a single his second time up, he strained his right quad while trying to score on a Carlos Correa double and didn’t return to the lineup until June 5. Once he did, he absolutely raked for four weeks, but an adductor strain interrupted that run, and after missing over three weeks, he endured one mediocre stretch and then one very bad one:

Admittedly, August 31 is an arbitrary endpoint for those splits, albeit a conventional one. Lewis began the month with a hot four-game stretch that included his final home run of the season on September 1; then from his second plate appearance of September 4 through his second on September 11, he went 0-for-22 while striking out nearly half the time and making a lot of bad contact even when he connected. After a slight rebound, he closed the season on an 0-for-21 slide (with two walks) from September 24 onward, dragging his season line down to .233/.295/.452 (108 wRC+) in 82 games and 325 plate appearances. That skid was just one of several factors in the Twins’ collapse, which cost them a Wild Card berth.

Unfortunately that 0-fer didn’t end with the season, but before he could snap it, he left a March 16 Grapefruit League game with another left hamstring strain and began this season on the IL. He finally debuted on May 5 and went 0-for-15 with a walk — extending his hitless streak to 36 at-bats and 39 plate appearances — before stroking a single off the Giants’ Erik Miller on May 11. He singled again in his next plate appearance, went hitless in his next two games, and then added seven more hits in a five-game span. But after doubling off the Guardians’ Jakob Junis in his third plate appearance on May 19, he began a drought that extended two weeks before finally ending with his double off Ferguson.

Through 82 plate appearances, Lewis is hitting .133/.207/.213 for a 19 wRC+. That’s still a small sample, and it’s not even the majors’ worst using an 80-PA cutoff:

Woof, that’s five players from the AL Central including Bride, who has at least managed a 65 wRC+ since the Twins picked him up, plus two from the Rockies. Lewis hasn’t dug himself nearly as big a hole as some of these hitters; what in the name of Ewing Kauffman is going on with Massey? Notably absent from the list is Joc Pederson, who endured an 0-for-41 stretch this year but is now up to a comparatively robust 52 wRC+.

Lately, Lewis’ struggles have cost him playing time. Prior to Tuesday, he had started just three games out of the previous six, with Bride and Brooks Lee starting the other three for the Twins, who have overcome a slow start and just snuck into second in the AL Central at 33-27, good enough for a Wild Card position. At times, the third baseman has sounded despondent. Here’s what he said after last Wednesday’s game, when he went 0-for-4 with a 106.3-mph lineout, a 103.4-mph double play grounder, and fly outs of 97.2 mph and 99.7 mph:

“I’m at a point where the hope is gone. I just do my job as best as I can. If I keep hitting the ball hard, they say it’s going to find a hole, but I haven’t seen it yet… Feels like a Wiffle ball game right now, truly, because you know how the Wiffle ball stays up? That’s what my ball feels like.”

Last June 20, when he bounced back from a rare 0-for-5 with a three-hit game, the red-hot Lewis infamously said, “I don’t do that slump thing.” Since then, Twins fans have been keeping tabs to the point that Lewis was compelled to clarify that statement on Monday, after he sat out a 10-4 win over the A’s:

“What I was trying to say mentally was I don’t go into, ‘I’m 0-for-20 whatever,’” Lewis said. “I go into today thinking, ‘It’s Luis Severino. I’ve faced him in the past. I feel good. I know his sinker and his four-seam.’ And that’s my mindset. That’s what I was trying to say. So I’ll say it: I slump. A lot of people slump. Everyone slumps. Hopefully, I play long enough I slump 100 more times. That’s my goal. I’m very excited to keep pushing through and have another opportunity.”

As the table of Lewis’ hitless streaks illustrates, he’s been hitting the ball reasonably hard lately. He has just 62 batted ball events this season, so we’re back in small-sample territory, but exit velocity stabilizes at the 40 BBE mark and barrel rate at the 50 BBE mark; hard-hit stabilizes at the 80 BBE mark, so he’s short of that, but his rate is in line with his all-too-brief history:

Two things stand out. First, Lewis is well short of his expected stats, 96 points below his xwOBA and 171 points below his xSLG. That could be a sample-size issue, as his shortfalls are larger than those of the unluckiest qualifiers in xwOBA (Andrew Vaughn, 88 points short in 193 PA) and xSLG (Salvador Perez, 153 points short in 173 BBE). Second, even those expected numbers are well below those of 2023 and ’24, despite his solid exit velocity.

Much of that comes down to Lewis’ batted ball distribution. He’s hitting slightly more grounders than usual and pulling the ball much less often (27.4%, 19.2 points below last year). His pulled air rate of 11.3% is less than half what it was last year (29.1%) and just over half of what it was in 2023 (21%). Drilling down into Baseball Savant, Lewis has pulled just three fly balls in 2025, one of which produced his only home run, a solo shot off Freddy Peralta on May 18, and the other of which produced Tuesday’s double. By comparison, he had 12 homers on 31 pulled flies last year and seven homers on 14 pulled flies in 2023. He’s missing an essential part of his hitterly diet.

As for why, it’s not as though Lewis is making particularly bad swing decisions. His 27.1% chase rate and 47.4% swing rate are both a couple points below his career norms. He’s in the 75th percentile according to Robert Orr’s SEAGER metric, down from 87th percentile last year but still an indicator that he’s been very good at identifying and swinging at pitches with which he could do real damage. His 8.4% swinging strike rate and 15.9% strikeout rate are both career lows (excluding his 12-game cup of coffee in 2022).

Understandably, Lewis has been tinkering with his batting stance:

royce lewis is now 0-for-20 in his last 21 plate appearances

looks like he’s trying to change things up with an upright open stance https://t.co/edcjstks4G pic.twitter.com/MggeGh5Fxh

— parker hageman (@HagemanParker) May 28, 2025

According to the Statcast data — which aren’t granular enough for me to match up individual dates and don’t include spring training metrics — Lewis has evolved from a stance that was open by 3 degrees last September, to 6 degrees in May, to 14 degrees in June, the last of which is my best guesstimate for that top clip from May 28. He’s moved his feet farther apart, increasing from an average of 28.7 inches last year to 32.4 in May and now 34.3 in June — and he’s swinging hard. His 73.4-mph average bat speed and 34.7% fast swing rate are consistent with last year, and both his 31.4% squared-up rate and 14.9% blast rate are well ahead of those marks.

“If anything, right now I’m over-swinging,” Lewis said on Monday. “I’m swinging way too hard and then it feels like your head starts bouncing up and down and you start missing pitches you normally want to hit. I’m trying to slow it down a little bit.”

Lewis’ more open stance has increased the angle of his attack direction toward the pull side from 3 degrees to 9 degrees. That’s noteworthy in that he had more success last June and July, when his direction ranged from 7–9 degrees, than he did in August and September of 2024 and May of this year, when it ranged from 2–6 degrees.

Pitch-wise, Lewis has increasingly struggled with offerings in the upper third of the strike zone, but it does look like there’s been some bad luck involved lately:

Those upper-third pitches are mostly fastballs. Pitchers have left Lewis precious few hanging breaking balls or elevated changeups; he’s faced just five non-fastballs in the upper third this year, only one of which was put into play, a routine fly ball to the Brewers’ Jackson Chourio on May 16. Two days later, in his second plate appearance after homering off Peralta, Chourio robbed Lewis of a potential game-tying, eighth-inning homer.

When it doesn’t go your way, it doesn’t go your way. Hopefully, the tide has turned for Lewis, who’s far too talented to be hanging out at the bottom of the wRC+ leaderboard. Here’s hoping his next 0-fer is a long ways off.