As the 2026 Minnesota Twins campaign gets underway, it’s important to resist the temptation to overstate the stakes of certain things and to overreact to spring developments. That said, it sure feels like this year will be the pivotal one in the Twins career of Brooks Lee, one way or the other.

Lee is going into this season as the clear starting shortstop. After 139 games in 2025 and some struggles at the plate and in the field, he gets the peace of mind that he will be an everyday guy to start the year. It’s an opportunity—but because of the team’s other options and the magnitude of his failures so far, it’s also something like a last chance. He had a solid spring, batting .308 and controlling the strike zone well, but consistent power and on-base ability have been absent in his first year-plus in the majors.

He mashed in his last season of collegiate ball, slugging 15 bombs and 25 doubles, with a monster 1.125 OPS as a switch-hitting middle infielder. The upside seemed endless, but now, he’s had 712 big-league plate appearances and we’re still waiting for that upside to show. Meanwhile, the Twins have very talented infielders in their farm system, like Kaelen Culpepper and Marek Houston, who are fighting for their opportunity in The Show. 

In 2025, Lee batted .236 with a .285 OBP, tallying only 32 extra-base hits. The year before, Lee impressed in his brief stint in St. Paul, with a .308 average and 15 XBH in just 25 games. He was dominant at points in the minors, and clearly has the talent to be a main part of this Minnesota Twins core moving forward into the rebuild.

Any way you look at it, Lee has been falling short of the mark so far as a big leaguer. He struck out in just 17.5% of his plate appearances last season, but had an average exit velo of 88.6 MPH; a 90th-percentile exit velocity of 101.2 MPH; and a 5.9% walk rate, all three of which are well below the league average. He’s also below-average in mobility at shortstop, and doesn’t steal any bags. He worked a lot on his quickness this offseason, so hopefully he’ll be able to make an impact in other categories when he slumps at the plate. He’s showed the ability to punish fastballs, which is important, but he has to learn to control the zone better and hit offspeed stuff.

The biggest thing working against Lee at this point might be the state of the franchise. The Twins desperately need some definitive proof of who their core will be moving forward. This might be a long season with not many wins, but a lot of questions will be answered as we get deep into this summer. 

I’m curious to see what kind of hitting philosophy Lee will be implementing this season. There have been a lot of changes in that dugout, and a new voice might be just what he needs to internalize a successful plan for his at-bats. He doesn’t strike out, but he doesn’t hit many hard line drives, either. It would be incredible to see a change in approaches up and down this lineup, and Lee would be a prime beneficiary of such a change.

Hopefully, Lee can get comfortable as the everyday leader of this infield and start driving the ball gap to gap like everybody knows he can. If not, though, he might run out of chances by next Opening Day.