After a double and a triple Wednesday night, Byron Buxton is now slugging an even 1.000 during his seven-game hitting streak. He’s come back to Earth very slightly from the heights he reached around the All-Star break, but he’s still batting .273/.333/.559 for the season. He’ll get to 30 home runs for the first time, and he’s already 21-for-21 on stolen base attempts. It’s been a phenomenal season, right at an age (31) where it becomes essentially impossible to think of Buxton as a phenom. Now, he’s something more, although also something sadder: the fearless lion of the lineup, but for a truly terrible team.

Playing out the string with the most depressing Twins team in several years, Buxton has made it through two separate stints on the injured list without letting either stretch or stop his march toward new career landmarks for durability. The only season in which he qualified for the batting title was 2017, when he was 23, but he’s well on the way to doing so again this year. He won’t match the number of games he played or the number of innings he spent in center field in that season, but he’s already beyond the numbers he accumulated in any season since.

Not counting 2017, Buxton’s 767 innings in center field last year were the most he’d played. This season, he’s already at 840, and will surely eclipse 900. It’s not just how much he’s played, though, but how much his success has given him to do.

Buxton has reached base 156 times this year, including times reaching on error. Here’s how many times he’d reached in each previous season of his career:

2015: 37

2016: 97

2017: 163

2018: 18

2019: 94

2020: 37

2021: 89

2022: 121

2023: 104

2024: 132

While watching Buxton slide headfirst (alas, out) into home plate in the fifth inning Wednesday night, I was struck by the thought that he’s surely slid dozens more times this year than in any of those other years. He’s spent more of his long, fluid strides covering ground in center and more of them wheeling around the bases. He’s swung at 872 pitches, nearly 100 more than he did last year—which had been his post-2017 high-water mark. And that doesn’t count the Home Run Derby or the All-Star Game.

Counting each rep—each swing, each rounding of the bases, each throw, each mile covered in the outfield—is vital to the modern game. When we do so, it’s clear that Buxton is taking on a volume of work that far exceeds what he’s done in the past.

That’s not a bad thing, and the team doesn’t need to shut him down or anything. It’s just jarring to see a player whom the team had always handled with kid gloves, running all over the diamond each day at the end of a dead season. Buxton runs the bases so hard, swings so hard, and puts his body on the line for fly balls so unreservedly that it’s impossible not to think about the workload piling up, even as one watches him thrive.

It’s possible Buxton will see more time as the DH down the stretch. The Twins could use a look at some of the other players in the mix for outfield playing time in 2026, including Austin Martin and James Outman. Either way, though, Buxton is stretching to a level of work he’s never put his body through before—at least not this version of his body. It’s been fun to watch him dominate on the field, and he’s the only thing animating the team as it slouches toward the offseason. For the good of the team in 2026 and beyond, though, it might be wise to scale back his playing time in subtle ways over the final 20 games or so.

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