The Twins will be spending some significant money this winter to improve their offense—even if that spending comes in the form of hours tallied by front-office personnel or technological upgrades, rather than new hitters on high-paying free-agent contracts. That was, perhaps, the most intriguing takeaway from the press conference at which the team introduced new hitting coach Keith Beauregard (and bench coach Mark Hallberg) last month.

“We’re gonna build a markerless system that shows what a guy’s swing is, and when it’s good what it looks like and when it’s off, ‘Here’s what we’re seeing,'” Beauregard said via Zoom on November 17. “And it should get us to solutions as quickly as possible, and make meaningful tweaks as quickly as possible, as well.”

Nestled in that enthusiastic statement of intent was a somewhat startling admission: the Twins don’t already have such a system in place. Sources within front offices elsewhere in the league estimate that between 15 and 25 of the other 29 teams do already have proprietary means by which they provide biomechanical feedback to players on their swings within games—that is, without needing to attach markers and study the player’s movements in a laboratory setting.

This is one of the little-discussed shortfalls that has crept up on the team over the last few years. Throughout Derek Falvey’s tenure as the head of baseball operations, good analysts, developers, scouts, executives, coaches and instructors have flowed through Minnesota. They’ve generally been well-regarded by other teams for their acquisition and development of good staffers. That’s why they’ve lost a lot of them to other teams over the last several seasons. When it comes to technology (and the implementation thereof in player development and coaching), however, they haven’t invested enough to stay ahead of the curve. In fact, they’re a bit behind it.

Diminished spending throughout the organization has had effects reaching beyond the 40-man roster and the nominal payroll. Most of the team’s pro scouts were let go earlier this year, and sources familiar with the internal workings of the team say a budget crunch has encroached upon the efforts of the front office since 2023. 

That’s the bad news. The good news is that forward strides like the one Beauregard described cost very little. It won’t eat up much of the budget for research, development and implementation to add a markerless motion-capture system to their arsenal of tools. The data needed to do that kind of work is already abundantly available to the Twins, via Statcast. Visualizations that animate and illustrate a hitter’s swing in three dimensions already exist, and are available to the public via Baseball Savant. Here’s the one for Trevor Larnach, for 2025.

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However, these animations are composites. They show the average of all the swings a hitter took during the year in question. The application Beauregard described, which the Twins will have at their disposal in 2026, is more nuanced. It will allow them to study individual swings on demand (another capability they technically already had, but which they didn’t use extensively in 2025, according to a source), and even more importantly, it will allow them to bin and tailor swings to study them in clusters. 

What does a hitter’s swing look like on fastballs down in the zone? What about when the pitch is belt-high and on the inner edge? How are they adjusting to breaking balls, in terms of both their bat path and the transfer of weight in their lower half? These are questions all hitting coaches would agree are important, but there are different ways to attempt to answer them. With improved technological tools at their disposal, Beauregard and assistant hitting coaches Rayden Sierra and Trevor Amicone will try to give their charges more objective, concrete answers in 2026.

For multiple reasons, communication about swings and hitting trouble has been a major weakness for the team over the last two years. David Popkins was fired after 2024 because the front office believed he was unable to adequately convey the team’s philosophy to the players under his tutelage. He proved that theory wrong in 2025, as he helmed one of baseball’s best offenses and led the Blue Jays to within inches of a World Series title. Although signed to a multi-year deal to replace Popkins, Matt Borgschulte was fired after just one season in his stead. The team’s persistent inability to translate apparent talent into consistent production prompted that move.

Larnach is a perfect example. The fault might well lie in him, rather than his instructors, but neither Popkins nor Borgschulte succeeded in getting the young slugger to better understand his own swing. He made major changes from 2024 to 2025, but wasn’t even aware of them—or able to articulate the reasons for them.

“There’s been no intentional changes to the swing this year,” Larnach said in August. “Everything I’m trying to do is the same as last year, and if anything’s different, it’s just my adjustment to the pitch and to what I’m seeing.”

That might have been true, as far as it went, but it betrayed an insufficient self-knowledge, which can be blamed partially on a lack of irrefutable feedback. Beauregard’s markerless capture system will force Larnach to reckon more with the realities of his swing, which might be part of why the team felt optimistic enough to retain him at the non-tender deadline in mid-November.

Slushy swing talk was a virus that spread throughout Minnesota’s clubhouse in 2025. Carlos Correa (who came to the team from the Astros, and thus has had his swing captured and dissected in quantitative fashion for a decade), Ryan Jeffers, and late-season reinforcements Ryan Fitzgerald and James Outman could be counted on to accurately describe their own swings, but Larnach, Matt Wallner and others frequently demonstrated a mistaken or incomplete comprehension of themselves in motion. That can reflect a player’s attitude or inclination, as much as a team’s tendency, but the Twins’ lack of cutting-edge tools certainly made it more possible to come to work every day and be underprepared for the hard work of hitting big-league pitching.

In 2026, Larnach, Wallner, Royce Lewis and Luke Keaschall will have the benefit of that hard data, be it in numerical or visual form. Beauregard is ready to find the best way to communicate with each individual, but one way or another, the goal is to get them the actionable information they weren’t receiving (at least in actionable form) until now.

“I think it goes back to meeting guys where they’re at, and figuring out how to speak their language,” Beauregard said. “When you learn to speak their language, you build (basically) a base model of what type of swing works for them. And with some of these biomechanical markers, and some of the things you just alluded to, it allows us to get to resolutions a little bit quicker, so when they’re outside of those markers, we can catch flags.”

The 2026 Twins will have to do more with less, at the plate. Hiring Beauregard was part of the plan to do so, but supporting him with better technology and advanced tools the team should have had already will be important, too.