In just over a month, the Minnesota Twins will report to Spring Training. With Christmas in the rear view mirror and the cold of January setting in, this is usually a time when Twins fans look ahead and start booking their flights to Fort Myers and perhaps a summer road trip.<\/p>\n
But this year, Twins fans couldn\u2019t care less.<\/p>\n
If we were to do an autopsy on the Twins, there are several reasons why fans are upset. A downward spiral<\/a> in public relations since the 2023 season ended is enough to temper some enthusiasm. Still, so are the things fans can\u2019t control, such as the continued reign of the Pohlad family as owners and employment of President of Baseball and Business Operations Derek Falvey.<\/p>\n There are a lot of reasons why Twins fans may have their minds somewhere else this winter. And it\u2019s why the franchise needs Royce Lewis<\/a> more than ever.<\/p>\n Back in Oct. 2023, Lewis was one of the biggest reasons why Twins fans were starting to hop on the bandwagon. Between the 2022 and 2023 seasons, Lewis hit .307\/.364\/.549 with 17 home runs and 57 RBI in 280 plate appearances. His rookie season in 2023 alone put him in great company<\/a> with names like Albert Pujols<\/a>, Mike Trout<\/a>, Fernando Tatis Jr.<\/a>, and Yordan Alvarez<\/a>.<\/p>\n When the Twins broke their 18-game playoff losing streak, it was because Lewis drove in all three runs with a pair of homers in a 3-1 victory. His energy was infectious, and fans who had grown weary of their postseason failures gravitated to a new star.<\/p>\n The best thing for Lewis at this point was that he didn\u2019t have to be the face of the franchise. Byron Buxton<\/a> had the attention of the local diehards, while Carlos Correa<\/a>\u2019s star power brought in a national audience. If Lewis had been a productive player, the Twins would have had a foundation for success, and the 2023 season would have been only the beginning.<\/p>\n But like many things, Lewis\u2019s star began to fade in 2024. Injuries played a key role as Lewis suffered a severe quad strain<\/a> after hitting a homer in his first plate appearance on Opening Day 2024. While he smashed nine homers the following June, he\u2019s hit .235\/.288\/.416 with 29 homers and 99 RBI in 188 games over the past two seasons.<\/p>\n Through it all, Lewis lost his smile like Shawn Michaels in the mid-90s. What was a player that appeared to be an optimism-fueled machine quickly became a grizzled vet. His pointed comments in the media and seemingly rocky relationship<\/a> with Rocco Baldelli became a point of contention, and there was a non-zero chance that the Twins could have traded Lewis if they hadn\u2019t replaced Baldelli with Derek Shelton<\/a> this winter.<\/p>\n As a result, Lewis will enter a completely different environment in 2026. Lewis remains an important piece to Minnesota\u2019s success, but he also could be the key to winning back a fan base that has nothing to grab onto coming into this season.<\/p>\n Buxton is coming off the best season of his career, but his injury history makes it just as likely he plays 70 games as it is to find the fountain of youth in his mid-30s. Pablo L\u00f3pez<\/a> and Joe Ryan<\/a> form a strong top of the rotation, but both players could be off the team by this summer\u2019s trade deadline if the Twins don\u2019t win or they continue to slash the payroll.<\/p>\n Even looking at the Twins\u2019 youth, Lewis is the player with the best chance of grabbing the attention of the fans.\u00a0Brooks Lee<\/a> would need to take a massive jump to reach Lewis\u2019 level of star power. Even the promising early returns of Luke Keaschall<\/a> are watered down by several prospects who have regressed when reaching the majors \u2013 a folder that some may have already put Lewis into after the past two seasons.<\/p>\n Going deeper, it\u2019s hard to get excited. Walker Jenkins<\/a> is Minnesota\u2019s most heralded<\/a> hitting prospect since Joe Mauer<\/a>, but Twins fans have rarely seen the type of impact rookie bat that other teams seem to produce. Kaelen Culpepper<\/a>, Emmanuel Rodriguez<\/a>, and Eduardo Tait<\/a> are projections and hard for anyone to get excited about, as ownership and the front office sedate them with their decisions at the major league level.<\/p>\n All of this could change if Lewis finds himself again. The Twins have gotten off to a good start, with Shelton flying to meet Lewis in person to discuss his standing with the organization. While it\u2019s important to note that Baldelli and former bench coach Jayce Tingler had a similar meeting<\/a> last winter, the message Lewis relayed<\/a> to The Athletic\u2019s Dan Hayes sounded like that of a player attacking this season with renewed optimism.<\/p>\n \u201cIt meant the world,\u201d Lewis said. \u201cWe started off building a really good relationship. He told me I was important to him and our organization. I told him at points last year, I didn\u2019t feel like that. It was really important to me to feel that kind of confidence. I told him that part of me is still a little bit of a wide receiver mentality, to where I need to be talked to and just told what\u2019s going on, what the plan is for myself, for the organization, and to be involved just a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n The other part is that Lewis must stay healthy for that to happen. While he\u2019s been removed from his ACL tears in 2021 and 2022, he\u2019s succumbed to lower-body injuries, including the quad strain in 2024 and hamstring and adductor strains in 2023 and 2025.<\/p>\n Twins fans are sick of \u201cifs,\u201d but those could go away with on-field production. If Lewis returns to the player he was two years ago, he could be the star that fans accept in the face of their latest rebuild and perhaps begin the healing processes for both the fans and his relationship with the organization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In just over a month, the Minnesota Twins will report to Spring Training. With Christmas in the rear…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":519363,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2388],"tags":[5,822,60,3190,4,408,148],"class_list":{"0":"post-519362","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-minnesota-twins","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-minnesota","10":"tag-minnesota-twins","11":"tag-minnesotatwins","12":"tag-mlb","13":"tag-royce-lewis","14":"tag-twins"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/115891541562174099","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=519362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519362\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/519363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=519362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=519362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=519362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}