MINNEAPOLIS — Ten home runs in 13 minor league games is the kind of number that demands attention even when everyone knows it won’t travel. The Minnesota Twins were paying attention. On Saturday, they recalled infielder Royce Lewis from Triple-A St. Paul, and in his first game back he started at second base — a position he had not played regularly since a brief, abandoned experiment in 2024. Outfielder James Outman was designated for assignment in the corresponding move.
Lewis had been optioned to St. Paul on May 19, roughly two weeks after it became clear that his .163/.261/.279 slash line through 119 plate appearances was not a slump the Twins could wait out at the major league level. The former first overall pick in the 2017 draft needed a reset. What he got, against minor league pitching, looked almost violent by comparison. He posted a .340/.417/.868 slash line across his time in Triple-A, including 10 home runs in that brief stretch, until the organization was satisfied enough to bring him back.
What produced the turnaround is the more interesting question. Lewis dismissed the outside hitting coach he had worked with over the winter — a person Minnesota general manager Jeremy Zoll described as a clean break with no friction, simply an approach that wasn’t working on the field. Lewis himself was characteristically brief about what changed mechanically. “Just small stuff,” he told reporters Saturday. “Keeping it simple and going back to being Royce.” The Twins’ organization had made a deliberate decision not to pile adjustments on top of adjustments while the offensive reset was the priority, as Zoll explained: “We wanted to start with, ‘Hey, we want to get your offense back on track.’ To avoid just dumping a bunch of different things at a player, let’s go stepwise here. Obviously, the offense kind of clicked in pretty short order.”
The position question is genuine and unresolved. Brooks Lee shifted from shortstop to third base during Lewis’s absence. Tristan Gray absorbed most of the shortstop plate appearances in the interim. Neither player has hit well enough to have laid a real claim to either spot, which means Baldelli has flexibility but also a reconstruction project on his hands. The Twins’ decision to play Lewis at first and second base in St. Paul before recalling him signals that multi-positional deployment is now the plan rather than a fallback. Lewis sounded at ease with that. “Playing in the big leagues is comfy,” he said. “Let’s just start with that. I feel great. I’m ready to get in the box every time, and however I can do that.”
Whether that comfort holds against major league pitching is the part no Triple-A stint can answer in advance. Lewis has hit .225/.285/.398 over 847 plate appearances since Opening Day 2024 — a line that doesn’t reflect the player who looked like a franchise cornerstone during his 2022 and 2023 stretches. Injuries were part of that story. Inconsistency was the rest of it. The Twins have kept building their timeline around him anyway, and this recall is another installment in that wager.
The Outman side of this transaction is its own uncomfortable story. Minnesota acquired him from the Los Angeles Dodgers last July for reliever Brock Stewart, a trade that benefited neither organization. Stewart has pitched just 5.2 innings since the deal, spending most of that stretch on the injured list. Outman hit .156/.229/.250 across 70 plate appearances as a backup outfielder in Minnesota — an extension of the collapse that began after his 2023 season with the Dodgers, when he slashed .248/.353/.437 with 23 home runs over 567 plate appearances.
The deterioration since that 2023 campaign has been difficult to explain. Over his last 374 plate appearances in the major leagues, Outman has batted .144/.235/.284, numbers that place him among the least-productive regular hitters in baseball over that span. He has the speed and the defensive tools to cover all three outfield positions, which has historically been enough to keep a player employed. Whether any club believes the offense is recoverable depends entirely on what each organization thinks caused the collapse — a question that doesn’t have a public answer.
Because Outman has fewer than three years of MLB service time, he cannot refuse an outright assignment to Triple-A if he clears waivers unclaimed. Utility players Kody Clemens and Ryan Kreidler now constitute the backup outfield on the active roster, a thin arrangement that will become thinner if Byron Buxton’s latest ailment — he has been limited to designated hitter duties for much of the past month — results in a longer absence.
The Twins have dealt with constant roster triage this season. Injuries across the American League have reshuffled divisional standings, and Minnesota has not been immune. The organization separately announced the trade of right-hander Simeon Woods Richardson to the Toronto Blue Jays this week, further thinning the pitching depth. The question of whether high-ceiling players can deliver on organizational investments is one the Twins are actively working through with Lewis as the test case.
The gap between production and explanation is where this story actually lives. No one in the Twins organization has said specifically what changed in St. Paul, and Lewis himself offered only that he returned to being himself. That is either reassuring or insufficient depending on what you believe about how slumps end. The Twins believe enough to have recalled him. What remains unknown is whether the major league pitching he will face over the next several weeks delivers the same verdict.
