Minneapolis – The Minnesota Twins’ lineup has experienced highs and lows this week. They raked up 26 runs, outscoring the Athletics by eight in the first three games of their series in West Sacramento.
However, they’ve only managed seven combined runs in their last two games. Meanwhile, the A’s 14 scored on Thursday, and the Toronto Blue Jays scored six on Friday.
Amid these highs and lows, Royce Lewis seems to be getting back into place with his peak performance at the plate at a time when the Twins need his bat. Lewis attributed it to sitting out Monday’s series opener after carrying a 0-for-30 stretch back to Target Field.
“Sometimes you need to take a day,” Lewis said about his need for rest on Monday. “The next day (Sunday to Monday), my obliques were killing me because I swung about 2,000 times, but sometimes you need that day, especially in a long season like this.”
Sitting out Monday’s opening game against the Athletics benefited him. He has gone 5-for-14 with two doubles, four walks, and four RBI. Both doubles were feet away from being homers, but with where he feels he’s at with his swing, that elusive home run could be coming soon.
It’s still a relatively small sample size of improvement for Lewis. He ended the 0-for-32 stretch in his fourth plate appearance on Tuesday night. However, Lewis started his 2025 season carrying a 0-for-36 stretch from last year into this one. After breaking that streak, he had a separate 0-for-32 stretch.
“Overall, [Lewis] looks comfortable at the plate right now, and the swing looks synced up,” Rocco Baldelli said after Friday night’s game.
“He stays through the ball pretty good, and gets that last hit today. He did it a lot of different ways. It’s not like he’s executing just one thing, and that’s a really positive thing to say that he’s getting it done in a lot of ways offensively right now. And he’s making the plays defensively, too.”
Lewis said his rest day brought about the return of finding that feeling he needed to be comfortable at the plate.
“Just my feel,” he said. “The comfort that I missed. I wasn’t comfortable. I don’t know if it had to do with injuries… of course, timing for sure. But I don’t know what it had to do with, but I just didn’t feel like I was myself, is the best way to put it.”
The biggest sign that Lewis is getting back into the swing of things at the plate is that he had the hardest hit ball in Friday night’s game with his double reaching an exit velocity of 109.6 MPH. The hard contact has always been a good sign for Lewis’s numbers at the plate in previous seasons. If he can get a few more hits over 105 MPH in the coming days, then he’ll be able to get a few home run balls out of the park.
However, even if Lewis makes hard contact on the ball, everything is out of his control once it’s airborne.
“Once the ball leaves the bat, it’s on God and it’s on those fielders where they’re playing,” he said. “So I’ve just got to keep doing my thing and controlling what I can control, and looking for my pitch, which is key, I think, for any hitter.”
The results coming together for Lewis at the plate this week have also given him some levity on the mental side of the ball. And as he regains more confidence at the plate, he feels that more big moments that helped bestow the title of Mr. Grand Slam upon him will come.
“I just feel personally like mentally a little more focused,” he said. “I know what I need to do, and I feel more comfortable in my stance after those 2,000 swings or whatever they were.”