After winning two of three games against the Kansas City Royals, the Minnesota Twins had a great start to the season. But along with the good news came the bad news: right-hander Anthony DeSclafani will miss the entire season due to flexor tendon surgery, and Royce Lewis will miss at least the next month and probably longer due to a significant right quad strain.
Lewis has some of the greatest explanations for why the Twins managed to end all the jokes last autumn when they won their first postseason games in over 20 years. Lewis finally made a comeback to the diamond in May of last year, after nearly four years of injuries kept him mostly off it. However, he ended up on the injured list twice more in 2023; the first time was due to an oblique strain that cost him nearly a month and a half, and the second time was a hamstring strain that ended his regular season early in September. Even yet, he was a monster when healthy, slashing.309/.372/.548 in just 58 games (239 plate appearances) with a 151 wRC+ and 2.4 WAR. He smashed four home runs in six postseason games, continuing his streak of sheer, unadulterated excellence.
Preseason projections of Lewis’s 581 plate appearances (based on our Depth Charts) were sufficient to project the Twins to fifth place at third base in our positional power rankings. After a healthy spring training, he made his Opening Day lineup debut, playing third and hitting third. A no-doubt dinger in his first plate appearance, a single in his second at-bat, and an almost instantaneous injury sustained while rounding second base after Carlos Correa, the next batter, hit a double, made his 2024 debut an omen of his career.
Lewis expressed his relief that the injury did not involve his knee, which has twice needed surgery to repair its ACL, following the Twins’ 4-1 victory.
Lewis and the Twins are lucky not to have suffered more, but this is still a devastating blow for the player and the organization. “Maybe I’m too electric for my own good,” he remarked over the weekend after learning the full extent of his injuries and receiving an official placement on the IL. Tragic.
The Twins will most likely take a cautious approach to his recuperation, progressively reintroducing him to the lineup as the designated hitter before using him as their everyday third baseman. Naturally, the health of other players on the team, particularly Byron Buxton, who is anticipated to spend the most of his playing time in center field this season after being limited to DH by his own history of ailments last year, will also have an impact on how Minnesota deploys Lewis. Lewis won’t be available, so the Twins will match Willi Castro at third against right-handed pitchers and Kyle Farmer against left-handed pitchers. Lewis’s absence would have left Minnesota in third place in our preseason power rankings, so it’s obvious that this combo is only a temporary fix. Depth Charts currently forecasts Lewis to play third base for 405 plate appearances and 2.8 WAR after he returns from the injured list, but should Lewis be limited to DH, the Twins should begin searching for outside third base candidates.
In order to offset some of the pitching production it would lose without Sonny Gray—who signed with the Cardinals back in November after placing second in the AL Cy Young voting—Minnesota acquired DeSclafani in the Jorge Polanco deal over the offseason. In 2021, DeSclafani’s first season with the Giants, he was at the top of his game with a 3.17 ERA, 3.62 FIP, and 3.0 WAR in 31 starts. However, an ankle injury that necessitated season-ending surgery limited him to just five starts in 2022. He played well in the first few months of 2023, but it was obvious something was awry when he let up nine home runs in three times as many games to open the season, and then he allowed six in three starts in July. To treat his injured pitching arm, he underwent an injection of platelet-rich plasma. San Francisco sent him and Mitch Haniger to the Mariners in exchange for Robbie Ray in the beginning of January. A few weeks later, Seattle moved DeSclafani to Minnesota. It was anticipated that he would be prepared for this season, but the team shut him down in the third week of March because of elbow pain. After this season, he will be a free agent, and it appears likely that he will sign a pillow contract of some kind, like a one-year agreement with a team option on a second season.
The timing of DeSclafani’s injury may be the Twins’ lone bright spot. They don’t have to scramble later on because it happened early in the season before he was fit for action. Instead, they can start looking for starting pitching answers now. It does, however, leave the Twins with little leeway in their rotation in the interim. They would probably have to resort to Simeon Woods Richardson, whose ZiPS projected ERA is 4.67, if another starter were to sustain an injury. The team’s third-ranked prospect, David Festa, could step in later in the season, but given his struggles with command in his four Triple-A starts thus far (three in 2023 and one this year), it’s highly unlikely that Minnesota will call him up unless something unusual happens in the coming weeks. According to our depth charts, the Twins’ rotation will lose roughly 0.7 games compared to their preseason estimates. If Minnesota needs to go too far into their starter pool, ZiPS, which often takes a more pessimistic picture of pitcher health, has the change at 1.2 wins, mirroring the team’s problems.
Prior to the season, ZiPS had the Twins pegged as a.531 club; going forward, it expects them to have a.525 winning percentage. At first look, that doesn’t sound too bad, but according to ZiPS, the AL Central race is even closer than it was in the FanGraphs preseason standings, with the Twins finishing just one game ahead of the Guardians. The Twins are still ahead by a very slim margin, 39.5% to 39.3%, according to ZiPS, which now has the two teams’ divisional odds almost even.
The Twins begin a stretch of 10 of 16 games against the two AL Central teams they should be most concerned about this year—the Guardians and Tigers—after a two-game series against the Brewers. It’s reasonable to say that Minnesota wasn’t expecting DeSclafani to return in time for this early stretch of play, as the team was already bracing itself for the worst when it shut him down a few weeks ago. Aaron Gleeman of The Athletic reported on March 22 that DeSclafani “may never throw a pitch for the Twins.” The Twins, though, were hoping Lewis would be starting. When considered collectively, the information represents a significant blow to a season that had a great start.
