When he’s at his best, Royce Lewis is arguably one of the most exciting players in all of Major League Baseball. During his 58 games played in 2023, Lewis went on an offensive rampage, producing a 153 wRC+ over 259 plate appearances and leading the Minnesota Twins to their first Postseason series win since 2002. Since his electric 2023 season, Lewis has struggled, as he has throughout his career, with various injuries and a regression in offensive output, culminating in an 80 wRC+ over his first 236 plate appearances of the 2025 season. This article will take a deeper look at Lewis’s offensive profile, attempt to identify the factors behind his decline in offensive production, and determine whether or not Lewis can bounce back over the final month and a half of the season.
As mentioned earlier, Lewis burst onto the scene during his first prolonged stint of Major League action in 2023, producing a 153 wRC+ and 2.3 fWAR in 58 games played. The primary factor behind Lewis’s offensive performance was his impressive power production, hitting 15 home runs and sporting a .240 ISO. With high expectations that he would be able to carry this level of offensive production over the 2024 season, Lewis’s offensive output was underwhelming last season, producing a 107 wRC+ over 325 plate appearances in a season interrupted by multiple injuries. To this point in 2025, Lewis is producing the lowest offensive output of his Major League career, with an 80 wRC+ over his first 236 plate appearances.
The table above depicts Lewis’s Process+ metrics, which evaluate how well a hitter executes the aspects of hitting they have the most control over (swing decisions, contact ability, and batted ball quality), relative to the quality of pitches faced, from the past three seasons. In 2023, Lewis displayed above-average ability in each of the three offensive categories (105 Decision+, 104 Contact+, 107 Power+), resulting in a 113 Process+. Last season, Lewis took a major step back in swing decision ability, which weighed down his contact and power production (87 Decision+, 100 Contact+, 107 Power+), resulting in a 102 Process+. So far this season, Lewis has once again displayed above-average ability in all three categories (101 Decision+, 114 Contact+, 100 Power+), resulting in a 109 Process+ over his 63 games played this season.
A key driver of that improvement has been his rebound in swing decision ability. After ranking below league-average in Decision+ past season, Lewis has shown a more disciplined approach at the plate so far in 2025, with his O-Swing declining from 32.3% in 2024 to 27.6% this season. The ability to make good swing decisions is an important attribute to possess as a hitter, not only because fewer chases lead to more walks, but a more disciplined eye at the plate allows for the hitter to swing at pitches in areas of the zone where they are most likely to produce quality contact. This renewed swing decision ability has allowed Lewis to create a solid foundation for the improvements he has experienced in his contact quality so far this season.
With such an improvement in his underlying process metrics, Lewis should be experiencing an increase in his offensive production rather than a decrease. Perhaps Lewis is simply running into some poor “batted ball luck” this season, which has contributed to his decline in offensive output. As shown by the table above, Lewis’s .338 xwOBA is considerably higher than the .286 wOBA he is currently producing, and his .257 BABIP is both well below the league-average of .291 and his career-average of .283. While xwOBA has lost some of its descriptive power this season due to the increased drag of the baseball altering the expected value of batted ball events, it appears that Lewis will experience some positive batted ball regression in the future, as his underlying metrics indicate that his batted ball quality should result in better results than what he is currently experiencing.
While bad “batted ball luck” tells most of the story regarding Lewis’s decline in offensive production so far this season, there are other elements of his offensive approach that he could refine to further improve his ceiling of production moving forward. The table above depicts Lewis’s batted ball quality metrics over the past three seasons. This season, Lewis has experienced a notable increase in his squared-up rate, increasing from 19.7% in 2024 to 28.5% in 2025, and this improved ability to make contact on the “sweet spot” of the bat has likely contributed to the increase in Lewis’s Contact+ grade from 100 in 2024 to 114 in 2025.
Exit velocity is generated through a combination of bat speed and collision efficiency, and this improved ability to square the ball up has allowed Lewis to display an EV50 this season (101.6 MPH) similar to his 2023 EV50 (101.8 MPH) despite a ~1.5 MPH decline in bat speed between these two seasons. Displaying the ability to make consistent “sweet spot” contact moving forward will be imperative for Lewis to continue generating above-average exit velocities moving forward, absent a return to his prior 75.2 MPH average bat speed he displayed in 2023.
While Lewis’s ability to hit the ball hard has rebounded in 2025, his ability to hit the ball hard at optimal angles has declined, with his barrel rate declining from 11.2% in 2024 to 9.2% so far this season. This can be attributed to a continuous decline in his air rate (percentage of batted balls that are either line drives or fly balls) from 65.4% in 2023 to 61.4% in 2025. Though still above league-average (the league-average air rate is ~56%), Lewis could stand to benefit from hitting the ball in the air more frequently, given how it has allowed him to generate more barrels in the past.
The blueprint for Lewis to hit the ball in the air more frequently, however, is much less straightforward. Over the past three seasons, Lewis’s swing path tilt, the angle of the player’s bat path over the 40 milliseconds prior to contact, and his attack angle, the vertical direction of a player’s bat at the moment of contact, have increased, indicating that he is more frequently making contact with pitches when the bat is on a more upward plane, yet he is hitting more ground balls this season. Lewis has also moved his average point of contact closer to the pitcher, and since batted balls with contact points further out in front are more likely to be fly balls, given that the bat is typically moving more upward at that portion of the swing, also makes Lewis’s decline in barrel rate rather perplexing. I can’t say I have the answers for how Lewis can improve his barrel rate over the remainder of the season; however, an increase in barrel rate combined with positive “batted ball luck” could be a recipe to unlock a new level of offensive production for Lewis over the remainder of the season.
In conclusion, it appears that Royce Lewis’s struggles in 2025 have been driven more by variance and bad “batted ball luck” than by any glaring deterioration in his underlying skill set. His process metrics remain firmly above league-average, his contact quality has rebounded, and his overall offensive profile still contains the ingredients of an impact bat, provided he can stay healthy for a full season. While certain elements of his offensive approach could be refined to further elevate his ceiling, such as his barrel rate, it appears that Lewis should likely improve his level of production over the final month and a half of the season. OOPSY has Lewis projected for a 110 wRC+, while THE BAT X has Lewis projected for a 108 wRC+ over the remainder of the season, and I believe that these are fair prognostications of Lewis’s production over the final six weeks of the season, given his strong underlying batted ball quality. If positive regression finds him over the final six weeks, Lewis has a legitimate chance to close the season looking more like the offensive force of 2023 than the underperforming bat of 2025, and remind everyone just how impactful at the plate he can be when healthy.
Statistics as of the end of play on August 12th, 2025.
Photo by Icon Sports Wire | By Carlos Leano
