I owe Luke Keaschall an apology. Last night, the 22-year-old second baseman presented his first OH-FER in his short and excellent major league career, and it was a predictable result of my decision to write about his decision today. In the Bronx series opener, the Yankees beat the twins 6-2, while Keaschall watched online with an 11-game winning streak in the deck circle, Ryan Jeffers beat the game to finish the game. This is my fault. I know that by publishing articles about Keaschall, I am condemning his fate. I do feel bad about jinx him, but it’s time to highlight his start. Keaschall will turn 23 on Friday, making him three years older than Fangraphs.
Allow me to temporarily exclude Monday’s statistics in order to draw a picture. In his first 12 games of his career, Keaschall ran 234 WRC+, cut .415/.500/.707, homering twice, stealing five bases. He is one of only 10 players in the past 30 years, and the roster also includes his manager Rocco Baldelli – who started his career with an 11-game winning streak. Keaschall also started his career with a 12-game winning streak. Yes, this is possible; I’ll explain it later. With a good 1.0 round of war (down to 0.9 on Monday; again, I’m sorry, Luke), he ranks eighth in Minnesota’s position players. He has five multi-hit games. In his second week as a major leaguer, he was only named the AL player of the week. He scored his first three-hit match in the 11th inning against the Royals on Sunday.
To make all this more impressive, Keaschall is not doing normal rookie sports. The twins called him in April and he started his career with a six-game winning streak. His foundational winning streak was made when Kyle Hendricks’ fastball hit near his right wrist on April 25. The 86.8-mile pitch broke Keaschall’s forearm and his season, putting him on hold after seven games with a 206 WRC+ career. Keaschall missed over three months instead of next where he left, but played better when he came back. He returned on August 5, hitting the Multi-RBI twice in three straight games. About these RBIs: Keaschall’s WRC+ is 119 in low leverage, 261 in medium leverage and 352 in high leverage. With a WPA of 1.13, he already ranked second among twin batters and 47th among all batters. He once again played 13 games, and in one of them all he did was walk onto the plate and was broken by the second sensitive four holes in the baseball.
Keaschall spent two years at the University of San Francisco, where he combined the .916 merged OPS, then moved to Arizona and went all out. He cut .353/.443/.725 with the Wildcats as 55 games. The twins selected him in the second round of the 2023 match and he continued to explode on minors. That summer, he released 154 WRC+ in 31 games, starting with a complex league and ending with High-A. In 2024, despite dealing with elbow issues, he had a 157 WRC+ between High-A and Double-A, forcing him to have Tommy John surgery after the end of the season. It was a ridiculously quick recovery as he started the 2025 season with Triple-A St. Paul after his surgery last August. He was quickly called (and West) to Minneapolis for debut in the major leagues in three weeks of the season. He still only participated in 153 professional competitions. He only spent 28 games in Triple-A, half of which were performed after a surgically repaired fracture of the arm. Yes, his recovery work is more than twice as high as his professional league career.
So far, what Keaschall has done is not unprecedented. According to Stathead, he is one of 44 different players running 1.200 or higher in the first 12 games since 1995. But the names on the list are encouraging. It contains the Glitter in the Pot, titled by Aristides Aquino (1.573 OPS), who played 1.1 Wars in his first 12 games and then 0.3 in his career. But that also includes solid major leagues, real stars, future Hall of Fame members of Albert Pujols and future Hall of Fame members of Joey Votto.
All this means the future? Keaschall now has an average hitting average of 214 WRC+, and he obviously won’t stay that forever. Prior to this season, Zips and Steamer merged to cast .321 Woba for Keaschall. They now have .336. It’s not bad for 13 days of work, but far from the .480 he’s now swaying. The pitcher won’t throw the ball 34% on his area on his body 57% of the time and the heart of the board, which is much higher than any qualified batsman. Still, after chasing a lot in college, Keaschall improved his excellent walking and strikeout rate among minors, which continued in the Grand Slam. With the twins, he has a walking rate of 9.8% and strikeout efficiency of 7.8%. Even if this won’t last forever, it’s certainly encouraging.
The real question is about the power of Keaschall bats. He ranked third in Minnesota’s highest prospect in June, as Eric Longenhagen and James Fegan wrote at the time: “The relative lack of power could cause Keaschall’s walking speed to sag among the big man, and could also cause his popular tools to be reduced by light contact quality.” On the other hand, when the twins first called him, Baseball prospectus “Every time I’ve written about a potential client who needs to find a balance between contact and power, I’ve been imagining what he’s brought to the board. He’s unlikely to add power to the game with major league weapons, but Keaschall should always be bop 15-20 bombs while getting enough touch in good cuts and enough touch in good cuts.” Keaschall still looks like a great contact hitter so far at least, he’s probably going to lift and pull enough balls to go at medium exit speeds. But what we should probably see for the end is that what we are seeing now is what Keaschall will behave in his absolute terms. He is running the original chase, whif and square rate, but his bat speed score is low. His average exit rate is currently close to the league average, but this is when he hits no tomorrow. His tough speed is still below average, and his 90-level exit speed puts him in 22 percentiles. Keaschall beat the third baseline five of his extra hits, which is probably what we should expect.
Keaschall also has to find a position. Back in June, Eric and James wrote: “The best place for Keaschall is the batsman. The twins tried him in the outfield for minors, but Minnesota’s outfield didn’t have many rooms, his elbows limited him to first base, and at some point a batsman anyway. If Keaschall could stand out, it would be a great contact batsman and brought some popularity that would make him a very useful player, but it was a very open question. If he slid to first base or DH, the outlook wouldn’t be that optimistic.
If all of this sounds familiar, you are not wrong. For whatever reason, the twin batsmen have stood out in the moment they entered the profession in recent seasons. Ryan Jeffers ran 154 WRC+ in the first 20 games of 2020. Trevor Larnach recorded 143 WRC+ in the first 21 games of 2021. Jose Miranda Games. Edouard Julien and Matt Wallner both featured 134 WRC+ as rookies. Last season, Brooks Lee soared to 165 WRC+ in his first 12 games. All of these batsmen fell to Earth at some point, and even though some of them proved to be excellent batsmen, none of them are as hot as Keaschall. At least for now, we have no more to ask for him.
