Matt Wallner’s season appears to be done after the outfielder suffered a left oblique strain in Wednesday’s game. He was placed on the 10-day injured list on Friday before the Twins took on the Cleveland Guardians and, while he could technically return since the stint was backdated, it seems unlikely.
“It was something we (were) hoping would be a day or two,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “It’s not going to be a day or two. … I think ultimately it very likely closes the book … on his season. It’s not the way anyone wants their season to end, but his goal now is to make sure he’s going into the offseason as healthy as possible.”
It’s been an up and down season for Wallner, who hit .202 with a .776 OPS. His 110 OPS+ is 10 percent better than the league average hitter and is third among Twins players who played in at least 50 games, behind just Byron Buxton and Harrison Bader, but well below his career average 127 OPS+.
“(He) had some really good periods of time where I think he was feeling really good, he was locked in, he was productive,” Baldelli said. “Some times where he had to work through his swing, but he battled well.”
Wallner hit a career-high 22 home runs, but drove in just 40 runs — a majority of them himself, hitting just .177 with runners in scoring position. He had 68 hits on the season, 41 for extra bases, a statistical oddity.
His strikeout percentage dipped to the lowest its been in his career and his walk percentage was at its highest, but his batting average on balls in play dropped more than 160 points from a season ago.
“It was up, down, up, down throughout the whole year,” Wallner said last week. “I’m just trying to be more consistently like I always am and, again, building myself for next year.”
Wallner was one of the Twins’ most productive hitters at the start of the season but suffered a hamstring strain while running to first base on April 15 that kept him out a month and a half. He returned at the very end of May and for the first time in his major league career, stuck in the majors for the entire season, a point that Baldelli felt was important to make.
“There’s something to not needing any sort of actual true reset which, the last two years, even though his numbers ended up better at the major league level, he needed a break, and time off and time to go work in St. Paul to get what he needed to find,” Baldelli said. “But to be able to find that while not needing that break, I think, is important and I think that’s what he did in a noteworthy fashion this year.”
Briefly
To fill Wallner’s spot on the roster, the Twins called up outfielder DaShawn Keirsey Jr. … The Twins will send Joe Ryan and Bailey Ober to the mound in their doubleheader on Saturday with Ryan starting the 1:10 p.m. game and Ober the night game, which begins at 6:10 p.m. The first game was originally scheduled to take place on May 20, but was washed out because of rain.
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