The Buck Continues Here

I’m not going to act like Byron Buxton has been healthy all year or anything. He’s already had two IL stints this season for two unrelated injuries, and just this week he missed a game after being hit in the thigh with a pitch. This isn’t a single nagging, career-altering injury; this is a man who just can’t catch a break. Or who can’t catch without breaking, rather.

But this is about as close to a healthy Byron Buxton season as we’re likely to see. The 31-year-old has figured in 109 of Minnesota’s first 144 games and collected 467 plate appearances in those games, putting him on pace to qualify for the batting title for just the second time in 11 big league seasons. And he’s made the most of that extended run of playing time: .271/.332/.562 with 30 dingers and 21 steals. That comes out to a wRC+ of 140 (tied for 10th among qualified hitters) and 4.7 WAR.

For all intents and purposes, this is a full season. Which is not something you can take for granted where Buxton is concerned.

If you’ve ever seen Buxton in full flight — and “flight” is not much of an exaggeration here — you can see that he’s one of the most talented baseball players of his generation. That much has never been in dispute, not since the Twins picked him second overall in the 2012 draft. But just months into his minor league career, the injuries started to pile up, and ever since then he’s struggled to do much more than tantalize.

The Twins, as you might expect, have bent over backwards to make baseball’s rigid schedule and rules fit a player who is traditionally available only intermittently. There was the heavily incentive-laden contract, and the full-time DH experiment of 2023, which still resulted in only 85 games and 347 plate appearances.

But now, Buxton has registered back-to-back 100-game seasons for the first time in his career. Last season, he was limited to 102 games by various lower-body ailments as he played his way back to full fitness after offseason knee surgery. This year, he’s been full speed ahead.

He retains his perplexing and frustrating habit of attracting impact injuries. Like, we’ve all been following baseball long enough to understand that sometimes a player’s back or elbow or knees just can’t keep up the demands of the job. It sucks, but it’s part of the game.

The frustrating thing about Buxton is that he also has a habit of running into walls and flinging his body into the ground, and when a thing is moving as quickly as Buxton does at full tilt, that kind of deceleration can be quite destructive. Don’t blame Buxton, blame Sir Isaac Newton.

On top of that, Buxton just seems to have the worst luck when it comes to fluke injuries.

A sinker to the leg is usually little more than an annoyance, the kind of event that inspired the immortal exhortation of the Little League coach: “We got ice!” What are the odds of Buxton catching a pitch right on the kneecap?

But neither the chronic injuries nor the unlucky knocks have kept Buxton down for long this season. And that’s given us a glimpse into something that had hitherto only been a thing of legend: A Full Buxton Season.

Buxton’s talent, combined with the small-sample weirdness that comes with only playing 50 games a year sometimes, combined with some genuinely odd quirks in his development, has resulted in some weird numbers.

Like in 2020, when he played 39 games — two-thirds of a season that year — and posted a 121 wRC+ with 13 home runs… but only walked twice. The wRC+ of -2 in 28 games in 2018, followed not too long after by the wRC+ of 171 in 61 games in 2021.

Obviously, everything would’ve been different had Buxton consistently taken 550 plate appearances a year, but what if that weren’t true?

One thing you’ll notice is that for much of the time we were pining for a healthy Buxton, he wasn’t all that good. Especially not at the plate. In his previous full season, 2017, Buxton was a 4.4-WAR player not on the strength of his bat (92 wRC+) but on the strength of his legs and glove. Buxton swiped 29 bags on 30 attempts that year, and posted the best defensive center field season of the Statcast era.

To me, the single wildest thing about Buxton’s medial struggles is this: He’s made eight trips to the IL for lower-body injuries in his career, plus numerous other sprains and strains and bouts of tendinitis. He’s had two knee surgeries in the past 36 months. He’s 31 years old, almost 32. And he’s still one of the five fastest players in baseball. The defensive numbers have waned to the neighborhood of average, but he can still run faster than most people can ride a bike, and he’s a perfect 21-for-21 in stolen base attempts this year.

Nonetheless, Buxton’s bat developed late. Or rather, he’s gotten much better at translating his tools into production than he was in the mid-2010s. So if we’re looking at The Mythical Full Buxton Season, and incorporating his numbers from early in his career, what we’re seeing in 2025 is way better than what could’ve been expected.

But if you just look at Buxton since his bat really took off in 2019, his 2025 campaign is — believe it or not — about what you’d get by extrapolating his partial seasons out over a full year’s worth of playing time.

I don’t mean to be pollyannaish here, but that’s pretty cool! The Mythical Full Buxton Season is like an elusive cryptid, and we’re learning that it’s not only real, but it also looks exactly like it was supposed to. Here’s to many more sightings in the season to come.