Chin Music w/ Roy Smalley, LaVelle E. Neal III & Jim Souhan - Minnesota Twins Podcast · Talk North Podcast Network

On Ryan, Royce & TK

·38 min·2 clips

Joe Ryan is heading toward arbitration with the Twins over a $500,000 gap, which gives the conversation exactly the dry baseball-business flavor it deserves. The panel does not turn it into a grand scandal. It lands more like classic Twins weirdness: a small number that still manages to say plenty. The recent moves get treated as mostly minor, and then the show settles where it has more bite, on Royce Lewis and what needs to happen next. The swing is the first problem. When Lewis gets long and rushed, the rest of the at-bat starts to unravel with it. The panel keeps coming back to the practical stuff: shorten it, repeat it, and get back to the version that worked. Then comes the part hitters do not get to skip, the plan. One voice brings up Mock's old line about how it is not enough to step into the box just because it is your turn. That is the useful part of the episode. Hitting gets framed as mechanics plus intent, not just sitting fastball and hoping the ball finds the seats. Pitchers have a plan. Catchers have one too. If Lewis does not bring his own, theirs can pull his swing apart before he gets to do any damage. The panel wants him thinking about how a pitcher gets strikes, what he wants chased, and where Lewis can hurt him across the park. Simple, yes. Easy, no. The close drifts into Booze and Blue, with Gary Clark Jr., First Avenue, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Albert King taking over for a while. It feels like the usual clubhouse-adjacent exhale, not filler. By the end, the Twins are still hanging over everything, with 2026 left sitting there as the next big, messy question.

As heard by us

A practical Twins conversation that treats a small arbitration gap and Royce Lewis's next step as real questions.

This piece stays grounded in the numbers and the baseball questions behind them, moving from Joe Ryan's $500,000 gap to Josh Bell and the twins' minor moves without losing sight of Royce Lewis.

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Why you'd press play

You want a grounded Twins talk about Royce Lewis, Joe Ryan, Josh Bell, and the latest club housekeeping.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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