Twins’ Royce Lewis a full success with only a half-season’s worth of career games

Those who regularly attend the Masters learn to differentiate the roars that roll like thunder through the amphitheater known as Augusta National.

Roars for an eagle by Tiger Woods sound different than those for an eagle by a journeyman. Just by listening, you might be able to tell that a leader’s shot had landed on the 16th green and was curling toward the cup.

On Sunday afternoon, I was walking next to Target Field when a roar preceded fireworks, eliciting this thought: “Wonder how far Royce hit it?”

Royce Lewis is barely getting his big-league career started, yet he is already generating unprecedented numbers and sounds.

The Twins played a doubleheader against the Oakland Athletics on Sunday. The first game marked Lewis’ 81st in the majors, meaning he has played in exactly a half season.

In his 81st game, he went 2-for-4 with a home run and a walk. In the first inning of the nightcap, he became the first Twins player to hit seven home runs in his first 12 games of the season.

He has hit 24 home runs in 82 big-league games, the most in Twins history to start a career.

In 12 games this year, he is batting .390 with a 1.398 OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage.) Harmon Killebrew has the highest OPS in Twins history, at .892.

Lewis was the first pick in the 2017 major league draft and was projected to be an impact player and versatile athlete. As he rose through the Twins organization, team executives began raving about his charisma.

He arrived amid great expectations. He has exceeded them, as a player, personality, and seeker of large and loud moments.

“I love where the swing’s at right now,” Lewis said. “It’s in a great spot.”

He was in the Game 1 lineup as a DH, but his most common assignment will be to play third base, next to Carlos Correa, and bat third in the lineup, right after Correa, who has benefited from Lewis’ threatening presence.

“Absolutely,’’ said Correa, who went 3-for-5 with two home runs in the first game Sunday. “You know you’re getting a pitch to hit. He’s a guy who will go deep at some point in the game, so [the opposing pitcher] doesn’t want to have people on base when he’s hitting. So, yeah, it’s great having that protection.”

Correa is a 10-year veteran, perennial Gold Glove winner, World Series champion and very rich man. Players with his pedigree don’t say things like, “He’s a guy who will go deep at some point in the game.’’

Lewis is, at least momentarily, changing the parameters of legitimate expectations.

“That’s just Royce being Royce,’’ Game 1 starter Bailey Ober said. “It’s unbelievable.’’

Lewis will slump, eventually. Right?

Everybody slumps. Lewis, in his energetic and analytical way, detailed the margin between success and failure when talking about his first two at-bats of the day.

The first produced a home run to right field. The second produced a flyout to right field.

“There’s millimeters of difference,” he said. “I feel like, in my second at-bat, I took the same exact swing in the same exact location, but it was a flyout instead of a home run.”

Projections and paces are worthless fun. We don’t know how many games Lewis will play this season, or whether he can continue to swim upstream against baseball’s typical regression to the mean.

We’ve seen enough, through 82 games, to know that he will always want to be at the plate with the game on the line and that no pitcher will intimidate or outthink him.

Between games Sunday, Lewis conducted a television interview, spoke with writers, then applied eye black to one of his teammate’s children. Asked what Correa said to him in the first inning of Game 1, just after Correa homered, Lewis said Correa often sings to him on the field.

Lewis plays next to Correa in the field and often bats behind him in the lineup. With any luck, theirs will be the defining relationship for the Twins for the rest of the decade.