Walker Jenkins, put simply, looks like a baseball player.
The 19-year-old is 6-foot-3, a solid 210 pounds of mainly muscle and looks to be engineered to play ball. It’s what you can’t see — the intense attitude, focus and work ethic, for starters — that helps take him from somebody who just has that look to someone who is projected to be among the game’s best someday.
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That’s the Twins’ hope, anyway.
Jenkins may still be a teenager, but he’s the No. 3 overall prospect, per MLB Pipeline, in the game, and the expectations around him are sky-high.
“He’s the real deal. He’s a real prospect, and he has got a lot of upside,” said veteran shortstop Carlos Correa, himself once a top prospect in the game. “You look at his body and he looks like a big leaguer already. I think he’s going to help us, hopefully, this year. Or next year. I don’t know, but he’s going to be a superstar in this game.”
If it were up to Jenkins, his debut would come this year. But the Twins will be sure not to rush the outfielder who is such a pivotal part of their future.
In his first full season as a professional, Jenkins hit .282 with a .833 OPS. He hit six home runs, drove in 58 runs and swiped 17 of 20 bags across 82 games and four different levels, finishing the year with a brief taste of Double-A.
He wasn’t satisfied.
“I want to go be a five-tool player. I want to go out and hit a bunch of home runs, hit for a great average, not strike out a lot, get on base all the time,” Jenkins said. “I want to man down center field, wherever I’m playing, steal a bunch of bags. I think I’m capable of it all. … I think the biggest thing for me is managing my body, making sure I can stay out there and go at my hardest. That’s how I like to play.”
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Being injured, he said, hindered his ability to play the way he wanted. It started in spring training when he strained his quad. Then at the beginning of the season, he strained a hamstring, and the injury cost him more than a month.
The Twins mixed in some designated hitter at-bats for him as they managed his playing time, and Jenkins said he felt like he couldn’t go full throttle all the time as he learned how to manage his body.
Doing so has been a constant, evolving process.
This offseason has been a lot working out — he trains at the same North Carolina facility as Twins catcher Ryan Jeffers — as usual. He also incorporated swimming, doing so twice a week as a cardio alternative to running.
As he heads into his second full season as a professional — the Twins drafted him fifth overall in 2023 — he has a better sense of what to expect, and what is expected of him.
“I have so much of a better understanding of how to navigate spring training, of how to navigate a routine, how to navigate my body, how to navigate going and competing while also managing the health side, as well,” he said.
Now fully healthy, Jenkins has a good sense of what he wants to accomplish this year. And even if a big league debut doesn’t come, the question is when, not if, Jenkins will play in a Twins uniform.
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“I have extremely high expectations for myself,” he said. “I feel like last season, that was a below-average year for me. Like, I’m not happy with my performance last year and I want to do better. … I’m always going to set extremely high expectations that almost feel out of reach because that’s, I think, the only way I can get to where I want to be.”
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