Byron Buxton and the Loneliness of Learning on the Job

Byron Buxton was picking at his food. At two other tables in the visiting clubhouse at Nationals' Park, his Twins teammates were seated in small groups, joking in the casual, comfortable, giddily immature manner unique to young men who spend a great deal of time together. Not Buxton, though. He was hunched alone over the hard grey plastic of his table, square shoulders rounded, staring straight down, pushing a small portion of potato chips and mac and cheese from side to side across his plate. On the clubhouse TV, right in front of him, ESPN played highlights of Mike Trout's home run in Los Angeles the previous night.

Later that day, Buxton would smoke a double off of one of Washington's star pitchers, Stephen Strasburg, score a run later that inning, and make two sensational catches in center field. That's the Jekyll side of Buxton, and it's thrilling to watch. Hyde was there, too, though: Buxton struck out four times, all swinging, all ugly, and when the game ended his triple-slash line for the young season was just .156/.208/.289, with no home runs and 24 strikeouts in 49 mostly brutal plate appearances. He was sent to Triple-A the next day.

It wasn't supposed to be this way for Buxton. For all the talk about baseball being a game of failure, prolonged struggles like this aren't easy for anyone, let alone a player so incomparably talented that Baseball America ranked him the top prospect in the sport in 2014, ahead of Carlos Correa, Kris Bryant, and Noah Syndergaard. But, right now, this is Buxton's reality.

"It's a tough game, man," Buxton told VICE Sports at his locker before the game on Sunday afternoon. "I don't pay too much attention to what goes on on social media or what people say. I just focus on what I can do and what I'm here to do." Which, lest we forget, is hit: Buxton was called up to the majors with great fanfare last June, at the age of 21, more or less to be the savior of a Twins franchise that found itself muddling through a division dominated by the Royals. At the time, they were neither good enough to contend with the eventual world champs nor bad enough to conduct a full teardown and rebuild; the idea was that Buxton could be the difference. Those weren't fair expectations in the least, but the Twins weren't in the mood to worry much about that.

Buxton, understandably enough, crumbled under that pressure. His big league line settled at .209/.250/.326, which was well below league average and in a different universe than the mind-boggling .400/.441/.545 he'd hit at Triple-A Rochester earlier that same year. His talent was unmistakable even as he struggled, but Buxton simply could not bring it to bear from one at-bat to the next. Despite the mentorship of respected vets Joe Mauer and Torii Hunter, each of whom knows something about being a top prospect themselves, and one of whom (Hunter) was brought back pretty much exclusively to mentor the kid, Buxton just never quite found a groove. That set up 2016 as a bounceback season, which is the sort of pressure few 22-year-olds have to face. Before the Twins mashed the reset button and returned him to Rochester, the results were distressingly familiar.

"I take advice from everybody and try to use it in my game," Buxton said on Sunday morning. "If it works, it works, and if it doesn't, I don't use it." Which makes perfect sense, except that at the moment a million different people—including the Hall of Famer now managing Buxton's squad, Paul Molitor—are talking, shouting, or whispering in his ear. Each is trying to help him understand how to bring to bear the extraordinary physical tools that that carried him so quickly through the minors. Some may even be right. But also that's a lot of noise.

"It's hard to play when you're trying to be somebody you aren't, and it just puts more pressure on you," Buxton said. "Me trying to get more and more every day back to myself is what I'm trying to do." That sounds about right: stay true to yourself, and take advice from everyone, and be polite with the media, and take care of your young son (Brixton, age 3), and oh, yeah, hit big-league pitching every day. It's that simple.

Which is to say that it's not simple at all. Those thoughts about staying true to yourself are probably best understood as those of an honest young man grasping at straws, trying as hard as he can to do the right thing and say the right thing while doing it, and nonetheless finding himself wholly unable—for the first time in what has otherwise been a brilliantly successful career—to make things right. Buxton is young, but he's pro enough to know the right things to say, and how to say them the right way. That's a different thing than knowing the answers.

Fact is, he'll probably be fine, when all is said and done. Players with Buxton's range of physical tools—his blazing speed, his sharply intelligent routes in center, his quick wrists at the plate—are exceedingly rare, and they don't usually fail in the long run. Even Mike Trout, the player to whom Buxton is most frequently compared, hit .220 his first season in the Show. Buxton mentioned that he had heard from Trout, and from Bryce Harper, too, about the struggles of being gifted in the major leagues. I didn't get the impression that they had helped him much. "You need to fail to succeed up here, man," Buxton said, and failure is a solitary game. There's no easy way to learn that.