Royce Lewis, recovering from hamstring injury, set to begin rehab assignment

Rainy conditions slowed Royce Lewis for a day, unable to run the bases before Wednesday’s game at Target Field, but he was cleared to start a rehab assignment Friday.

Lewis, on the 10-day injured list because of a left hamstring strain since June 15, is expected to serve as the designated hitter for the Class AAA St. Paul Saints at CHS Field. The Twins haven’t determined an ideal length for his rehab assignment, manager Rocco Baldelli said, but it’s possible Lewis could rejoin the Twins’ roster next week.

“He’s in a good spot right now,” Baldelli said. “This is what we were probably hoping for when it first happened. This was pretty close to an ideal situation to this point. We still treat it as a guy recovering, and that’s why he’s going on a rehab assignment and why he’s going to get some at-bats.”

It’s been a disappointing season for Lewis, who missed the first month of the season because of a more severe strain in his left hamstring. On the field, he battled two long slumps but was heating up just as he was sidelined again, batting .202 with two homers, four doubles and nine RBI in 30 games.

“Mentally, with everything, resilience is what I try to stand for now,” Lewis said. “Just keep having fun, being myself, and I just want to go out there and have fun playing the game that I love. Looking forward to coming back this time.”

The Twins sat through a rain delay that lasted 4 hours, 22 minutes before Thursday’s series finale against the Mariners. Seattle was not scheduled to return to Minnesota this season, so the two teams were prepared to wait as long as they could.

“We actually thought [first pitch] was going to be later than it was,” Ryan Jeffers said after the scheduled 12:10 p.m. game began at 4:32 p.m. “I don’t think we thought the rain was going to be out of [the area] until later, but we were ready to go.”

“It could be easy, we’re here all day, to get out of our own flow of things,” pitcher Simeon Woods Richardson said. “But I think we did really well just trying to stay in a routine today.”

Said Jeffers: “That’s not easy to do, come out and pitch like that after sitting around and waiting all day. That says a lot about who [Woods Richardson] is as a player and a pitcher.”

The Twins didn’t have a position player voted to start in next month’s All-Star Game.

Buxton received the eighth-most votes among American League outfielders (920,986), but he was more than 286,000 votes short of qualifying as a finalist to start in next month’s Midsummer Classic. Aaron Judge received a league-leading 4,012,983 votes, almost double Riley Greene, the second place vote-getter among outfielders.

Willi Castro finished with the seventh-most votes among AL second basemen (492,878), but he was more than 800,000 votes behind finalists Gleyber Torres (Detroit) and Jackson Holliday (Baltimore).

• Utilityman Austin Martin was activated from the injured list at St. Paul, and he homered in his first at-bat Thursday off Louisville righthander Chase Petty, the former Twins first-round pick, in the Saints’ 4-2 loss to the Bats at CHS Field. Martin had been limited to 13 games this year because he strained his right hamstring twice.

• It was 63 degrees at first pitch Thursday, the coldest game-time temperature for a June game at Target Field since 2019.