NEW YORK — Byron Buxton’s role on the Twins has been limited to serving as maître d’ and team psychologist for the past two weeks, so he was excited to be back atop the lineup Monday night.
“Energetically, it’s itchy to get back,” Buxton said shortly after being activated from the injured list. “I’ve been on the bench, seeing them take the extra base, stealing bases. It’s fun. We’re a young group, now even younger, just going out and playing baseball. That’s a fun thing to do.”
While waiting for the inflammation in his rib cage to heal, he has been making sure his teammates are having fun, too. He accompanied the team to Cleveland and Detroit after the trade-deadline teardown, unusual for a player on the IL, mostly to make sure the remaining players understood that their goals had not changed.
In fact, after the second game in Cleveland, he helped veteran catcher Christian Vázquez organize a team dinner at Morton’s steakhouse. Over steaks and shrimp cocktail, “we kind of talked it out. Relaxed a little bit,” Buxton said. “We wanted [the new arrivals] to know it’s good to be here — be happy about yourself for being here. It’s hard to get up here. Don’t take what happened that Thursday and carry it over for weeks. Get together, have a good dinner and go out the next day.”
Ryan Fitzgerald, for one, thought the dinner accomplished that and more. And it didn’t hurt that Buxton and Vázquez picked up the check.
“We got to know each other a little bit, shared some stories around the table. It was cool to hear from guys like Erasmo [Ramirez] and José Ureña, pushing 10 years of service time,” said Fitzgerald, a 31-year-old MLB rookie infielder. “It’s like a bombshell goes off and I’m walking into this, the new guy here — let me know what I can do to help. Buck, Vaskie, all of them were like: ‘Dude, let’s go. We’re excited. Let’s just play hard and see where it goes.’ It was encouraging to see that.”
And it’s encouraging for the Twins to have Buxton back.
“He leaves you smiling and with your heart racing,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. “It’s a pleasure to watch the guy play. He brings that every day.”