This story was excerpted from Matthew Leach’s Twins Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
If you’d been told at the beginning of the year to pick the Twins prospect most likely to participate in the 2025 All-Star Futures Game, you might not have gotten it on the first try. But have no doubt, the club is not at all surprised by Kaelen Culpepper’s rapid rise.
Culpepper, the team’s 2024 first-round Draft pick and No. 4 prospect, has rapidly emerged as one of the organization’s top prospects, combining an all-around offensive game with solid defense at shortstop. Now, he’s headed to baseball’s top in-season showcase.
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A shortstop out of Kansas State and alumnus of the summer showcase Appalachian League, Culpepper put up solid but unspectacular numbers in his first taste of professional baseball last summer. After a full offseason, though, he came out of the gate raking at High-A Cedar Rapids, and has kept it up since a promotion to Double-A Wichita.
He performed so well, so quickly, at Cedar Rapids that the calls came almost instantly for his promotion to Wichita. The club held off until the end of Cedar Rapids’ playoff chase before making the move, but Culpepper was on the radar long before that.
When you’ve got the combination of strike zone control, power, baserunning and defense that Culpepper brings, you’re going to draw attention.
“I think the first thing would be the plate discipline,” said Twins farm director Drew MacPhail. “He had incredible plate discipline at Kansas State. … And I think this is something that warranted him being a first-round type guy. It really excited us about him. And you pair that with a solid power profile and the ability to play shortstop, that’s going to probably merit first round consideration. So I think that’s what immediately has jumped out, and what we saw from Kaelen in his first half-season last year as soon as we drafted him.”
Culpepper is of course not the Twins’ No. 1 prospect. It’s been a challenging year for the team’s three Top 100 overall prospects. Walker Jenkins (club’s top prospect) and Emmanuel Rodriguez (No. 2 prospect) have both missed significant time due to injury, and though Luke Keaschall (No. 3 prospect) made it to the Majors, he suffered a significant injury as well. As for Culpepper, he missed time early in the year also, but since his return to the active roster, he’s done nothing but hit.
Moving forward, the club is looking more for evolution than revolution from Culpepper. Minnesota wants him to get experience at positions other than shortstop in case an opportunity comes up somewhere else, and the club wants him to fine-tune his already mature approach.
But it’s a short list.
“We just want to make sure he gets some exposure at some other positions,” MacPhail said. “But I think on the offensive side, just want him to refine the approach a tick. Mitigating that chase. But we also understand that a guy like KC that can hit a lot of pitches, those guys are naturally inclined to chase a little bit more.”