Trevor May, you're a Twins pitcher now. Seven innings pitched. Three hits. One earned run. Two walks. Three strikeouts. I am not going to knock this start, but it's not entirely comforting to see that the Twins have managed to "fix" May's walks/homers problem (for one day at least) concurrent to a steep decline in strikeout numbers. Trevor May strikes dudes out. That is the reason why we acquired him. There are substantial warts that can keep him from becoming a usable big league starter, but there is no happy ending to the story for Trevor May where he doesn't use the plus fastball and plus curve to make batters swing and miss.

There's a middle ground here, where this is the part of the process where May learns to command his fastball to get ahead in counts. Last time, he got rocked for a bunch of singles and doubles. This time, balls found gloves. If there's a step beyond this where, imbued with the confidence to pound the zone with 93-95mph fastballs, he resumes striking bozos outs with that curve, then I will drop this worry. But only then.

Miguel Mejor hit another homerun. Because it was Sunday. Three for four with a homer and four RBI. He struck out once, but didn't make any errors. His fielding his been, at the very least, much, much cleaner this year. Rightly or wrongly, the Twins are an organization that believes in errors and Mejor's ability to handle balls without throwing them into the seats behind first is a perhaps-disproportionately-important sign that he may be capable of playing third for Minnesota.

Also, he's hitting .377/.446/.755 right now. That batting average is rather implausible with 32 strikeouts in 118 plate appearances, but if you want the profile of somebody who is theoretically capable of hitting .540 on contact it's somebody who hits every ball really, really hard - and a bunch of them over the fence where there's no chance that anybody can catch it.

At this point, it may be reasonable to ask yourself whether anybody in the system is outperforming Sano. The strict answer according to the above batting line is "no," but Buxton* is putting up a pretty similar batting line (.383/.504/.681) with really eyebrow-raising peripheral numbers that don't make us doubt the batting average in the same way that they do with Sano. Drafted, Buxton was the toolsiest of toolsy outfielders, which provokes the very useful dual question of whether and when he can turn those into baseball skills. For the first test of pro, full-season ball the answer is clearly "yes" and "right now". He is way more polished than anybody initially anticipated, proven with a 23:20 BB:K ratio. Further, evidence of his learning curve is that pretty much the only early knock on him was that for somebody fast he seemed to get a poor jump on the basepaths a lot. That was digging deep for something to ding Buxton for, but I think he was only something like 5 out of 9 stolen bases attempts. Now? He's 12 for 16.

The Twins will keep waiting for the other shoe to drop on both these guys, and wisely. But I think that if I had to choose which one was a better candidate for promotion based purely on performance, it'd be Buxton - arguably making more of a joke out of his present competition. That probably wont be the way it plays out because these decisions aren't based purely on performance. The Twins have seen Sano struggle and snap out of it - not so yet with Buxton - and more information always makes for safer promotions. Plus, they like to one-level-at-a-time for the lower minors even more than the upper levels.

*I'm imagining Myron Fuxton as his nerd doppleganger, no?