Baseball, at its core, is a game.

A kid’s pastime. A joyous outlet! But at the highest level, under the suffocating weight of expectation and pressure, it often becomes anything but fun — which is what makes it so jarring (yet understandable) when a slumping player leans into that very mindset as a way to find their way out.

Royce Lewis, the Twins’ once-untouchable phenom, is in the midst of the deepest and most unrelenting slump of his professional life. He’s 0-for-his-last-24, now batting .138 on the season. He hasn’t looked right at the plate since last July. And after another hitless game in Tampa on Wednesday, these were his answers to reporters:

“Just having fun. Playing baseball in the box. Feels like a Wiffle ball game right now because you know how a Wiffle ball stays up? That’s what my ball feels like.”

“I just need some luck for adjustments. I opened up today for the sake of I’m just going to go out there and have fun. If I get out, I’m going to have fun getting out.”

You can see what he’s trying to do: reframe the moment, lighten the burden, return to the roots. But there’s an almost tragic irony in the effort.

When a gifted athlete like Lewis, who once seemed like he could do no wrong, starts repeating “have fun” like a mantra, it doesn’t sound like a return to joy. It sounds like survival.

This is, after all, the same Royce Lewis who once said, “I don’t do that slump thing.”

He’s a freak of nature who seemed immune to struggle; a top draft pick and postseason hero who defied reasonable logic to immediately dominate whenever he stepped in the box following every lengthy injury hiatus.

Lewis made the hardest sport on earth look like backyard Wiffle ball. Now, it feels like Wiffle ball for a different reason, evidently.

The fall from “unstoppable force” to “grasping for answers” is not unique to Lewis. Baseball humbles everyone, eventually. But the whiplash is amplified when it hits someone who has always seemed like The Chosen One. For fans, it’s a little surreal. For teammates, it’s a reminder. And for Royce himself, it might just be the first time he’s having to learn what most pros confront early: this game isn’t fair, and it definitely isn’t always fun.

Still, there’s something deeply human in Lewis’s coping mechanism. We all tell ourselves little lies to make it through the grind. “This is fun” becomes a sort of foxhole affirmation, like a soldier in a lost war muttering “I’m fighting for a good cause.” You don’t say it because it’s true. You say it because you need it to be.

There was a time when even his own teammates couldn’t relate to Lewis. “He’s a freak,” Matt Wallner once said at a Twins Daily Winter Meltdown event with both awe and resignation. And he was. But now, as Royce struggles and searches for joy in a cruel game, he’s finally doing something that’s relatable: reminding us he’s human after all.