The Iowa Meat Truck has pulled up to the home of the chicken wing.

Peyton Williams, nicknamed The Iowa Meat Truck, hit his second home run in just seven games with the Buffalo Bisons on Thursday.

The Origins of The Nickname

Let's start with the nickname and then move on to the prospects for the hulking 6'5", 255-pound slugger. Williams is as corn-fed as they come, having grown up in the Des Moines area and then played baseball at the University of Iowa.

His neighbor in Johnston, Iowa, around 20 minutes outside Des Moines, owns a business called The Iowa Meat Truck, which partners with Iowa farmers and small-town lockers to sell and deliver premium meats across Iowa.

The neighbor, Jason Curry, gave William's father some hats and T-shirts with the Iowa Meat Truck logo.

His father regifted the T-shirt to Williams. He wore it to the exit meeting for the 2023 Vancouver Canadians. Brent Lavallee, then Vancouver's manager, asked him where he got the shirt and told him that it had to be his nickname.

He also suggested Williams mimic a trucker honking his horn to celebrate big hits.

When Williams returned to Vancouver for the 2024 season, Vancouver Canadians broadcaster Tyler Zickel asked Williams what the honk-the-horn gesture meant and worked the nickname into his calls.

Two Steps Forward and Two Steps Back

Vancouver is a notoriously tough-hitters park. Sean Keys set the all-time Canadians record with 19 home runs in 2025 and still had just a .773 OPS. Williams slugged 11 home runs for Vancouver in 2024 and had an .839 OPS.

The Blue Jays sent him to the Arizona Fall League, a league in October and November filled with promising prospects like Nick Kurtz in 2024 and Kevin McGonigle in 2025. The Iowa Meat Truck made the Fall Stars team, the AFL's equivalent of MLB All-Stars.

The Iowa Meat Truck was on the highway to the big leagues.

Williams began 2025 as the Blue Jays' 29th-ranked prospect, per MLB Pipeline. The Blue Jays assigned him to Double-A New Hampshire.

The Iowa Meat Truck stalled out, slashing just .217/.280/.353.

To put it kindly, Williams is a bat-first prospect. His defense is, shall we say, a work in progress, as you might guess from the nickname and build. He splits time between 1B and DH, but with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. locked in at first base, Williams' path to big-league playing time would be as a DH if George Springer does not stay with Toronto next season.

His 2025 season was so poor that he began 2026 back two rungs on the ladder in Single-A Dunedin. After just eight games, he was promoted to High-A Vancouver, and his passport got a Canadian stamp for the third season in four years. As a 25-year-old in High-A, Williams was now in the far right lane.

But the lefty-swinging Williams had worked on his mental game to stay more even-keeled when things went wrong. This helped him slug 11 home runs in Vancouver with an .824 OPS and earned him a promotion to Buffalo last week.

A Righty Masher

Williams has smoked righties with a triple slash of .289/.357/.535, which gets chopped to just .184/.340/.276 versus lefties. Williams hits the ball hard, as shown by his Statcast maximum exit velocity of 111.9 mph in Triple-A, which, if he were on the Blue Jays, would only trail Guerrero Jr. and Kazuma Okamoto, who holds the club rookie record for home runs, and the defensively challenged Jesus Sanchez.

Before being promoted, though, he was named the winner of a contest for the best nickname in the Minor Leagues. In an NCAA tournament-style bracket format of 32 nicknames called The Nickname Knockout, "The Iowa Meat Truck" bested such competitors as The Password (Jhosnyxton Garcia), Lord Tubbington (Jace LaViolette), The Tugboat (Matt Wilkinson, who is now in the Majors with the Giants, and Big Christmas (Johan Kenkensy Noel).

Despite winning the Nickname Contest, not all his teammates use the nickname; many in the organization prefer P-Willy.

As a left-handed slugger, Williams has drawn comparisons to a past Blue Jays slugger, Rowdy Tellez, but with just a .636 OPS so far in Buffalo, he has work to do to match the 21 home runs Tellez hit with the Blue Jays in 2019 (123 HRs for his career). Tellez is currently in Triple-A with the Braves.

As a righty-mashing DH type, Williams' path to the majors is a narrow one.

But if the whole baseball thing doesn't work out, Rowdy and The Iowa Meat would make quite the tag team in WWE.