Wallner's hard work has him finding '23 form right on time

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- When it comes to Matt Wallner’s rough Spring Training, it’s not about how he started, it’s about how he finished.

Don’t look at Wallner’s surface stats, because they certainly haven’t been pretty. He entered the final day of Spring Training having gone 4-for-37 (.108) in Grapefruit League play with a .506 OPS -- and until he had hits in consecutive games on March 21 and 23, those numbers were even less flattering.

But it’s that last week of games -- including a homer and a deep, deep flyout against the Red Sox last Saturday, then a monster 451-foot blast in Minnesota’s 9-6 victory over Atlanta on Tuesday afternoon -- that the Twins point to as an indication of where they feel Wallner is at, with that kind of contact much more representative of the player who helped carry their offense down the stretch last season.

“I think our group is really pleased with the way he's coming around right now,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “You want guys to come into form towards the end of camp, not at the beginning of camp. So I think he's in that category of being in good shape for the season.”

Wallner professes that he’s always been a bit of a slow starter, and the hope this year is that they got it out of the way in Spring Training, at least, before the games started to matter. At the start of camp, things just didn’t feel right -- his bat was slow, his hips were slow and everything just felt behind, Wallner said.

There weren’t necessarily glaring mechanical issues, Wallner said, as he ultimately doesn’t try to tweak too much about his stance and swing aside from perhaps widening and narrowing his feet a small bit based on how he feels on any given day.

Wallner said it was more about the approach -- he wasn’t striking out very much at the start of spring, but he couldn’t make the solid contact he did when he was at his best in last season’s second half, wresting control of a starting job in the corner outfield by hitting .249/.370/.507 with 14 homers in 76 games, the sixth-best slugging percentage by a rookie in Twins history.

“You're kind of in-between,” Wallner said. “I was never going to get the fastball, but also [I was] not sitting back enough to drive the breaking ball, so I wasn't really swinging and missing, really. It was just soft, weak contact.”

But the one thing the Twins can always count on with Wallner is that he’ll grind the long hours in the cage to find that feel again.

Wallner is notorious for how much he likes to swing in the batting cages and work on his hitting, and he responded to this challenge as he always does -- by hitting and hitting and hitting. Baldelli estimates that nobody in camp took as many at-bats as Wallner did this spring, and Wallner said he perhaps got up to 400 swings one day in the cage.

Wallner said he wasn’t necessarily worried about his roster situation -- Baldelli has always been very open about how Spring Training counting stats mean nothing to him -- but the lack of results did get to the 26-year-old.

“I was more just frustrated with myself, probably hitting a little bit too much at times because of that,” Wallner added. “I don't think it was necessarily a worry, but I knew what I was doing wrong, and I wasn't fixing it, so that was frustrating. I got a little bit too caught up in that when it's just Spring Training.”

“We try to do a good job of keeping him kind of level and try to relieve some of the anxiety that he was feeling early in the spring,” Baldelli said, “because he’s going to have many other experiences in this game that probably deserve a lot more stress than this one.”

But just in time, Wallner says he feels as close to the version of himself that he was late last season as he has at any point this spring -- and all that matters is what he does when the season begins on Thursday.

“I think I'm getting close to where that is, for sure,” Wallner said. “See the light at the end of the tunnel, for sure. I really do feel good. But yeah, a couple of weeks ago, pretty different.”