Wallner's stats show he's a man of extremes

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It takes one look at the oak tree-like frame of Matt Wallner for it to become apparent that he’ll likely be a man of extremes on the diamond -- and that, he is.

Look at his Statcast page, and every metric pertaining to how hard somebody can hit a baseball -- that’s the realm of expected slugging, average exit velocity, barrel rate and bat speed -- is cranked all the way deep into the elite “red” section.

Meanwhile, the metrics pertaining to how often a player misses the baseball altogether -- that’s whiff rate and strikeout rate -- are cranked all the way to the bad, “blue” extreme.

But Wallner has put that paradoxical package together into perhaps the best hitting performance on the Twins this season, with a .273/.398/.558 slash line good for a .972 OPS entering Sunday -- and far from aiming to eliminate all that swing-and-miss and sky-high 37.3% strikeout rate, Wallner actually thinks it enhances his game, weirdly enough.

“Honestly, sometimes, I feel like when I strike out more, those are my best stretches,” Wallner said. “There's some times when I strike out way too much and I'm terrible, like at the beginning of the year. But when I'm hitting homers, I usually strike out more. I'm looking for pitches, being more aggressive. I obviously don't want to, but it's just how I flow, I guess.”

That’s a trade-off he’s willing to accept, because it has become clear that few people in the sport can do as much damage when actually hitting the baseball as Wallner.

By Statcast’s new bat speed metric, Wallner has the fourth-highest average bat speed in the Majors (minimum 200 swings), putting him in the rarefied territory of Giancarlo Stanton, Oneil Cruz, Jhonkensy Noel, Kyle Schwarber and Aaron Judge.

It’s simply beneficial for Wallner and the Twins for him to be using his “A” swing as often as possible, even if he misses the ball often while doing so, because when he does put the ball in play, he has a much higher chance than most of doing something very good with it -- something that’s been borne out by his results this season.

“Yeah, there's not many times where I'm just trying to touch the ball,” Wallner said. “It just doesn't work for me. I've tried it. I swing and miss just as much, if not more. I don't really have it. I can think of one swing since I've been here where I just tried to touch the ball, and I grounded out to second.”

It is a delicate balance, though, because the relatively inflexible nature of Wallner’s one swing means that his timing and pitch recognition need to be good -- and he pointed out that it was a poor timing mechanism with his front leg that caused him to be late constantly as he got off to his brutal 2-for-25 start to the season, which now seems like an eternity away.

And if his timing is off, perhaps he can just lean into the other hilarious extreme in his game -- his enormous affinity for getting hit by the pitch -- from which he’ll gladly take the boost to his on-base percentage.

“That's great,” Wallner said. “I love it.”