FORT MYERS, Fla. -- Max Kepler needed to detach from baseball for a while.

Three full seasons have now passed since he was at his best in the batter’s box as part of his highly productive 2019 campaign, and he still has yet to recapture that form. That’s to say nothing of the fractured right pinky toe he played through after last July, and the overall pressure that took hold of the Twins’ clubhouse as injury after injury felled key players down the stretch of the season.

He needed to reset and come back mentally and physically fresh -- so he spent this offseason with his girlfriend in Paris, enjoying the culture and cuisine as his toe and physical condition fully recovered for a month and a half. The mental reset has him more confident and eager than ever as he enters camp following an offseason of uncertainty.

“Spend time with family, friends, loved ones,” Kepler said. “Travel. Eat good food. Read. Listen to music. Just the pleasures of life to balance out some of the struggles we go through in a year. We work so hard. I think we deserve to enjoy some things to take our minds off. It's a game of adversity.”

Kepler sees himself as an overthinker when it comes to his hitting, something he describes as a “never-ending project.” He prefers to simplify, and it was tough to do that at the end of last season when he was playing through the toe fracture, which made him more conscious of how he lifted his front leg in the swing and the load in his stance -- and how his on-again, off-again toe-tap sometimes stabilized.

He posted a .466 OPS with no homers in his final 109 plate appearances of the season, across 30 games playing through the toe fracture until his campaign ended on Sept. 11. Kepler finished 2022 with a career-worst .666 OPS for the season.

This year, he enters camp making a conscious effort to eliminate the toe tap and pick up the front foot. It should also help that, when he surveys the field, he’ll no longer see three infielders to the right of second base, as per the new rule changes limiting infield shifts. He figures that played into the overthinking, too.

“I talked to [Joey] Gallo yesterday, and we talked about like, you know, when you see three people occupying the side where your strength is, then you kind of try to play around it, whether it's going the other way, thinking about a bunt,” Kepler said. “It takes you away from your strength, you know? And so yeah, hopefully this year will be a game-changer for us.”

Kepler’s excellent batted ball metrics have always lagged behind his actual production, in large part due to his perennially low batting average on balls in play as the 20th-most shifted against batter in baseball in 2022. He said he hopes to be hitting the ball over the heads of the infielders, anyway -- but he’s also cognizant of the fact that he’s been hitting “too many fly balls that didn’t go anywhere” and thus compensated with a level swing that created too many ground balls.

A game-changing season for Kepler would certainly help his cause, as this is the final guaranteed year of his contract (the Twins hold a $10 million club option for 2024), and other left-handed slugging outfielders like Trevor Larnach and Matt Wallner are Major League-ready, without starting spots available for them in the crowded Twins outfield.

Kepler was also the subject of numerous trade rumors throughout the offseason, though a deal never came to fruition. He tried to tune that out, too, and focus on what remained in his control: A fresh mental start that he hopes will finally translate back to the field.

“I always think going through hard times, I think in the long run, those times make you better,” bench coach Jayce Tingler said. “They make you tougher going forward. I think the refresh button, the offseason, I think some of the new rule changes with the shift, I think that’s going to be refreshing for Max as well.”

“Success, I think, breeds success on a mental level in our game,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “We always talk about which comes first. No one knows the answer to that, whether it's the confidence or the success. I think they have to kind of go hand in hand in a lot of ways.”