Twins players and coaches have noticed that Mitch Garver is a much different person than he was at the beginning of the season.
Garver is needling teammates, using self-deprecating humor and, most importantly, developing all-around skills as a catcher. He has found a comfort zone in working with pitchers, improved his footwork behind the plate, is making better contact with his bat and is more confident when explaining his gameplan for attacking opponents.
"It's just a learning curve," the 27-year-old catcher said.
The biggest lesson came when Garver learned to overcome his doubts.
Thrust into more playing time after Jason Castro suffered a season-ending knee injury in early May, Garver struggled with adjusting to the speed of the game. Some consider catcher the most vital position on the field, because it requires game-planning, handling the different personalities on a pitching staff, helping to control the running game and then finding a way produce offensively. In this day and age, you can add pitch framing to the desired skill sets.
And Garver made mistakes.
"There were early struggles," the New Mexico native said, "and people would let me hear about them, whether it would be the media or the staff or whatever. I had to wear that.
"There were doubts in my head. Like was I really ready for this? Should I even be here? Stuff like that. Once that went away, I [got off] Twitter and started caring less about what people thought, I started playing my game and I was fine."