Twins utilityman Austin Martin goes back to playing like ... well, Austin Martin

Matt Wallner has at least 5 inches and perhaps 40 pounds on his Twins teammate Austin Martin. The two outfielders look and play nothing like each other.

So why, Martin wondered last offseason, was he trying to imitate the slugging Wallner at the plate?

“As you’re coming up, you’re being taught launch angles and stuff, and you want to use what you’ve learned,” Martin said. But when he made the Twins roster during spring training in 2024, “I just didn’t feel athletic in the box anymore. I was too concentrated on being mechanical. I’d be in the box thinking about how I’m planting my back leg and turning my hip and stuff like that in order to try to be more of a power hitter. I was trying to be something that I’m not.”

That changed last winter, following a disappointing rookie year in which the former Vanderbilt All-SEC star, second baseman on the Commodores’ 2019 College World Series champion — he batted .392 during the title season — produced a subpar .670 OPS in 93 games for the Twins, and started only occasionally for three months in the middle of the season.

“The biggest thing was, I got too far away in one direction. I tried to do what I was told, and it didn’t work for me,” Martin said. “Once I got a better understanding of that, I started having the kind of success that I wanted. Since I made that transition, it’s been night and day.”

The transition started when he went home to Florida last winter and decided to become someone completely different: Himself.

“I worked a lot on my swing and tried to revamp it, tried to make it feel more like myself. Just get back to using my athleticism,” Martin said. “I’ve been searching for a long time, just to kind of feel like myself in the box. It started in the offseason, and I was really feeling good this spring about the work I had done.”

And this time, he looked like the Austin Martin the Twins traded for back in 2021.

“The competitiveness of his at-bats, it’s pretty great right now. He’s not chasing anything out of the zone. He’s barreling stuff up in the zone. He’s running the bases well,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said Monday. “He tagged up on a shallow fly ball to score — that’s a huge add-on run for us. His athleticism really showed up on that play and his aggressiveness, as well.”

The numbers bear it out. Martin is barreling up the ball more than four times as often this year as last. His chase percentage on pitches out of the strike zone has fallen to just 14.6%, lowest on the team. He has almost walked as many times this year (16) as last (20), in fewer than half the number of games played. He also swings and misses less often than any other Twin, and his strikeout rate has fallen to 16.1%, well below league average.

Martin has started 24 games since rejoining the team, which he believes explains his current hot streak: he’s batting .372 with a .500 on-base percentage since Aug. 25.

“It just has mostly to do with consistency and playing time and reps. I always felt I was capable of performing at this level — it was just a matter of getting the opportunity,” the 26-year-old Martin said. “I mean, it would be hard to face [rookie-level Florida Camp League] pitchers if you only played once a week, and we’re up here facing the best pitchers in the world.”