Video: Matt Wallner's future In The Twins Lineup

[Destination The Show]

Matt Wallner had one of the most bizarre seasons for a power hitter in recent memory. What changes will he be making this off-season to improve upon his swing and hit pitches faster than 95 MPH?

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[ashbury]

Wallner is the player I have the highest hopes will gain from a new hitting coach's perspective.  You didn't touch on what bothers me about Wallner's 2025, and really his entire career stats - something I've posted in another thread and I'll rephrase here. 

Normally I take at face value the conventional modern stats like OPS (which WAR derives from), because across the majors it correlates very well with the actual goal of scoring runs, - which of course correlates well with winning ballgames during the season - and which correlates with winning a championship.  Wallner's actual run and RBI totals have always seemed low compared to his rate stats, and some have pointed to fewer opportunities with men on base and so forth as an explanation.

But when sifting through the "Splits" page for Wallner on baseball-reference.com, I noticed a real outlier.  When the ballgame is tight, like tied or with a one-run lead for either side, Wallner's OPS is down in the .600s for 2025.  When the game is not close - a lead of at least 4 for either side - his OPS zooms up above 1.100.  This general pattern has shown up fairly consistently through his short career so far - it's not a one-year blip that I'd more easily dismiss.  League-wide there is a slight uptick in hitting performance during garbage time - it stands to reason - but nothing remotely this wide.

Pitchers have the right to alter their approach depending on game situations.  It's up to the batter to adjust accordingly.  My take is that somehow Wallner is not adjusting effectively.  When the pitcher's incentive is to just get the game over with (win or lose), and let's say throws more strikes if I want to oversimplify, Wallner's in his element.  But in the situations where the game hangs in the balance, somehow he's either going for a pitcher's pitch rather than one he can do something with, or he's waiting for a mistake pitch that (at the MLB level) rarely happens, or he's not using tactics like going opposite field when that's all the pitcher's giving him.

So I can only repeat what I said in the first paragraph.  I hope the coaches can sit down with him and talk about what his approach has been and what maybe can be simplified, or maybe be adjusted, to correct this imbalance (the part at the low end of acceptable, obviously).  Because at present, his high OPS doesn't turn into runs, corroborated by his Win Probability Added which doesn't  turn into contributions to wins the way his WAR would suggest.

You led off asking why some people "hate" Wallner.  I can't speak for others but I suspect it's not hatred so much as a feeling of disconnect between his numbers and the eye-test when watching games.