The toughest critic for Twins outfielder Trevor Larnach is ... Trevor Larnach

MIAMI — It’s sort of fitting that Trevor Larnach was sitting at his locker Friday night, stewing over his 0-for-5 performance in the Twins’ 4-1 victory over the Tigers, while just down the hall, his manager was praising that same performance.

Good job? Bad job? Either way, Larnach just wants to do better. Always.

“This game will beat you up, for sure. I beat myself up a little tonight,” Larnach said when told of the contradiction between his opinion and Rocco Baldelli’s. “But you’ve got to [find] positives, because there’s a lot of failure.”

Or at least instances where he could do better. That’s how he saw his routine seventh-inning groundout to the second baseman that night, on a pitch he thought he should have hit harder and in the air. But it “was executed perfectly,” in Baldelli’s view, because by pulling the ball, Larnach allowed Byron Buxton to move from second to third base, setting up Willi Castro’s run-scoring squeeze bunt.

“I feel like I can do more than that. I hit the ball hard, [but] straight into the ground, and it happened to do the job,” Larnach said. “I’ll take the positive out of it, for sure. Anything to get the job done.”

Larnach has felt he can do more for a long time, he said, including during his five years in the major leagues. He’s worked hard to gradually overcome his weaknesses, yet he understands that fans are expecting more, too, from an NCAA champion and first-round draft pick. So finding those positives is important.

“I went 0-fer, but I hit a ball right at someone, super hard,” he said of a 104-mph fly ball to deep right-center with two runners on base. “Hit it a little to the left, or higher, or lower, or to the right, that’s two RBIs. It was a good at-bat, and that’s how I need to frame it in my mind.”

That’s certainly how Baldelli frames it. His trust in Larnach has risen so much that he bats the Oregon State alum among the top four hitters in the lineup nearly every game.

“We did that for a reason — because he has good, major league-quality at-bats on a consistent basis,” Baldelli said. “He’s a guy that you want coming up to the plate because you know he’s going to compete every single time. He barrels balls up.”

Not as often as Larnach would like, of course, but he has found more power this season. Larnach’s 12 home runs are second to Byron Buxton on the Twins, as are his 25 extra-base hits. His .746 OPS is near last year’s career high.

There’s little doubt what has changed: his ability to make contact with breaking pitches. Larnach has feasted on fastballs since arriving in the majors in 2021, with a career .287 average and 32 of his 47 career homers coming on heaters.

But when he puts something that’s not straight and fast in play? Larnach came into the season hitting .175 over his career, with three times as many strikeouts as hits.

Things have changed, however, most notably Larnach’s approach. At a time when most big leaguers are trying to pull the ball and hit it in the air, Larnach has adopted a whole-field strategy. By not trying to direct every ball toward right field, it gives him more time to see and recognize the pitch.

“He’s seeing the ball better, making better swing decisions because he’s not trying to yank every fastball, and he wasn’t out in front of stuff,” Baldelli said. “He was actually shooting fastballs really well to left-center field, and then he could compete better on the off-speed stuff. Those are adjustments he’s made to make himself a better offensive player.”

It’s working. Larnach is hitting .235 against non-fastballs this year, and seven of his dozen doubles have come on such pitches. He can see progress, and he sees a different hitter than he was five years ago.

“I find myself thinking about that a lot. It’s been an interesting journey for me,” Larnach said. “Learning from other guys and understanding what works for you— it’s been a heck of a journey, but I’m still learning.”

Learning what works took some unlearning of techniques he had used early in his career.

“When I was younger, they told me I needed to pull the ball more in the air to create power and produce more slug. You can do that, but what does it take away?” Larnach said he decided.

“When I did that, it took away my ability to go the other way. It took away my ability to put the ball in play more often. So what’s the give-and-take? For me, I need to work the other way and not swing as hard.”

The hardest part of this education? Even the game’s best hitters fail more than they succeed. It’s a baseball truism, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy way to live. Not if, like Larnach, you dwell on the failures more than the successes.

“You always want to do more. You want to do as much as you can because the game will take it right away,” Larnach said with a shrug. “It takes failure to learn all that.”