This story was excerpted from Do-Hyoung Park¡¯s Twins Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

It takes one look at the oak tree-like frame of Matt Wallner for it to become apparent that he¡¯ll likely be a man of extremes on the diamond -- and that, he is.

Look at his Statcast page, and every metric pertaining to how hard somebody can hit a baseball -- that¡¯s the realm of expected slugging, average exit velocity, barrel rate and bat speed -- is cranked all the way deep into the elite ¡°red¡± section.

Meanwhile, the metrics pertaining to how often a player misses the baseball altogether -- that¡¯s whiff rate and strikeout rate -- are cranked all the way to the bad, ¡°blue¡± extreme.

But Wallner has put that paradoxical package together into perhaps the best hitting performance on the Twins this season, with a .273/.398/.558 slash line good for a .972 OPS entering Sunday -- and far from aiming to eliminate all that swing-and-miss and sky-high 37.3% strikeout rate, Wallner actually thinks it enhances his game, weirdly enough.

¡°Honestly, sometimes, I feel like when I strike out more, those are my best stretches,¡± Wallner said. ¡°There's some times when I strike out way too much and I'm terrible, like at the beginning of the year. But when I'm hitting homers, I usually strike out more. I'm looking for pitches, being more aggressive. I obviously don't want to, but it's just how I flow, I guess.¡±

That¡¯s a trade-off he¡¯s willing to accept, because it has become clear that few people in the sport can do as much damage when actually hitting the baseball as Wallner.

By Statcast¡¯s new bat speed metric, Wallner has the fourth-highest average bat speed in the Majors (minimum 200 swings), putting him in the rarefied territory of Giancarlo Stanton, Oneil Cruz, Jhonkensy Noel, Kyle Schwarber and Aaron Judge.

It¡¯s simply beneficial for Wallner and the Twins for him to be using his ¡°A¡± swing as often as possible, even if he misses the ball often while doing so, because when he does put the ball in play, he has a much higher chance than most of doing something very good with it -- something that¡¯s been borne out by his results this season.

¡°Yeah, there's not many times where I'm just trying to touch the ball,¡± Wallner said. ¡°It just doesn't work for me. I've tried it. I swing and miss just as much, if not more. I don't really have it. I can think of one swing since I've been here where I just tried to touch the ball, and I grounded out to second.¡±

It is a delicate balance, though, because the relatively inflexible nature of Wallner¡¯s one swing means that his timing and pitch recognition need to be good -- and he pointed out that it was a poor timing mechanism with his front leg that caused him to be late constantly as he got off to his brutal 2-for-25 start to the season, which now seems like an eternity away.

And if his timing is off, perhaps he can just lean into the other hilarious extreme in his game -- his enormous affinity for getting hit by the pitch -- from which he¡¯ll gladly take the boost to his on-base percentage.

¡°That's great,¡± Wallner said. ¡°I love it.¡±