FORT MYERS, Fla. — For months last offseason, Ryan Jeffers would hit at home in North Carolina, send the video off to hitting coach David Popkins and then hop on a FaceTime with him later that night. The duo were working to rebuild the catcher’s swing, starting from the ground up. The process was, more or less, trial and error.

“We started with different set-ups, lots of different swings, lots of different upper-half moves, different lower-half moves, to kind of go process of elimination, like ‘Hey, we’ve pretty much tried everything. What are we going to settle on?’ ” Jeffers said.

The work continued into last spring, and it wasn’t until really halfway through last season that everything finally fell into place for Jeffers. At the end of May, Jeffers hit a home run at 117.4 miles per hour, the hardest-hit ball by a Twin tracked by Statcast. In that series, he finally felt he had found what he had been searching for.

A year removed from that process, things are feeling even better for Jeffers at the plate as the muscle memory sinks in and, in a small spring training sample size, he has been getting the results to prove it. Jeffers, who went 2 for 3 in the Twins’ 8-3 loss to the Baltimore Orioles at Hammond Stadium on Sunday, is now hitting .360 with a 1.225 OPS on the spring. Four of his nine hits have been home runs, a category in which he leads the team.

“This spring training, I feel 10 times better than I did in the season last year because I’ve done it so much more,” Jeffers said. “Now, the little changes that we might do are a tiny tweak here or a little tweak there.”

While the Twins split playing time between their catchers during the regular season, Jeffers wound up catching all six playoff games because the Twins valued his bat in the lineup. In the first half of the season, Jeffers hit .256/.357/.421 with a .778 OPS. The second half? .294/.379/.549 with a .928 OPS. He finished the season with a 134 OPS+, a number that is 34 percent higher than the league-average.

That kind of production put him among the top tier of catchers offensively last season — and the Twins are hoping for more this season.

“He looks comfortable. … Even getting to two strikes and kind of battling, putting balls in play instead of swinging and missing, there’s just a lot of good, small signs that he gives off that he’s in a good spot right now,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “He’s turning into a really nice player.”

Paddack to stay back

When the Twins open the season in Kansas City later this week, starter Chris Paddack will be back in Fort Myers getting in his final work of the spring. The Twins will be very careful in how they handle Paddack, who is coming off his second Tommy John surgery, and his workload.

“I know we talked about saving some innings,” Paddack said. “This is going to be a perfect example of maybe being on the back end of the rotation to save a start, I guess you could say.”

Briefly

The Twins will head to North Port on Monday for their final road trip of spring training. Bailey Ober will get the ball to start the game. … Third baseman Royce Lewis went 2 for 2 on Sunday. … Joe Ryan went five innings and gave up two runs while striking out five in his last tune-up of the spring.