You meet a lot of people, work with a lot of coaches and see the game from a unique perspective while riding the backup catcher carousel around the big leagues — and that’s what Austin Wynns has been doing since he elected free agency and left the Orioles in the fall of 2021.

Not far into his journey around the big leagues, Wynns ended up in San Francisco, working with bullpen and catching coach Craig Albernaz — now the Orioles’ manager.

Wynns’ assessment of his time with the Giants, and Albernaz’s impact on his career, track with what we know about Albernaz and what the Orioles hope his influence will be here.

“In my career, at that time, he made me a better player and person, and just evolved the player that I am,” Wynns said. “He helped me out in catching, big time. There’s a lot of coaches out there, and Alby, he adapts to many players — that’s why he’s now a manager. He adapts to, here’s your weaknesses, here’s your strengths. He even puts the numbers in front of you and says, ‘We need to grind this out more.’ And we did.”

Wynns said Albernaz was the first coach he talked to after the June 2022 trade that sent him from the Philadelphia Phillies’ Triple-A affiliate in Lehigh Valley to the Giants (for Michael Plassmeyer, whose brother Mitch is the Orioles’ bullpen coach), and they struck up a quick relationship.

Albernaz told Wynns how excited he was to work with him, and Wynns — who considered himself an early arriver at the ballpark — always found Albernaz a step ahead of him. He’d be in the weight room “getting his pump on, getting after it,” when Wynns walked in, then be off to do his studying and game-planning.

“That’s my routine, too, but he does it way earlier than me,” Wynns said. “He beats me at it. He’s just always prepared, man. He’s always prepared.”

For Wynns, on an individual level, that means receiving not only the data about his developmental needs but the means to help him achieve them. At that time, increasing importance was being put on catchers’ pitch framing — their ability to present pitches as strikes and potentially influence the umpire’s call, both by keeping strikes in the zone and nudging outside offerings into it.

According to MLB’s Statcast data, Wynns didn’t score well on that when he was with the Orioles from 2018-21. His framing was worth minus-12 runs over 824 innings, according to BaseballSavant.com data, including minus-8 in 2021, his final season with the club. His shadow strike percentage — a metric tracking strikes called on the edges of the zone — that year was 42.9, second-lowest among big league catchers.

Albernaz and Wynns went to work on that and made meaningful strides in Wynns’ receiving, with Wynns adopting the knee-down catching style that has proliferated in the game. In 2022 with the Giants, Wynns’ framing was effectively neutral — worth 0 runs — and his shadow strike rate jumped to 47.7%, which was in the top half of qualified catchers.

Wynns attended Giants spring training in 2023 and worked with Albernaz. He played just one game for San Francisco that year before spending a few weeks with the Los Angeles Dodgers and the remainder of the season on and off the Colorado Rockies’ roster.

That season still ended up being his best behind the plate, at least according to publicly available metrics. His framing was worth 4 runs, with a 47.6% shadow strike rate, and he had his best throwing season.

“The receiving, the metrics, the numbers — he made me definitely level up myself, and my career, in the catching aspect,” Wynns said.

Given how the Orioles have operated, a manager who will lead the team’s coaching staff and has stories like this on his résumé feels like a fit. Albernaz said he welcomes “all the information” for him and his coaching staff to inform not only decisions during games but instruction.

That’s no different than how the Orioles operated under former manager Brandon Hyde and his staff, and Albernaz will have a wider set of responsibilities than just hammering home receiving drills with his catchers. But those successes, achieved through data-driven decision-making and instruction to help turn a deficiency for a player into a strength, feel unique to the coach behind them.

Wynns’ framing has been worth minus-1 run in each of the last two seasons, spent with the Cincinnati Reds and Oakland Athletics. If not for the gains he made working with Albernaz, Wynns’ career may not have lasted as long as it has.

As such, he recognizes the impact Albernaz had in their nearly 10 months together, and seeing the videos of Albernaz with his 2-year-old daughter, Gigi, at the manager’s introductory news conference last month felt authentic to the person Wynns got to know.

“He’s a family-oriented man,” Wynns said. “He’s humble, he has a good heart, and he cares. … He’s so loving and caring, and that will relate to everything he does.

“I couldn’t be more happy for him.”