Phegley tweaks his swing

MINNEAPOLIS — A major change to his approach at the plate has turned backup catcher Josh Phegley into a doubles machine.

On The Chronicle’s A’s Plus podcast, Phegley said that he and hitting coach Darren

Bush “just canned my approach,” eliminating as much extra movement as possible.

“You’re always practicing a swing — what’s really hard when you don’t get a lot of at-bats is loading and getting into a good hitting position,” said Phegley, who doubled in the sixth Sunday and has four doubles among his past five hits. “That’s the thing that goes out the door when you don’t play for four or five days. I could not repeat the same thing every day. It was just a battle. Talking to Bushy, he said, ‘The only way to get past this is to do something new.’

“So I basically just stand there and then do a simple move back and it gets me in a position to execute my swing a lot easier. We took out a ton of moving parts. It’s very logical. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long.”

“He’s very strong, so we just want to keep it as simple as we can so he has more accuracy,” Bush said. “When you’re not playing all the time, you need to be as simple as you can so your timing comes back as quickly as possible, so you can just put your hands to the ball.”

The A’s will add another catcher to the mix soon — with Phegley and Jonathan Lucroy both right-handed hitters, they’re likely to call up left-handed-hitting Beau Taylor when rosters expand Saturday. Onetime A’s starter

Bruce Maxwell is batting .220 with one homer in 48 games at Triple-A Nashville. Briefly: Emilio Pagan, sent down to Triple-A Nashville to make room for Sunday starter Chris Bassitt, was recalled when the A’s placed starter Sean Manaea on the disabled list . ... Stephen Piscotty had a three-hit day . ... Jed Lowrie is 9-for-21 (.429) during a sixgame hitting streak . ... Ramón

Laureano stole his third base since coming up Aug. 3, putting him No. 2 on the list of current A’s players.