DENVER — The bases were still 60 feet apart the last time Bryce Eldridge let his emotions get the best of him in baseball. He was 9 or 10 years old, he was on the mound in the Little League All-Star regional finals, and things didn’t go well.
“I completely broke down because I didn’t play well and we lost,” Eldridge recalled in an interview with the California Post. “For lack of a better word, I was acting up on the field. That was something that stuck with me. I was so embarrassed. My dad tore me apart. Learning moments when you were younger changes how you are now, you know?”
That doesn’t mean he’s still frustrated.
In fact, this final stretch at the plate came to him. Even if it doesn’t appear.
“He’s so calm, you never see him throw a bat or go crazy,” raved outfielder Heliot Ramos, who went through the same adjustments in the major leagues that Eldridge is going through now. “It’s a mental battle… I think he feels it [frustrated] Because in the end we are human. “But he has good control over his emotions.”
It’s in every opposition scouting report nowadays: Eldridge can hit the fastball. He lays off early breaking balls. Pitchers are getting ahead of him with soft stuff in the strike zone, putting him in a hole — and one of the longest slumps of his young career.
Entering Saturday’s game against the Rockies at Coors Field, it had been five games since Eldridge last took a walk, remarkably his longest to date. Dating back to his last homer, 12 games ago, he is batting .163 (7-for-43) with a .475 OPS.
He struck out 16 times in that span, the same number he had over his previous 23 games.
However, Eldridge would soon make an adjustment and regain the upper hand.
“It’s a fun little cat-and-mouse game,” hitting coach Hunter Means told The Post. “The more things they start to influence you, the more you have to start to understand how they’re going to do things. … He’s smart enough and savvy enough to figure that out.”
Still more than three months away from his 22nd birthday, Eldridge is so mature, mentally and physically, that Mincey has to remind himself of his relative inexperience — perhaps closer to that embarrassing moment in Little League than the end of his playing career.
“I catch myself sometimes, like maybe I should have that conversation because maybe he doesn’t know,” Mincey said. “Sometimes, we coaches feel stupid for having conversations, because they probably know.”
One of the new things for Eldridge this year is analyzing shooters’ offensive plans against him. Before every at-bat, now, he consults with Mincey in the dugout.
“I went up to Hunter and said, ‘What did you get?’ “He’ll just tell me how he set me up earlier and what he’s going to try to make of it,” Eldridge said. “Every time I go there, he’s sitting there. I like to have that reminder so I can mentally put it in my plan box.”
Lately, break throws and extra speed have come up a lot.
In May, Eldridge’s first month in the major leagues, he saw fastballs on 51.6% of his pitches. In June, this percentage dropped to 47.1%, with an almost equal amount of curves and skiers (41.6%).
Lately, the majority of the few fastballs he has seen have been in the zone. He fell into pitchers’ traps of adjusting his eye level, and swinging at subsequent breaking balls that started in the same place and raced down the strike zone.
“There’s a lot of off-speed, there’s not a lot of challenge heaters,” the 6-foot-7 first baseman said. “I think it was just a combination of slow things trying to push me down, which is what I’ve unfortunately been doing a lot of lately — backing away from. I think that’s why I’ve been slow in my results.”
In these past three games against the Diamondbacks, things have reached a breaking point. He didn’t ask many other hitters on the team for advice but decided to consult the Giants’ left-handed hitting first baseman who also broke into the major leagues at a young age.
“There were a lot of at-bats where I was really frustrated, so I said to myself, ‘What’ve you got me, Ravi?'” Eldridge said, referring to Rafael Devers, who was 20 when he made his debut with the Red Sox. “He told me, ‘You’ve just got to move in the zone. Dance with the pitchers. Stay in the rhythm. Keep fighting. You’ve got a lot of at-bats. There’s a lot of games you can play,'” Eldridge said.
In these recent games that affected Eldridge, most of the 25 heaters he saw were either outside the strike zone or plated in the corners. The other 29 pitches were slow and curved.
He went 1-for-5 in the final series, pounced on a first-pitch knuckle curve from Zach Gallen but bombed it to the ground. Jalen gave him two fastballs the next over but both were on the boundary and he went down looking down. The next time, Gallen had him look at another borderline fastball for strike two, which sent him swinging at a knuckle curve in the dirt.
He missed it but then was bluffed by looking at a low changeup for strike three.
Then he went down on three pitches in his final at-bat to hit the third triple of his career.
Despite the Giants getting their first win in nine tries against Arizona, Eldridge was upset.
“I was just concerned about how I felt, which was selfish of me,” Eldridge said.
But he didn’t allow himself to show it like he did on a Little League field in suburban Northern Virginia, a little more than a decade ago. He’s got the job.
“I still remember that to this day,” Eldridge said. “I will never show that kind of emotion on the field again.”