For the first time in his life, Matt Gorski didn’t know what to do on the baseball field.

Gorski was a star in baseball and soccer in high school at Hamilton Southeastern, a kid with the kind of raw power that makes pitchers tremble and scouts drool. He once hit two grand slams in a game, the second traveling over 400 feet. In a game at Noblesville he launched one that landed in the bed of a pickup truck on Highway 32. The Royals’ bunt coverages went through him, the second baseman, rather than the corner infielders because, with his 6-4 frame rapidly filling out, he was the most athletic player on the team.

He then moved onto Indiana University, where he hit .306 with 24 home runs as a three-year starter before getting drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2019.

Yet here he was on the High-A Greensboro Grasshoppers, hitting .224 and striking out more often than he reached base in a slog of a 2021 season.

It all left Gorski searching for answers. He had never truly struggled in a lifetime of playing baseball. He didn’t know how to escape the seemingly endless slump in which he was mired, or how to handle failure in an arena that had always come easily to him. As the strikeouts added up, so did the frustration, the self-criticism to teammates and coaches, and the unanswered questions.

After his 2021 season mercifully came to an end, he headed to the Pirates’ spring training facility in Bradenton, Florida, for the organization’s annual GBAP (Get Better at Baseball) Camp. Prospects like Gorski were ideal candidates for the camp: Highly drafted, high potential players who had struggled to put it together professionally.

A year and more than a few adjustments later, Gorski has a new swing and a new approach, which has led to his old success. He started this season in Greensboro, where he hit .294 with 17 homers in 37 games. He hit three in his last game with the Grasshoppers on May 22. On May 24, he hit another in his first game with Double-A Altoona and has four more since. It’s the result of a busy offseason, one that took place in three states and led to a litany of changes, both physically and mentally.

“It was kind of difficult in the offseason because you’re not facing a bunch of live pitching,” he said. “It’s mostly off of just BP throwers, so you’re getting a lot of good results, but you always have it in the back of your mind that it may not work when you get in game situations, but then spring training came around. I felt super comfortable. I was seeing the ball really well. I was hitting really well. So yeah, it took a little bit of an adjustment period and getting confident with it, but it definitely has worked out for me this year.”

Upon arriving at the GBAP Camp, Gorski sat down with hitting coach Blake Butler, who had been in Greensboro with him that season and now works for the Altoona Curve. Butler pulled up video of Gorski from when he was doing well, and when he wasn’t. The two studied the video and came up with a laundry list of things that needed correcting: Gorski crushed pitches in the middle of the zone, but struggled to adjust to anything high or low. His barrel entered and left the zone too quickly, which made adjusting to offspeed pitches a challenge. He didn’t keep his back leg stable enough.

“His swing didn’t have a ton of adjustability,” Butler said. “It was kind of a one-way swing. We really worked hard to be able to allow his barrel to work to where he could get to multiple pitches and different pitch heights so he could show the consistency that he’s shown so far this year.”

Gorski took it in stride as he worked with Butler and the other coaches at the camp. Making changes and taking coaching was always something Gorski was willing to do, even good at, at higher points of his career. In college, IU coach Jeff Mercer noticed that he rarely had to tell Gorski anything twice. Any suggestion he had — a tweak to his swing, changing footwork in the outfield — the slugger implemented it. Gorski didn’t have to go through a process of implementing changes so much as he could simply do it.

But the adjustments in Bradenton were bigger and more complex, so Butler ran Gorski through a series of drills, all designed to fix a different part of his swing. Gorski took batting practice using an open stance to force himself to keep his back leg quiet. Other times Butler made him start with his hands over his front shoulder, where his swing ended. Gorski then had to pull his hands back to the starting position to swing in an effort to improve his plate coverage. Sometimes he hit with a fungo bat. The fungos, smaller and more fragile than regular bats, shattered if he didn’t perfectly square up the ball.

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That was Gorski’s life in October: three to four hours every day on the field and in the cage, trying to become the titan he once was, the clear-minded slugger who hit homers onto highways and rarely fell into slumps.

Off the field, he worked with the Pirates’ mental training coaches. He learned to embrace the cliche that baseball is a game of failure, and that a bad at bat or game didn’t need to spiral, couldn’t spiral if he was going to find consistent success.

“You get a lot of opportunities to get back and play your best baseball,” he said. “It’s a game that you play six days a week. If you have a bad game, you don’t always dwell on that forever. You can come back the next day and play well. So it’s just flushing things and getting onto the next pitch.”

After a stop back in Indiana, Gorski went south again to Houston to work out at a facility called Dynamic Sports Training. His teammate Jared Triola trained there often, as did Pirates third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes, among others.

Days were the same in Houston: Gorski would wake up around 7:30 a.m. and head to the facility for a 90-minute workout. After that it was time to hit for an hour, repeating the changes he made in Florida until they became second nature, followed by half an hour of fielding.

All the while, he kept working at the intangible part of the game that had once been his strength. He picked the brains of other players, learning about their approaches at the plate, and found them to be more analytical. Those who found success in the Major Leagues, like Hayes, were more selective. They come to the plate looking for a particular pitch rather than just reacting to what the pitcher throws.

In high school and college, Gorski had been a heady but instinctive player. If the ball was in the strike zone, he swung at it. That way of thinking worked when he was younger, but professional pitchers are more capable of attacking corners and leaving less over the plate. It led to weak contact early in counts. So he decided to be less aggressive. It was like a micro version of his attitude of accepting that failure will happen sometimes.

“It’s always about getting your pitch,” Gorski said. “It’s not always about just putting the ball in play. It’s OK to strike out. It’s OK to not swing at pitches in the zone if they’re not your pitch.”

Back in Bradenton, this time for spring training, it was time to put all of the adjustments into action. Gorski had the same athletic frame, but was armed with a treasure trove of knowledge from the winter. Keep the back leg stable. Stay through the ball. Don’t swing at a pitch that isn’t yours. Even if it’s in the zone, take it and force the pitcher to throw it again.

Between Greensboro and Altoona, Gorski is hitting .289 with 22 homers in 2022. He’s cut down on his strikeouts, although he still has the relatively high rate associated with a power hitter. But he handles those punchouts differently. Each no longer comes with a wave of frustration and self-doubt. He handles them like a player accustomed to being the best on the field.

“He’s still the same, cares a lot, cares about his teammates, but you just don’t seem him quite be as big a critic of himself this year,” Butler said. “Maybe a critic of himself, but he’s definitely not being as hard on himself. He’s still holding himself to a high standard, but he’s able to bounce back after a strikeout. He knows he’s a good hitter now, which is awesome to see.”