Tulowitzki out to reverse shaky start

By Jack Etkin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published June 19, 2008 at 1:10 p.m.

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Brian Lehmann © The Rocky

Troy Tulowitzki has been activated for Friday's game against the New York Mets. He has been out since April 29 with a quadriceps injury.

Chris Schneider / The Rocky

Rockies shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, coming off a spectacular rookie year, was hitting only .152 when he was sidelined April 29.

Lenny Ignelzi / Associated Press

David Wright says he concerns himself more with meeting his own expectations than those put on him by others.

Jeffrey Phelps / Associated Press

Ryan Braun, who is having a strong season after a slow start, says he might have tried too hard at the start of the year.

The grind happily should begin again tonight for shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, as well as the resumption of a curious subplot.

When he left the Rockies lineup because of a quadriceps injury April 29, Tulowitzki was dealing with a challenge, one any young player would welcome and one easily boiled down to three words:

Do it again.

Coming off a superb rookie season, Tulowitzki was struggling when he was injured. He was hitting .152 in 105 at-bats. That's a limited body of work, to be sure, far from definitive and still easy to overcome with so many games remaining.

Tulowitzki admitted he might have been trying too hard and welcomed a break, albeit not one of seven weeks, to regroup mentally. He had set the bar exceedingly high this season by hitting .291 last year with 24 home runs and 99 RBI, by playing Gold Glove-caliber defense and by becoming an assertive force in the clubhouse.

Tulowitzki entered 2007 with 25 games of major league experience and, hence, little in the way of outside expectations. The situation is much different this season, although he said the expectations that were ratcheted up exponentially after last season were nothing he felt.

"If anything, I want to be a good player myself," Tulowitzki said. "I don't really care what other people think. I think I'm harder on myself than anybody, so I wanted to be the same player, if not better."

The ground Tulowitzki, 23, will cover this season is ground third baseman David Wright of the New York Mets, who begin a series tonight at Coors Field, knows very well.

Wright, 25, made his major league debut shortly after the 2004 All-Star Game and hit .293 with 14 homers and 40 RBI in 69 games.

In his first full season, Wright hit .306 with 27 homers and 102 RBI in 2005 and repeated his success by hitting .311 with 26

homers and 116 RBI in 2006. He made the National League All-Star team that year and in 2007, when he also won a Gold Glove.

"For me, pressure is what you expect of yourself and pressure is what you put on yourself," Wright said. "It's a big difference between adding extra pressure to yourself and just being confident in what you can do.

"As a young player, once you come up and you prove you can do something, there's going to be enough outside pressure on you to go out there and do it again. I think you just have to go out there and just bring that same philosophy - don't let others' expectations prohibit you from going out there and just continuing to develop slowly but surely."

That's far from easy, Wright said, when a young player bases his development solely on his statistics. In the case of a slow start, every at-bat brings big-as-the- eye-can-see numbers on a scoreboard that are far from a source of pride and can lead to worse things.

"If you go out there and strike out your first at-bat, all of a sudden, you're thinking to yourself, 'Oh, man, I have to go 5-for-5 today to get back to .250,' or something like that," Wright said. "If you don't get that first hit, you can be mentally defeated.

"I think when young players start trying to look at their numbers and judge how the development is going based on the numbers they put up, that's where you get caught. Because there's been times where I've felt great and felt like I've learned a lot but made some errors. And maybe my numbers weren't as good as the week before, but I felt good and I felt like I was getting that development."

The solution, Wright said, is to resort to a cliche and think of one at-bat at a time, knowing that a pattern with more good at-bats than bad "will get you back on the right track."

Numbers suggest left fielder Ryan Braun of the Milwaukee Brewers has been on track all season after narrowly beating Tulowitzki last year in voting for the NL Rookie of the Year Award despite defense so bad at third base, the Brewers moved him off that position and into left field.

Braun made his major league debut May 25 last year and finished with a .324 average, 34 homers and 97 RBI. He's hitting .291 with 20 homers and 55 RBI this season, having recovered from a 3-for-25 slide that dropped him to .226 after 11 games.

"I think at the beginning of the year, I felt myself trying to do too much to live up to the lofty standards I set for myself last year," Braun said. "And I think just being competitive, it's difficult not to approach it that way. It's not something that I tried to do, but subconsciously, I felt myself at times trying to do too much. It's definitely difficult.

"I think I was maybe in denial a little bit at the beginning that I was trying to do too much. But I'd look at my at-bats after a game and realize that I was swinging too hard or trying to do too much."

Dealing with these challenges, which can be frustrating and painstaking, will be a pleasure for Tulowitzki after his lengthy absence.

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