LAGUNA HILLS, Calif. — On Sept. 5, 2014, at Coors Field, Tyler Matzek pitched a three-hit shutout against the San Diego Padres. Poised and confident, and throwing a 94 mph fastball with graceful ease, the Rockies’ rookie left-hander was dominant. Over his final six starts, Matzek went 4-2 with a 1.55 ERA. He looked like the Rockies’ ace of the future.

Yet demons lurked in the corners of Matzek’s mind, and by the time he took the mound for the Rockies’ 2015 home opener April 10, he was headed for trouble.

“Even when things were going the right way, there was this overwhelming stress inside me that just kept building and building and building,” Matzek said recently while sipping coffee at a Starbucks in Southern California. “(Then) I just couldn’t hold that stress any longer and my game collapsed.”

Matzek was suffering from performance anxiety.

It wrecked him on the mound and even began to creep into his everyday life.

“My wife, Lauren, said it was our worst time, relationship-wise, because I was so tight, so stressed, just waiting to explode from this thing,” Matzek said. “She knew it wasn’t about her, but it was hard.”

But the quiet, intelligent 25-year-old confronted his condition head on, confident he will fulfill the promise that prompted the Rockies to make him the 11th pick in the first round of the 2009 draft. He is determined to compete for a job in the Rockies’ starting rotation in spring training.

“I look at it like this: Sure, I had a few bad months, but in the grand scheme of things it’s not that big a deal,” he said. “I don’t think this is going to define me by any means.”

Twenty-six days after the home opener against the Cubs, it was clear Matzek was in a downward spiral. Pitching against Arizona, he walked six in two innings, throwing just 20 strikes in 58 pitches. Subsequently sent down to Triple-A Albuquerque to regroup, Matzek crash landed, giving up seven hits and seven walks while recording only three outs.

Where once he fired the ball to the plate with conviction and precision, now his mechanics were a mess and he was slinging the ball across his body and behind hitters’ backs.

“I look back at (the home opener) and see that it wasn’t a bad start, but I felt miserable afterward,” he said. “I felt like a failure. … It became pitch-by-pitch anxiety and then it was overall anxiety. Now it was there leading up to the games.”

“Used to be taboo”

As defined by the National Institute of Mental Health, anxiety disorder is an umbrella term for an array of emotional ailments that annually affect about 40 million American adults — filling them with uncertainty and fearfulness.

Baseball players are not immune.

Zack Greinke, one of the best pitchers of his generation, walked away from baseball for two months in 2006 with what was diagnosed as social anxiety disorder. He received treatment and three years later won the American League Cy Young Award with the Kansas City Royals.

In June 2009, Cincinnati Reds slugger Joey Votto revealed publicly that he was battling depression and crippling anxiety that surfaced several months after the sudden death of his 52-year-old father, Joseph. Votto suffered from panic attacks that led to two hospital stays. He rebounded in 2010 to win the National League MVP award.

“Anxiety and the mental side of the game used to be taboo in the big leagues; nobody wanted to talk about it,” Rockies general manager Jeff Bridich said. “Now we realize that it’s part of the game and we address it in a more organized way.”

Now, every major-league club is required to have a program to assist players with behavioral health issues. The Rockies previously employed Andy McKay, who joined them in September 2012 for a position they call “peak performance coordinator.” McKay left the Rockies in October to join the Seattle Mariners. The Rockies have not yet replaced him.

“Doubt and fear is something that virtually every ballplayer has to conquer,” Rockies manager Walt Weiss said. “I think in our sport, in particular, there is a fear of failure, because there is so much failure in baseball. Your confidence is tested on a daily basis.”

Negative self-critique

Matzek had suffered through bouts of wildness before. In 2011, pitching for High-A Modesto, he struggled with 46 walks in 33 innings, his ERA ballooning to 9.82. The Rockies sent him home to California, thinking it was best to remove him from competition. Matzek insists that rough patch was about bad mechanics and faltering confidence. Anxiety, he says, was not the root of his problem at that time.

Curiously, the fear and negative thoughts began rearing their ugly heads after his breakout rookie season with the Rockies.

“From the day the season ended, I started putting all of this stress on myself,” he recalled. “I told myself I had to become one of the best pitchers, one of the top 5 percent.”

Rather than building on his success, Matzek, who admits he over-processes things, started burying himself with a negative self-critique.

“At the end of ’14, I was thinking that my mechanics were as good as they were going to get,” he said. “I thought, ‘All I need to do is get better mentally and stronger physically.’ “

But as spring training neared, he realized his mechanics were “out of whack,” he said. When he turned an ankle during spring training, that added to the problem.

“Trust your stuff”

In her 2010 book, “Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To,” University of Chicago psychology professor Sian L. Beilock notes that when anxiety increases, experts can begin to think and perform like novices.

“Too much brain interference can make you choke,” Beilock writes.

For a pitcher, losing that natural feel on the mound leads to disaster. Lefty reliever Rex Brothers, traded by the Rockies to the Cubs two weeks ago, knows all about that. After a phenomenal 2013 season when he posted a 1.74 ERA and saved 19-of-21 games, he appeared to be the Rockies’ closer of the future. But he melted down in 2014 with a 5.59 ERA and spent most of the 2015 season in Triple-A.

“I had a couple of bad games, and then you start searching a little bit, when you probably shouldn’t,” Brothers said. “You need to trust the stuff that got you here and has worked for years. You go through swings where you hunt for answers, but the bottom line is you just have to trust your stuff.”

Weiss said there were signs during spring training that Matzek wasn’t quite right — an occasional lack of fastball command — but nothing overt.

Bridich admits the Rockies didn’t see Matzek’s meltdown coming until it was too late.

“I wish I could say that we did, and I wish we could turn back the clock and step in, but you can’t,” Bridich said.

And the fiercely competitive Matzek, trying to win a starting job, didn’t reach out for help. Instead, he gritted his teeth, worked though his ankle injury and made it though spring training. Weiss tabbed him to pitch the home opener against the Cubs.

It wasn’t a terrible outing: four innings, four hits and one run allowed, four strikeouts and three walks. Also, he hit Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo twice.

“From up in the stands, I could see Tyler wasn’t right,” said Ryan Johnson, Matzek’s half brother and close confidant. “He had no confidence in his pitches. When you are pitching at this level, you have to be at your best, and he had a C-minus game.”

Quite quickly, Matzek’s self-induced pressure began to escalate.

Removed from competition

According to Beilock, some people treat anxiety as a signal to perform at their best and others dwell on it as a sign of impending failure. Clearly, Matzek needed to find a way to handle his stress in a different manner.

After his disastrous outing in Triple-A, the Rockies removed Matzek from competition and he began working in side sessions with Mark Wiley, the Rockies’ director of pitching operations, pitching coordinator Doug Linton and McKay. Matzek also found his own sports anxiety specialist, and beginning in July, he began seeing him on a regular basis.

“He helped me with a program that has given me the tools that have helped me numb the anxiety,” said Matzek, who declined to reveal the name of the sports psychologist. “I can now take a situation that was a 10 and take it down to a two or three.”

According to Kristi Pikiewicz, a Boulder-based psychotherapist, anxiety sufferers need a game plan.

“The key to overcoming anxiety is having tools and techniques and knowing what the triggers are,” Pikiewicz said. “You have to be able to see yourself and find that sense of calm. It takes a lot of self-awareness.”

It also requires perspective.

“My specialist made me realize it wasn’t the end of the world, it wasn’t the end of my career,” said Matzek, who does not take medication to help alleviate his anxiety. “He said, ‘You are going through a rough three or four months. It happens to everybody in sports; yours is just a little rougher than somebody else. You still have 10 or 15 years left to play baseball. You’re only 25, so calm down, let’s fix this, let’s figure it out.”

Walt Weiss aware “it’s a battle”

Finding a lasting fix, however, is not easy.

“I’ve seen this before, and I know it’s a battle, so I’m not going to sugarcoat it,” said Weiss, who, during his playing days, saw pitchers Bruce Ruffin and Mark Wohlers battle wildness that was sparked by anxiety.

Matzek’s comeback started with a stutter. In three games last summer with the Single-A, short-season Boise Hawks, Matzek posted a 23.14 ERA and walked eight over 2 innings. But at the end of the season, he pitched out of the bullpen in 10 games for Albuquerque. On Sept. 3 he pitched two scoreless innings, struck out three, didn’t walk a batter and earned a save.

“I saw him come back, physically and mentally,” Albuquerque pitching coach Darryl Scott said. “There is no doubt in my mind that he can come back and be the pitcher he was, or even better.”

Matzek admits that he’s surprised, and grateful, that the Rockies have held on to him through his roller-coaster ride of a career.

Why did the Rockies stick with him?

“The first reason is an easy one. Everybody sees the talent he has,” Bridich said. “The second answer is that I am one of many people in this organization who believe in this guy. We have seen him grow from a teenager into a solid young man. Together we are going to work to make sure that all of this is just one chapter of a very long career.”

Matzek insists he’s eager, not anxious, to take the mound again when the Rockies report to spring training in mid-February.

“I don’t think it will be the whole, freak-out, paralyzing thing on the rubber again,” he said. “When I pitched (in Albuquerque) at the end of the season, I just said, ‘Let’s do this. Let me face as many batters as possible. Righties, lefties, I don’t care.’

“I just wanted to put my tools into practice. Two weeks in the bullpen wasn’t enough time to fix everything physically, but mentally I was all there.

“So now it’s time to fix the physical stuff, use the mental skills I have learned and go pitch well next year.”

Patrick Saunders: psaunders@denverpost.com or @psaundersdp

Matzek’s journey

Tyler Matzek’s career in professional baseball has been a roller-coaster ride of success and failure since the left-hander received a then-club record $3.9 million signing bonus from the Rockies in 2009 as the 11th pick of the MLB draft:

2010: The 19-year-old rookie shines at Single-A Asheville with 5-1 record and 2.92 ERA in 18 starts.

2011: Struggles at Asheville (4.36 ERA), incurs bouts of wildness at High-A Modesto (9.82 ERA), and is shut down for the rest of the season.

2012: Returns for a full season at Modesto, striking out 153 in 142 innings but walking 95.

2013: Pitching for Double-A Tulsa, goes 8-9 with 3.79 ERA and reduces his walks to 76 in 142 innings.

2014: After a strong performance in Triple-A, makes his big-league debut with the Rockies on June 11 against Atlanta. Finishes the season 6-11 with a 4.05 ERA in 19 starts. Pitches a three-hit shutout against San Diego on Sept. 5 at Coors Field.

2015: After early struggles with the Rockies, he is removed from competition as he battles control problems. Finishes the season in the bullpen with Triple-A Albuquerque.

Patrick Saunders, The Denver Post