ARLINGTON, Texas — Kevin Pillar and Justin Smoak are pretty tight. They both established themselves as Toronto Blue Jays regulars during the 2015 season, and they’ve been spending a great deal of time around each other ever since. This year, as Smoak’s broken out as one of MLB’s best first-half offensive performers, Pillar’s taken to jokingly pestering his good friend for advice.

“I’m always like, ‘Dude, teach me how to hit. Teach me how to hit,’” Pillar says. “And he’s like, ‘Kev, you know how to hit. I’m not going to teach you how to hit.’”

But in recent weeks, as Pillar has fallen into a deep funk at the plate, to the point that he was demoted from the Blue Jays’ leadoff spot on Wednesday, the conversations between the two have grown more serious. Pillar asked Smoak the other day, point blank, how do you deal with failure?

Smoak has seven years in the majors under his belt, and seven years in which many would say he underperformed his potential — or, less politely, failed. That’s 2,887 plate appearances of people thinking you haven’t been good enough. It wasn’t until 2017, Smoak’s age-30 season, that he became the .303/.364/.601, 20-homers-before-the-all-star break player that many thought he could be when he was once the top prospect in baseball.

Pillar, whose struggles to get on-base and be a top-of-the-lineup hitter throughout his career are well documented, watched what Smoak did and, just like everyone else, wanted to know his secret. As if there even is one.

“Smoakey swears to me the biggest thing is really just buying into approach, trusting the process, and trying to hit the ball hard,” Pillar says. “Not searching for the result, but searching for a good swing or a good pitch to hit. And just leaving it at that. The rest takes care of itself.”

Ballplayers call this mindset. And while it can sound nebulous or cliché or even a little hackneyed, there’s a reason it’s talked about so much. When you play a sport grounded in failure — no ballgame is complete until one team fails 27 times collectively — your head can get awfully messed up. And a few weeks ago, as Pillar really floundered at the plate, his numbers plummeting lower and lower with every out made, that’s what happened to the Blue Jays centre-fielder.

“I wasn’t seeing results, so I started looking for results,” Pillar says. “I thought something was wrong. I thought my swing didn’t work anymore. So, I started changing a lot of things that I was doing instead of just seeing it for what it was and riding the wave.”

He started those changes at the end of May, after following up a torrid .314/.369/.497 start over his first 169 plate appearances with a two-weeks-and-change stretch in which he hit .170/.228/.321 over 58 plate appearances. The results had changed dramatically. He figured something must have been wrong.

So, Pillar changed his stance in the batter’s box. Then he moved his hand positioning. He tried moving his swing up and then down. He stood taller. He tried to be narrower. He modified his set-up. He cycled through a litany of tweaks, shifts and adjustments until he didn’t even know who he was as a hitter any more. He abandoned all the elements to his swing and his plate approach that had given him so much success earlier in the season, furiously searching for the answer to his woes.

Compound that with the anxiety of struggling, the expectations of hitting in a premium batting order position, and the increasing frustration with every out made, and Pillar got himself into a pretty bad spot. Smoak attributes much of his success this year to viewing each plate appearance in a vacuum, and not stepping into the batter’s box thinking about what happened last time, or the issues with his mechanics, or how badly he needed a hit. Pillar was doing the complete opposite.

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“When things were going well, I was always looking forward to my next at-bat. Whether it was a hit or not. If I didn’t get on base, I didn’t worry about it. I just took that as information on how they were trying to get me out, and used it in my next at-bat,” Pillar says. “But when you’re struggling, sometimes those at-bats kind of creep up on you. And you’re like, s—, I’ve gotta go hit again. You’re still thinking about the last one. You’re not feeling real good. And that’s not a good place to be.”

Pillar knows now that the answer to his struggles was not to change anything. Like Smoak told him, he just needed to trust what he was doing, trust that slumps happen, and trust that the results would return if he stayed within his approach. Now, weeks later, Pillar’s begun the process of undoing all those changes he made, and trying to relearn the things he did at the plate that made him so successful over the season’s first six weeks.

“I have teammates and hitting coaches around me that I have a lot of trust in. If they’re seeing an issue mechanically, they’ll let me know. And then I can go out and make the change,” Pillar says. “But I was making changes with no reason for them. Just because I was looking for results. So, now I’m really just backtracking — trying to find where I was at earlier on in the year.”

It’s a difficult, humbling process. No one likes to admit they made a mistake. But as he’s started reverted all the changes he made, and slowly retracing his steps, things have been getting better.

Take Tuesday’s game versus the Texas Rangers, Pillar’s final night as Toronto’s leadoff hitter. He led off the game by working a 3-1 count, getting a very good pitch to hit, and driving a ball very hard (97-m.p.h. off his bat) and very far (349-feet) with a launch angle (27 degrees) right on the border of a line drive and a fly ball. He merely hit it to the wrong part of the ballpark, as Rangers right fielder Nomar Mazara made a running catch on the warning track to take a hit away.

Pillar’s next plate appearance came in the third inning with a runner on first, when he got another good pitch to hit, a fastball on the plate, and smoked a hard liner (this one was 92-m.p.h. off the bat) to the right side. Problem was, he lined it directly at Rangers first baseman Mike Napoli, who snared it and stepped on first base for a double play.

Pillar’s third time up, leading off the sixth, may have been his best, as he hammered an 0-1 cutter on the plate to deep centre field. Once again, the exit velocity (104-m.p.h.), distance (375-feet) and launch angle (17 degrees) were that of a very well-hit ball. Balls put in play similarly this season have been hits 62 per cent of the time. But on this occasion? Pillar lined it directly at Rangers outfielder Carlos Gomez, who ran it down right in front of the warning track.

Those three plate appearances reflect some of the awfully poor batted ball luck Pillar’s experienced this season, which has made his struggles look worse than they’ve actually been. Pillar’s .272 batting average on balls in play is well below the .306 mark he set for himself in each of the last two seasons. It’s also below the .299 mark he holds for his career, which suggests he’s deserved better results from the balls he’s hit.

You can also measure Pillar’s weighted on-base average of .303 against his expected weighted on-base average of .322, which indicates he’s hit a number of balls very well that were either right at defenders or kept from becoming hits by strong defensive plays. Of course, Pillar’s poor batted ball luck isn’t everything. But it’s played a part in his struggles.

And yet, despite hitting three balls well with very unfortunate results, the plate appearance that stands out most in your mind from Tuesday night was probably his fourth, which came with the bases loaded in the seventh inning against Rangers reliever Jose Leclerc. There were two out, the Blue Jays were down by four, and Josh Donaldson, Toronto’s best hitter, was waiting in the on-deck circle. Pillar started by taking two balls, which was great. But then things got away from him.

“I started thinking about the situation. Bases loaded. Who’s on deck? I’ve been struggling a little bit. I kind of just made the assumption that the pitcher was going to attack me,” Pillar says. “And he ends up throwing another ball where, if I could go back in time, sure, I’m probably taking the pitch and making sure he can throw a strike.”

That’s not what he did. Instead, Pillar got too aggressive, swinging at three consecutive pitches outside the zone and striking out to end the threat. It wasn’t his finest moment at the plate. He’s thought about it a lot since it happened. And he’s trying to learn from it.

“I’m a competitive guy. I want to find ways to help this team win,” Pillar says. “But what I’m learning is it’s not always about getting a big hit or driving in runs, but just getting the next guy up there. I felt like my at-bats were getting better that day. But that’s the one that sticks out in my head when I’m going to bed as opposed to thinking about the three good ones I had.”

“It’s a learning experience where I’ve got to understand that as bad as I want to get the job done, you’ve still got to allow the pitcher to throw you something to hit. You don’t just go up there and try to make it happen,” Pillar continues. “I know that we’ve talked about this before. And my coaches have talked to me about it before. But it’s compounded when you’re struggling and you feel like this could be your moment to break out and do something to help the team. And it ends up backfiring, and the complete opposite of what I want to happen for myself and the team ends up happening. It was a really tough pill to swallow.”

The next day, Pillar got to the ballpark and saw he wasn’t in the lineup. Then his manager told him he would no longer be batting leadoff going forward. Speaking of tough pills to swallow. But with a couple days to clear his head, reaffirm his approach, and soak up some advice from his good friend Justin, Pillar feels he’s ready to pull his season out of its tailspin. On Thursday, his first start since the demotion, he went 2-for-4 with a double.

“I haven’t lost confidence in myself. It’s definitely been a rough period. And it’s gone on a little bit longer than anyone would expect, or at least than I would expect,” Pillar says. “But that’s baseball. It’s a tough thing to do. A really tough sport. Sometimes you have to take a step back and regroup. But I’ll get myself back going again. I know that I will.”