PEORIA, Ariz. — Baseballs dart around the infield on a back field at the Padres’ spring training facility as a group of minor leaguers take grounders and rifle throws around the diamond. The sport’s brutal probabilities suggest that few, if any, of these players will enjoy substantive Major League careers, but from up close, that seems impossible. The infielders show off impossibly quick feet and soft hands and cannon arms at every opportunity. They’re so good.

Brandon Wood was better.

Now 31, the former first-round pick stands with a group of fellow coaches behind home plate smacking grounders at the players. At an age when many of his former colleagues and teammates enjoy seven-figure salaries and all the trappings of the Major League lifestyle, Wood is preparing for his first season as a Class A manager. When the big-league Padres leave to start their regular season this week, he will stay behind in Peoria to coach in the Padres’ extended spring training camp until June, when he heads north to Pasco, Wash. to take the helm of the Tri-City Dust Devils of the short-season Northwest League.

“He was one of the best players I ever saw,” says Tigers catcher Bobby Wilson, Wood’s frequent teammate and roommate while both players were coming up in the Angels’ system in the middle part of the last decade. “I thought me and him would be playing together forever. Obviously it didn’t work out that way.”

“You expected a homer every time he came up to the plate,” says Angels starter Jered Weaver, who first played with Wood at Class A Advanced Rancho Cucamonga in 2005. “He was not only talented offensively, but he was a great defensive player as well. Good guy. Team guy.”

Wood hit 43 home runs for Rancho Cucamonga in that ’05 campaign, leading the California League by 15 homers despite being nearly three full years younger than the average player at the level. He finished the season in the Arizona Fall League, where he tacked on another 14 homers in only 29 games. A 20-year-old shortstop smashed 57 home runs in 163 games against mostly older competition.

After the season, Baseball America ranked Wood third among all prospects in the sport, just behind Justin Upton — the outfielder who recently inked a six-year, $137.75 million free-agent contract with the Tigers — and ahead of current big-league stars like Justin Verlander, Prince Fielder, Jon Lester, Ryan Braun, Andrew McCutchen, Cole Hamels and Dustin Pedroia, to name a few.

The same outlet put Wood atop its list of the Angels’ Top 10 prospects that year, citing a rival manager who dubbed him “the next Cal Ripken.”

“In minor league games in Rancho Cucamonga, they pass the hat around in the crowd after homers — people throw in dollars, 10 bucks, so on,” Wilson recalled. “As minor league guys, we didn’t have any money, and it seemed like he hit a home run every night we were home, so we’d go to Buffalo Wild Wings and have food on Brandon every night.

“We’d go home and play video games, and talk about it, and he was kind of like, ‘I don’t know man, it’s just kind of happening.’ It was special to see, and special to be a part of.”

The 2006 season brought more big power numbers, as Wood knocked 25 longballs for Class AA Arkansas. He tacked on 23 more homers at Class AAA Salt Lake City in 2007, appearing in a handful of games for the big-league Angels as an injury replacement and a September call-up.

But things began to go awry in 2008 when Wood got his first extended look in the Majors. Unaccustomed to irregular playing time, the 23-year-old managed only a .200 batting average and a .551 OPS across 150 at-bats. He continued his dominance of minor league pitching whenever he returned to Class AAA ball, but struggled in every turn at the Major League level.

“That’s when the doubt started to creep in,” Wood told USA TODAY Sports at Padres’ camp last week. “You rack up numbers, and you start looking at your numbers over the course of three seasons of playing once every ten days. Reporters come up to you and ask why you’re not hitting, and you start believing you can’t hit, when you know — if you take a step back — you’re not getting consistent at bats. It’s pretty tough as a young player and a power hitter to put up numbers in that role.

“I kept on thinking it was mechanical — ‘I’ve got to fix these mechanics.’ Mechanics, mechanics, mechanics. ‘I’ve just got to work harder, take more ground balls, take more swings in the cage.’ And it wasn’t the case. I needed to take a step back and really evaluate where my mind was going. I should have focused a lot more time on that.”

“He was a different guy,” said Wilson, who played with Wood on the Angels in 2010. “He was trying to be something that he wasn’t. As a young guy on that club, it’s not an easy place to play. There’s a lot of pressure to win there, because that’s what they wanted to do — they wanted to win. If you’re there, you’ve got to perform right now. It wasn’t a team he was coming into that was rebuilding, it was a team expected to win the division, and that pressure kind of built on him.”

Wood now recognizes that anxiety, more than any physical limitations, prevented him from Major League success.

“On opening day, 2010, when I started at third base for the Angels, something just came over my body,” he remembered. “I was light-headed. I felt like I was going to fall over — no control of my body parts. Looking back, it’s because I wasn’t breathing. I’d go probably 90 seconds without taking a breath.”

At 25 years old that season, Wood set a new career high with 226 big-league at-bats. To say they did not go well would be an understatement. Wood’s 2010 campaign — just one year after he hit 22 home runs with a .910 OPS in Class AAA ball — stands as perhaps the worst offensive season in modern Major League history. His .382 OPS is the lowest by any player with at least 200 plate appearances in the season since 1912, the heart of baseball’s Deadball Era.

“I struggled a lot, mentally, with my own expectations of where my career was going and what it should have been,” Wood said. “It took a toll on me. Every day, losing sleep, the anxiety that comes with it — you were Mike Trout coming through the minor leagues and you didn’t pan out. It was kind of hard for me to swallow.”

“Something didn’t click for him when he got to the big leagues,” Weaver said. “It was hard for him to dig himself out of the hole. He worked his butt off trying to find it, but something just didn’t click.”

The Angels waived Wood early in the 2011 season. He caught on with the Pirates, where he hit a bit better than he had in Los Angeles but still not enough to match his tremendous prospect pedigree. He spent 2012 playing Class AAA ball in the Rockies’ system but failed to succeed at that level like he had in the past. He returned to Class AAA in 2013, this time for both the Royals’ and Orioles’ farm clubs, but collapsed offensively. Finally, in 2014, after a 25-game stint with the Atlantic League’s Sugar Land Skeeters — in which he hit .098 with a .314 OPS — Wood realized his playing career was over.

“The first game of independent ball, the anxiety set in,” he said. “And it prevented me from doing what God made me able to do. Once I knew I couldn’t do it in independent ball, I said, ‘It’s time,’ and I came to peace with it. I started to accept some of the things I did well, and I look back on my career with more of a smile now than a lot of doubt.”

Wood spent the 2014 season away from baseball, contemplating his next step and learning how to cook. Spending time in the kitchen and working a barbecue grill, he said, helped him clear his mind and focus again. He even considered enrolling in culinary school before he heard about a job opening in the Padres’ system.

“I always envisioned myself playing until I was 40,” Wood said. “So when it was over, I was kind of just in limbo: What’s life after baseball? What do you do? All I’ve done is play baseball since I was five. My parents took care of me when I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have to do anything but play baseball. So it was a bit of a struggle for the year that I took off.

“Once I started going through the interview process, I realized this is something I feel like I can do. And my experiences of being one of the best players coming up in the minor leagues, and struggling as bad as anybody at some points in the big leagues, I feel like I can reach out to any and every player about any situation they might go through.”

Wood’s willingness to discuss his own battle with anxiety and expectations in the Majors seems to reflect, in some ways, baseball’s continued shift toward coaching aspects of the game that extend beyond the physical and fundamental. This spring, Wood has worked with Padres exec Jason Amoroso to develop routines aimed at preventing the mental struggles that ruined his promising playing career.

“What I want to bring as a manager to these players is open up 100% about myself and my struggles and what led me to not be able to reach my goals,” he said. “What distractions got in the way, and what things kept me from really developing into the player that I should have been… The self-doubt, the self-talk, the expectations that I put on myself, the loss of confidence. A lot of things play into that. And that’s really why I feel like God has put me in this position, first and foremost, to help every kid going through what I went through.”

And so it appears Wood’s unrealized potential as a player now gives him limitless potential as a manager. No one in the world better understands the weight of big-league expectations and what they can to do a talented young player. Wood said he hopes to someday coach or manage in the Majors, and that he aims to emulate Jim Tracy — the former Rockies manager who Wood says “managed 30 different personalities with 30 different personalities within himself.”

That starts here, in Peoria, in his interactions with all the young players Wood watches and coaches and counsels every day. He knows what it looks like when players are struggling the same way he did, and he recognizes how important it is for someone to help them out of it.

“I can see it in kids’ faces, because I’ve been through it,” Wood said. “So I can grab them before they even know it and say, ‘Hey, let’s take a deep breath. Baseball is what we do, but it’s not our life.'”

(An earlier version of this story identified Bobby Wilson as a Rangers catcher. He was traded to the Tigers late Tuesday night.)