ARLINGTON, TEXAS—When a 21-year-old Brett Lawrie crashed upon the big leagues in August 2011 and hit nine home runs in his first 150 at-bats, Blue Jays fans dreamed of what he could do over a full season.

Baseball pundits also bought in, with many projecting Lawrie to hit 30 bombs as a sophomore and maybe steal just as many bases.

But as it is for so many young players, Lawrie’s development path has not been a steady ascent. While his defence has been consistently above average, his offence has shown glimpses of those heady days but included almost as many steps back as forward.

After averaging a home run every 19 plate appearances in 2011, Lawrie’s power seemed sapped in 2012 and 2013, when he struggled with his approach at the plate and his home-run rate shrunk by more than half as he averaged just one homer in every 44.5 plate appearances.

After getting off to a slow start to this season, Lawrie now has seven homers in his last 30 games and is back to slugging at his 2011 rate.

But the man himself, fast-talking and tightly wound, is rarely keen on introspection. Asked last week what he’s doing differently this year, Lawrie said he’s “just going up there looking to do damage and trying to help the boys.”

So to get a little more insight into the power boost, we turned to Jays hitting coach Kevin Seitzer, who has only started working with Lawrie this season but knows of his past.

“He’s getting himself in a good position consistently and not over-swinging, using his hands, not trying to do too much and really staying in the middle of the field,” he said. “When you do those things you got a chance to have the hand speed that you need and the timing that you need in order to drive the ball — and he’s got tremendous power.”

Lawrie is actually chasing more pitches outside the strike zone this year than he was the last two years, according to Fangraphs.com. But he is making less contact on those pitches, which may actually be helping him to avoid some of the weak groundballs he rolled over on last year.

Lawrie is also currently riding what seems like an unsustainably high 17.9 per cent home-run-to-fly-ball rate, which is nearly twice as high as it has been the last two seasons — and right about where it was in his six-week debut in 2011. So maybe he’s due for some regression.

Seitzer, who worked as the Kansas City Royals’ hitting coach from 2009-12, likened Lawrie’s dramatic debut and subsequent scuffling to Royals first baseman Eric Hosmer, who was a runner-up for rookie of the year in 2011 but suffered through a sophomore slump the following season.

As the saying goes, baseball is a game of adjustments and Seitzer said it takes time for young players to figure that out.

“It takes a while in order to learn the process of what you need to do consistently in order to beat somebody,” he said. “That’s part of the maturity process that takes a while for a young kid when they come up.”

Some have speculated that Lawrie’s ever-active hands and quick-twitch reflexes — which serve him well on defence — have hurt him at the plate. Seitzer said Lawrie has calmed himself, but the biggest difference is he has more experience.

“He’s wired tight, he’s very aggressive and he’s very intense, but he’s also very young” Seitzer said. “When you allow that maturing process to unfold to where he’s getting more experience at this level, knowing what pitchers have, what they’re trying to do to him and then really getting yourself in good position consistently.”

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Meanwhile, no matter how many home runs he hits, Lawrie will continue to play out of position at second base — at least against right-handed starters — for as long as Juan Francisco is swinging a hot bat. Francisco went 2-for-4 and hit his eighth homer of the season on Sunday against the Rangers, while Lawrie, who had a pair of hits Saturday, went 0-for-4. Despite admitting the team is worse defensively with Francisco at third — the 26-year-old Dominican made two fielding errors on Sunday, while Lawrie made one at second — manager John Gibbons believes his club is stronger with more boppers in the lineup.

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