Corbin Carroll leaned back, rested his head on a rolling chair and stared at the ceiling. Around him, Diamondbacks players shuffled through the visitors’ clubhouse at San Francisco's Oracle Park, into the dining room and onto training tables. A handful trickled towards a loading dock to catch the first bus back to their hotel.

All the while, Carroll sat there, thinking. For three hours that afternoon, he had wiped a dropped first-inning pop fly from his mind. But in the silence of a post-loss clubhouse, he allowed himself to analyze. What did I do right? What did I do wrong? How can I make sure this doesn’t happen again?

Carroll hasn’t encountered much failure in his 118 major-league games. He’s off to the best start ever by a Diamondbacks’ rookie, breathing air few players ever do. It has led to Carroll being elected a starting outfielder for Tuesday's All-Star Game in his hometown of Seattle.

But failure, even in its narrowest manifestations, has a way of revealing the recipe to success.

Carroll, of course, has prodigious talent. He’s among the fastest players in baseball and packs remarkable power into an undersized frame. As an 11-year-old, he displayed “special barrel on ball skills” to Wes Long, his old trainer. That’s natural. It’s also not enough. Not, at least, to reach the heights Carroll has.

To do that, Carroll has combined an unfazed confidence with the acuity to learn from any experience. The former is why he maintains a perpetual aura of calm. The latter is why he sat at that locker in San Francisco, replaying a single error in his mind.

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Perched on a bench in his home dugout at Chase Field two weeks later, Carroll thought about those two qualities. His conclusion: They’re inextricable from one another.

“A lot of my confidence comes from my preparation,” Carroll told The Republic. “Just being fully convicted that I'm doing all the right things to put me in the best position to be out there and have the best chance at success. I think it just helps me not second guess.”

A few hours later, he provided the perfect example. After finishing off a breakfast plate of potatoes and avocado, Carroll turned into the Diamondbacks’ batting cages to work on facing curveballs. That afternoon, he hit one for a walk-off win.

Carroll's unique approach 'part of my nature'

On a January night this off-season, Carroll met Jeff Cirillo, his old travel ball coach, for dinner. As part of the legion of friends and family invited to Phoenix for Carroll’s debut last summer, Cirillo — a 14-year major-league veteran himself — remembered being struck by the expectations that day. So, over dinner, he began talking about the pressure. Asking, almost rhetorically, if Carroll was nervous.

Carroll stopped him in his tracks. “No,” he told Cirillo. “Not at all. I expected to be there.”

The trick to not being overwhelmed upon his introduction to the major leagues, Carroll believes, was to take the opponent out of it.

“In the minor leagues, you face a guy and it's ‘Jack John,’” Carroll said. “And then you get up here and it's Clayton Kershaw. It's just, I think that you can make opponents at this level more than they are. Just kind of put them on this pedestal. I think it's hard to feel like you belong when you hold the opponent in such high regard. Not saying I don't respect every opponent. I really truly do. But kind of just trying to take the name out of it and treat them like any other guy.”

Carroll pauses when asked how he’s able to do that. He settles on the idea that “it’s just a little bit a part of my nature.” Perhaps, like his confidence, it’s borne out of preparation. That much Carroll can explain. “That's definitely been driven by my parents,” he said.

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As a 13-year-old, at the end of his first season playing under Cirillo, Carroll sat his coach down for a series of questions. An exit interview of sorts, as Cirillo remembers it, just one being conducted by a middle schooler. Carroll wanted to know what Cirillo’s plan was for the following summer. Which tournaments they would play in, which players they were adding.

“That system of checks and balances that he had installed early in himself was impressive,” Cirillo said.

A decade later, Carroll has lost that specific meeting to memory. The overarching principal, though, was instilled in him from a young age. Brant Carroll is an ophthalmologist. Pey-Lin Carroll did her undergrad in biochemistry and her master’s in business. Neither was about to let Corbin skate by.

“They've always been big advocates of, don't just go through the motions,” Carroll said. “Really dig deep and truly learn. They always called it not learning for the test. You don't want to just memorize that 4x4 is 16. You want to have the process to get there and be able to understand why then 5x5 is 25. So just understanding the process has always been important to me and understand the why.”

As he tore through the minor leagues, that immediately stood out to the Diamondbacks. “Yeah, he's crazy talented, but there's a lot of guys that are crazy talented,” farm director Josh Barfield said. The difference with Carroll lay in his mentality.

There’s the story of him sitting with scouts at Chase Field while he was injured in 2021, learning the game from their perspective. That much has become part of Carroll’s lore by now. But Barfield saw his approach manifest itself in smaller bursts, too. Last spring, he went to Amarillo to take stock of the Diamondbacks’ Double-A affiliate. At the time, Carroll was leading the minor leagues in OPS and cementing perceptions that he would become a major league star. Yet, when Barfield met with him, Carroll was concerned. He didn’t like his results on pitches at the top of the strike zone.

“Most people would just be very, very happy with the numbers he was having,” Barfield said. “But you got lots of work every day and he was working on all that top of the zone stuff.”

Since reaching the majors, Carroll has hit .382 on pitches in that third of the strike zone. He also hasn’t stopped his quest for improvements.

Carroll's 'granular focus for today'

As the Diamondbacks’ season wound down last October, manager Torey Lovullo distributed a handout to his players. He wanted them to write their off-season goals on pen and paper so they could be held accountable come spring training.

“Most guys are like, ‘I'm gonna lift, I want to get strong, I'm gonna hit 25 home runs next year and I'm gonna be an All-Star,’” Lovullo said. Carroll’s goals: Become a better bunter and never be removed from a game because of a left-handed reliever.

The latter has come to fruition, with Carroll’s OPS having risen from .590 to .718 against lefties. But it was the bunting goal that struck Lovullo.

Beneath the initial objective, Carroll had written an itinerary for his off-season. After taking two weeks to rest, he would research what the best bunters do and how they position their bodies. Then he would learn how to get out of the box as fast as possible. From there, he’d work three days a week at Salt River Fields, first getting used to bunting positions then, as spring training approached, perfecting the placement of his bunts.

“He's 22 years old and I'm like, I can't believe what I'm hearing,” Lovullo said.

At the peak of the off-season in November and December, Carroll stood on the back fields at the Diamondbacks’ spring training complex, honoring his word. As is the case when you’re slugging .549, bunting is not a central piece of Carroll’s game. But it has become a tool he can weaponize on occasion, particularly when he’s in a mini-rut at the plate.

It’s a symptom of what Lovullo describes as Carroll’s “granular focus for today.” Beyond any particular skillset, that’s what stands out most to coaches and teammates alike.

Alek Thomas sees it every day when he walks into the clubhouse and encounters Carroll, already sitting at his locker, poring over TruMedia data on an iPad. He doesn’t spend as much time on the numbers as he did last season, which he says has “given me a little bit more freedom.” But he still dives into pitch shapes and heat maps every afternoon, “trying to put a mental picture together in my head of what that pitch is gonna look like.”

To Christian Walker, Carroll stands out most with his cage work. Whatever he’s focused on, Carroll will take a swing, step back from home plate, replay the swing in his mind and make the requisite mental adjustment. Then he returns to the box and executes it.

“I see him doing a really good job of knowing when to trust himself and trust his talent and then knowing when to dive a little bit deeper and make an adjustment,” Walker said. “And I think for a younger player, I think that can be a hard thing to navigate.”

The end product lies in Carroll’s results. At the All-Star break, he’s hitting .289 with a .915 OPS. His 3.8 WAR ranks third in the National League. All of it has led him to Tuesday night, when he’ll take the field at T-Mobile Park as a starting outfielder.

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Above the left-field entrance to the ballpark this week, there’s an oversized poster of Carroll greeting visitors. Its location couldn’t be more fitting. As a child, Carroll and his family would walk to Mariners games, zigzagging through Seattle and ending their journey at that same gate.

This time, Carroll will have to take a different entrance. Too much security to walk to the ballpark with family.

He is, after all, a star now.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: How Corbin Carroll's mentality made him Diamondbacks' All-Star sensation