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GREENSBORO — Kyle Skipworth has forged a nice little relationship with adversity.

That's what happens when your first two years of professional baseball have been spent hovering around the dreaded Mendoza line. And when strikeouts are an all-too-common part of your game.

The Greensboro Grasshoppers catcher, a top Florida Marlins prospect, has been taking his lumps since bypassing a scholarship to Arizona State last spring and signing a lucrative contract as a top-10 draft pick.

As an 18-year-old entering a cold, tough world of professionals, no one ever said it would be easy.

Then again, Skipworth probably never knew it would be this hard.

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"I was king of the mountain for one day, and then everyone wants to come along and knock the king off the mountain," Skipworth says.

His dad, Spencer, describes where he was as "Cloud Nine."

The awards started rolling in for Skipworth as a high school senior in Riverside, Calif., and suddenly he was Gatorade National Baseball Player of the Year and off to the ESPYs, where he lunched with NFL quarterback Matt Leinart.

The draft went pretty well, too, when he was the No. 6 pick and received a $2.3 million signing bonus.

All that means nothing when you step up to the plate as a professional, but it does impact how you're viewed. The guys on your team all know who you're supposed to be a star.

"I think maybe at first," Skipworth says.

"But I hope that the perception is that I don't think of myself any differently. Obviously, in a sense I am different than everyone else, but in the clubhouse I'm one of the guys."

But Skipworth is right. Like it or not, he is different simply because of his draft position.

"They expect a great deal of things from me," as he puts it, and that attention is the reason that he, and not his teammates, heard this chant from opposing fans.

"2.2 million dollars! Is he worth it?"

"HELL NO!"

It's also the reason he found himself trying too hard in the Gulf Coast League last season, when he batted .208 while trying to show he was worth the investment.

"I always told myself no," he says of feeling the pressure. "But, I mean, in reality there was."

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Even though Skipworth says he's not pressing as much this season, his struggles have continued.

There's no denying the talent.

"When he tries to stay in the middle of the field and use his hands to be direct to the ball, he's special," says John Mallee, the Marlins' minor league hitting coordinator.

But that hasn't happened often enough. Skipworth is batting .199 with 81 strikeouts in 60 games.

It's the occasional stretches of tough games — the ones with multiple Ks — when he calls his dad to talk through some things, like last week when he was on the phone saying, "I can't do this, I can't do that."

His father's message was simple: You can.

"As a parent, you've got to reinforce him," Spencer says.

Earlier this year came another rather forgettable moment that stemmed from his struggles.

Skipworth walked into a laundromat the day after an early-June game against Lakewood and picked up a newspaper. On the front of the News & Record Sports section was a picture of Skipworth smashing his bat in half on the ground after striking out to end a home loss.

"And I'm just like, geez. That was really the wakeup moment for me," he says. " ... Even though I lost a personal, one-on-one, me-against-the-pitcher battle, that's unacceptable to show that on the field in front of fans, because they pay to watch us play and they expect to see us be professional about everything we do. Even in failure and in success."

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Skipworth has been trying to reverse that failure, and he's no stranger to hard work.

He abused his home batting cage in California, and it was straight there with dad after any bad games.

But although work ethic is vital in the professional game, the biggest surprise for Skipworth has been the discipline needed.

"Really, for me, it's just how weak my mental approach to the game was," he says. " ... I would go up there and ... just go up there and hit it."

He approaches the plate with more of a plan and attempts to adjust each at-bat as he learns to study the game. This all comes in addition to defense, where he's involved in the action on every pitch.

"The days where I really stick to those plans are the days when I'll either get one or two hits, or I'll hit some balls hard," he says. "And then the days I don't are the days I look back and I'm like, what just happened? Five at-bats just went by and I looked like a fool up there."

Even after night games, the young catcher and roommate Isaac Galloway talk through their at-bats and offer critiques.

"I mean, we don't know everything. But still, it's a learning process," Skipworth says.

He also has lots of information and instruction flying at him — far more than in high school, and perhaps more than necessary at times. Skipworth trusts the Hoppers' and Marlins' hitting coaches "mechanically for everything that I have," but he says there can be input from outside the organization (such as back in California) because of his first-round draft status.

"Just people in general that are always going to kind of want to, 'Oh, yeah, well, we helped him do this, or do that,' " he says.

" ... So, to me there's a point where then I would get stuff from 10 different directions on how to do one thing, whereas it should just be one way to do one thing."

Add in Skipworth's own analytical take on his issues and the question becomes: Is over-thinking — which he admits to doing on occasion — one of his problems?

Hoppers manager Darin Everson pauses nearly 15 seconds before answering.

"He's very aware of the things he wants to get better at, and I think he does a good job of recognizing stuff that he wants to improve on and getting it done," Everson says. "So, yeah, from that standpoint, he does a good job of understanding what needs to be done."

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There's one other part of this equation, and it's the number 19. As in Skipworth's age.

Plenty of high school-age pros take a few years to adjust before blossoming, and it's far too early for judgments in what is a long-term process. There are signs of growth, too, such as a recent three-game streak with five hits.

"Because I know what I'm capable of, it's frustrating when I don't perform up to my expectations," he says. "But I know at the same time, I'm still such a young hitter."

His dad says getting through these initial struggles will make him "that much better of a ballplayer."

From Everson's perspective, the pace of the game can play a large part in the success equation for such a young athlete. When things start to mentally slow down is when they start rolling.

That part hasn't clicked yet for Skipworth, but he's working on it.

"Einstein would say he didn't find ways he couldn't do it, he just found ways that didn't work," the catcher says.

"And for me, it's still just, it's finding the ways that work for me."