Jon Meoli: After struggling, Dylan Beavers is back to hitting fastballs for the Orioles. Here’s how.

Dylan Beavers pored over videos and couldn’t find a solution.

Everything looked the same, except last year he drove fastballs all over the field in Triple-A, earning a major league call-up in August. He held his own in the big leagues by doing the same thing. This year, it looked like he was attacking heaters by “taking a two-strike swing when you’re beat on a breaking ball,” stuck and lunging out front.

On the homestand that just ended, something clicked for the Orioles’ rookie outfielder, who homered on fastballs in three straight games after entering the week with three home runs total. Almost instantly, his underwhelming return from an oblique injury was washed away. Beavers feels that he’s set up to be the kind of hitter who earned his way here a year ago in the season’s remaining month.

“I feel like I’m in a spot where I can get in the box and compete, trust the swing,” he told me. “I think part of why I was struggling was definitely physical, but when you go in there with a swing that you don’t believe in, or you don’t believe in your ability — if you have any doubt in your ability to get to a certain pitch, it derails your whole at-bat and makes it really hard to compete in the box, to be honest.”

Beavers spent the first two years of his minor league career trying to solve velocity, and his long-awaited breakout came last year at Triple-A Norfolk when he eliminated a slight move backward as he began his swing.

He started slowly, but once the adjustment took hold, he broke out, hitting .304 with a .935 OPS, driven primarily by a .325 average and .497 slugging percentage on fastballs (four-seam, two-seam and cutters).

That continued after his debut last August, when he had a .775 OPS that was boosted by a .297 average and .531 slugging percentage on fastballs.

He began his first full big league season covering fastballs well, with a .236 average and .400 slugging percentage (with a .471 expected slugging percentage) before he landed on the injured list with an oblique strain May 13. Overall, he was hitting .243 with a .699 OPS.

Beavers was activated off the injured list June 28, and fastballs caused him problems almost immediately. Until the beginning of this homestand, his .164 average and .213 slugging percentage were a large reason he was hitting .233 with a .612 OPS and an uncharacteristic 29.2% strikeout rate from his return through last Monday’s series finale at Tampa Bay.

“I really felt like after I came off the injury was when I felt like I wasn’t getting to the fastballs that I should have been,” he said. “Even on the machine, in the cage, I felt like I was clipping balls, and I was just under everything. I couldn’t really figure out why.”

He thought it was timing, so he started making swing decisions earlier and ended up swinging over a large number of breaking balls below the strike zone and chasing a lot — something he’d never done at any level. Then he started waiting and letting it travel deeper but couldn’t catch up to the pitch.

The breakthrough came after he talked to Matt Holliday, Jackson’s father and a seven-time All-Star, who helped explain what was holding him back — literally. Beavers was so focused on getting his weight into his back hip early that he was unintentionally leaning that way before his swing. Then he was moving backward as his first move because he was afraid he wasn’t getting into the right position to swing.

“Basically, all I did between a couple weeks ago, and even last weekend honestly, is try to start more neutral and find some more rhythm,” he said.

His home run Wednesday was on a sinker down in the zone that he drove to left-center field. A night later, he turned on an up-and-in four-seamer from Gerrit Cole and hit it to the flag court in right field. On Friday, he homered on a first-pitch fastball on the outer half, hitting it to center field.

Given his natural ability to make contact and lay off pitches outside the strike zone, the ability to drive fastballs is key to Beavers’ success in the big leagues. When he’s at his best pitchers know they often will have to beat Beavers in the zone, and when he can punish them for trying, there’s the potential for his quality at-bats to yield quality contact.

Manager Craig Albernaz said after Friday’s game that he has noticed Beavers is standing more upright in the batter’s box.

“Now he’s just in a better spot and you can just tell, especially getting to that high fastball,” he said. “It’s a great tell of if he’s in the right spot, and like we talk about with all of our guys, the ability to go the other way. When he hit the home run to left-center field three nights ago, it was kind of like, ‘OK, he’s starting to find something. He’s starting to feel it.’”