DENVER — The bases were still 60 feet apart the last time Bryce Eldridge let his emotions get the best of him on a baseball diamond. He was 9 or 10 years old, on the mound in the regional finals for his Little League All-Star team and it didn’t go well.

“I just completely melted down because I wasn’t pitching well and we lost,” Eldridge recalled in an interview with The California Post. “For lack of a better word, I was just being a b—- on the field. That was something that stuck with me. I was very embarrassed. My dad ripped me. Learning moments when you’re younger change how you are now, you know?”

That’s not to say he doesn’t still get frustrated.

This recent stretch at the plate, in fact, has gotten to him. Even if he doesn’t show it.

“He’s very calm, you never see him throwing a bat or being mad,” admired outfielder Heliot Ramos, who went through the same adjustments breaking into the big leagues that Eldridge is going through now. “It’s a mental battle. … I’m guessing he feels [frustrated] because at the end of the day we’re humans. But he has very good control of his emotions.”

It’s in every opposing scouting report nowadays: Eldridge can hit the fastball. He’s laying off early breaking balls. Pitchers are getting ahead of him with soft stuff in the strike zone, putting him in a hole — and one of the more prolonged slumps of his young career.

Going into Saturday’s game against the Rockies at Coors Field, it had been five games since Eldridge last drew a walk, remarkably his longest stretch to date. Dating back to his last homer, 12 games ago, he is batting .163 (7-for-43) with a .475 OPS.

He’s struck out 16 times in that span, the same number he had over his previous 23 games.

Soon enough, though, Eldridge will make an adjustment and regain the upper hand.

“It’s a fun little cat and mouse game,” hitting coach Hunter Mense told The Post. “The more stuff they start to get on you, then the more you have to start understanding how they’re going to do things. … He’s smart enough and intelligent enough that he’ll figure it out.”

Still more than three months from his 22nd birthday, Eldridge is so mature, mentally and physically, that Mense has to remind himself of his relative inexperience — probably closer to that embarrassing moment in Little League than the twilight of his playing career.

“I catch myself sometimes, like I probably should have that conversation because he might not know,” Mense said. “Sometimes we as coaches feel stupid for having conversations because, like, they probably know that.”

One of things that has been new for Eldridge this year is dissecting the pitchers’ plans of attack against him. Before every at-bat, now, he consults with Mense in the dugout.

“I go up to Hunter like, ‘Whattya got?’ He’ll just tell how he pitched me previously and what he’ll try and do off that,” Eldridge said. “Every time I go up there, he’s sitting up there. I like having that reminder so I can have it fresh in my mind in the box of what my plan is.”

Lately, breaking and offspeed pitches have come up a lot.

In May, Eldridge’s first month in the big leagues, he saw fastballs on 51.6% of his pitches. In June, that dropped to 47.1% — with an almost equal amount of curveballs and sliders (41.6%).

More recently, the majority of the few fastballs he’s been seeing have been down in the zone. And he has fallen into pitchers’ traps of adjusting his eye level, swinging at the subsequent breaking balls that start in the same place and dart below the strike zone.

“A lot of offspeed, not many challenge heaters,” the 6-foot-7 first baseman lamented. “I think it’s just been a mix of the slow stuff trying to get me to go down, which unfortunately I’ve been doing a lot more recently — going down with it. I think that’s why I’ve slowed down with my results.”

These past three games against the Diamondbacks, things hit a breaking point. He hasn’t sought out advice from many other hitters on the team but decided to consult the Giants’ other left-handed hitting first baseman who also broke into the big leagues at a young age.

“There were a lot of at-bats where I was really frustrated, so I was like, ‘Whatcha got for me, Rafi?” Eldridge said, referring to Rafael Devers, who was 20 when debuted for the Red Sox. “He told me, ‘You’ve just got to move in the box. Dance with the pitchers. Stay in rhythm. And just keep fighting. You’ve got a lot of at-bats. A lot of games to play.’”

In these recent games that took a toll on Eldridge, most of the 25 heaters he saw either were out of the strike zone or painted the corners. The other 29 pitches were slow and bendy.

Going 1-for-5 in the series finale, he pounced on a first-pitch knuckle curve from Zac Gallen but pounded it into the ground. Gallen gave him two fastballs his next time up but both were borderline and he went down looking. His next time up, Gallen got him to look at another borderline fastball for strike two, which set him up to swing at a knuckle curve in the dirt.

He fouled it off but then was fooled into looking at a low changeup for strike three.

Then, he went down on three pitches in his final at-bat for the third hat trick of his career.

Despite the Giants earning their first win in nine tries against Arizona, Eldridge was upset.

“I was just getting worked up about how I felt, which was selfish of me,” Eldridge said. 

But he didn’t let himself show it like he did on that Little League field in the suburbs of northern Virginia, a little more than a decade earlier. He got to work.

“Still to this day, I remember that,” Eldridge said. “I’ll never show that type of emotion on the field ever again.”