Jackie Bradley’s Measured Pursuit of a Record

Even Jackie Bradley couldn’t have guessed it. Before the start of the 2014 season, the Red Sox outfielder told the Boston Herald’s Jason Mastrodonato that he wanted to steal more bases. That’s become something of a Spring Training trope over the years, but Bradley did his best to keep good on his word and went 8-for-8 in steals.

Bradley’s a former running back who certainly has the speed to steal bases at the major league level, but lacked the instincts and experience to do it at an efficient clip. He was just 31-for-49 (63%) in the minor leagues, well below the major league average success rate of 73%. He knew he had the explosiveness, likening the necessary jump of a base stealer to that of a running back accelerating to hit a hole. He just needed to get better at identifying the pitcher’s movements and understanding the profitable situations to take off.

Seems he’s done a good job. Jackie Bradley Jr. is 13-for-13 on steal attempts to begin his major league career.

It may not seem like a large number, but since the beginning of the expansion era in 1961, Bradley’s perfect 13 is tied for the 11th-longest streak to begin a career, and is halfway to the record:

Read the quotes from 2014 now, and they become comical. After going 2-for-2 in 2013, Bradley said, “If that’s any indication, I’m on the right track.”

Manager John Farrell singled out success rate as the most important thing. “The beauty of it all is that if a guy hasn’t been a base-stealing threat in his career, he knows he may be put in motion at times because of the homework our entire staff does,” Farrell said. “So it comes down to success rate.”

During Bradley’s streak over the last three seasons, the Red Sox as a team have stolen bases at a 78.4% clip — the second-most efficient base stealing team in the majors, trailing only Kansas City.

Whether it can be attributed to prescient planning by Boston’s coaching staff, pure negligence from the opposition, or heads-up baserunning by Bradley himself, he’s had some freebies.

Like when he took off with a speedy runner on third base and the Indians didn’t even pretend like they were going to throw down:

Or when he was able to easily advance to third base while the Blue Jays had on an overshift:

But you don’t steal a dozen or more bases without a throw unless you’re Todd Frazier, and clearly Bradley has done his work to get better at this. Perhaps examining the batters against which Bradley has stolen and using some of the baserunning statistics from our friends at BaseballProspectus can give us a better of idea of what’s led to his perfect run.

The first thing that sticks out is the “TRAA” column for pitchers. In case you aren’t too familiar with these numbers, a higher TRAA means baserunners are more likely to attempt a steal against this pitcher, a lower number means that pitcher limits the number of steal attempts. Here, we can see that Bradley has mostly ran against pitchers that others players run against. Nick Hagadone, the pitcher in this table who most limited steal attempts and also one of three lefties, was the guy on the mound in the first clip, above, when Bradley stole without a throw because there was a speedy runner on third. So even that had less to do with the pitcher and more to do with the situation; take Hagadone’s TRAA out of this table and it skews even more toward the pitchers on which it’s easier to run.

It seems Bradley has picked his spots wisely. Consider Dellin Betances’ high leg kick, slow delivery to home, and propensity for spiking power breaking breaking balls in the dirt, and it’s easy to understand why he’s the easiest pitcher to run on of all Bradley’s victims:

Same with Drew Hutchison, who takes nearly 1.5 seconds to deliver the ball home here:

Perhaps even this comes back to Boston’s advance scouts or former first base coach Arnie Beyeler for cluing Bradley in on the most advantageous situations in which to run. But even then, Bradley does his homework. He only needed one pitch to pick up on Hutchison’s cue — that if he’s going home, his first motion is to rock back toward second base. Even if he was taking off no matter what, and likely to be safe due to Hutchison’s slow delivery, he ensured his safety by recognizing this cue and getting a remarkable jump:

This brings us to the second bit of information to be gleaned from the table of batteries above, and the part that shines best on Bradley — the attentiveness. Bradley’s never ran on the first pitch. Okay, that’s not totally true; he did steal in an 0-0 count, but only after observing six pitches from Matt Thornton in the prior at-bat. Point is, he’s never taken off without having seen the pitcher’s motion. In five of the 13 scenarios, he’d seen the pitcher’s pickoff move. In 2014, he admitted the thing he needed to get better at was identifying pitcher’s movements.

Hearing that, it’s encouraging to see him encounter a solid pickoff move by Scott Carroll one year later…

…and imagine that he picked up on the tell that Carroll’s pickoff move comes with the glove held at its apex, whereas it begins to drop down before he’s going home, allowing Bradley to steal on a tough righty who’s quick to home:

The thing about Bradley is, he hasn’t ran often. The average player attempts a steal about 6% of the time he reaches base. Baseball’s best base stealers take off about 16% of the time. What made Berry and Ellsbury’s streaks extra-impressive is that they were running 24% and 27% of the time, respectively, during those first couple years in which the streaks were active, and were still able to swipe their first 25 and 23 bases without being thrown out.

Bradley, though, is taking the Longoria route, running just 5% of the time he reaches base. Bradley hasn’t been a prolific base stealer; he’s just picked his spots, and he’s picked them well. Extrapolating Bradley’s career takeoff rate over his full season’s worth of projected at-bats and times reaching base, he’d attempt just 10 steals, leaving him three shy of the record if were he to continue his perfect run. It’s also not hard to imagine that, entering 2016 with an undefeated record, Bradley gets just a bit more aggressive, continuing mostly to pick his spots but finding more spots to pick, and winds up attempting 13 or more steals. If he can just double down on what he’s already done, he can break a record that’s lasted 39 years.

Jackie Bradley doesn’t have the most experience or the best minor league track record of stealing bases. But he’s got a football career and good speed, he’s got an attentive coaching staff, he’s had a little bit of luck, and he’s improved his ability to read pitcher’s movements. Jackie Bradley might not be Billy Hamilton, but so far, he’s done just enough to be perfect.

Thanks to Jonah Pemstein for research assistance