What Jackie Bradley Jr. Figured Out

Jackie Bradley Jr. has been doing amazing things. To be absolutely clear, they’ve all been doing amazing things. Every last one of them. That 91 mile-per-hour sinker outside? Amazing. That opposite-field roller past the shortstop? Amazing. The reason we bother to pay attention in the first place is because everything that happens out there is amazing, performed by amazing players. Yet Bradley has been particularly amazing. Here’s an amazing thing from yesterday:

Bradley is riding a long hitting streak, and while we don’t really care too much about hitting streaks, on their own, they’re tightly correlated to good offense. That’s what we do care about. This year, Bradley ranks eighth in baseball in wRC+, between Manny Machado and Nick Castellanos. Of course, some things still look a little weird — Aledmys Diaz, for example, ranks second. So looking over the past calendar year, Bradley ranks 15th. That covers 401 trips to the plate, and he’s sandwiched between Machado and Nelson Cruz. Regardless of whether this is for real, Bradley is now definitely a hitter. And in this season, he seems to have taken one more step.

The Jackie Bradley Jr. who debuted in the majors was terrible. He was even worse as a sophomore, and it appeared as if he was out of a role in Boston. They didn’t end up moving him, but they and everyone knew he was flawed. Great glove and everything, but the bat wasn’t there. The swing was long, and it made Bradley vulnerable. It caused him to over-commit, and it opened up an area inside. Bradley needed to figure out how to hit fastballs, so he put work toward tightening up. In 2015, he showed a quicker swing. It was, obviously, a more productive swing. Fastballs were getting hit, and pitchers responded by directing fewer fastballs toward the plate. That’s how it usually goes.

One weakness did sustain into last season. You probably won’t get anywhere if you can’t hit fastballs, but Bradley kept struggling against softer stuff. Before last year, Bradley made contact with 65% of his swings against non-fastballs. Last year, that dropped a little bit, to 61%. So while Bradley was crushing heaters, his contact rate against other stuff ranked him in the 21st percentile among big-leaguers. As a force, Bradley remained incomplete.

Now it’s a new season, and that contact rate is up to 73%. Put differently — Bradley now ranks in the 71st percentile. Between years, that’s a leap of 50 slots, and it suggests that Bradley has become markedly better at identification and execution. There’s a lot that could go into that — it’s not just like flipping a switch — but for more evidence, we can look beyond rates of contact. I decided to play with our pitch-type run values. I combined performance against fastballs and cutters into one, then I put everything else into another bucket. I turned those numbers into rates, so I could compare players in the majors over a common denominator. The graph should tell you everything — here are Bradley’s percentile ranks, league-wide, for each of the last three years:

I know the math might seem sort of complicated. That image should make it easily consumable. Take 2014 — in 2014, Bradley was a mess. He was a complete disaster against non-fastballs, but he was a similar sort of disaster against hard stuff, so pitchers just stuck with that. The following season, Bradley improved dramatically against those hard pitches. Pitchers noticed, and they also noticed that he still wasn’t having a great time with other pitches. Against non-fastballs, Bradley didn’t get a whole lot better. Now look at what’s happened this year. Bradley has stayed good against hard pitches, if slightly worse. But against the other pitches? Almost nobody has been better. Bradley’s been even more productive against them than he’s been against fastballs, and that’s incredible. He went from the 20th percentile to the 94th. These numbers are sort of noisy, but the take-home message is clear: now Bradley can hit just about anything. That home-run highlight at the top came against a 1-and-0 changeup.

Bradley erased his weakness against heaters, and now he might be erasing his weakness against non-heaters. Which makes him difficult to pitch to, because, what do you throw? Every hitter on the planet has a weak spot, but Bradley’s hasn’t been easy to identify. Now, this doesn’t really have to be a mechanical thing. I don’t know if Bradley made a physical tweak; he’s kind of cagey about that stuff. We know that his timing must be good, so he’s been getting his foot down. I’d guess this is probably more about a refined mental approach. Having a plan that isn’t just “see a heater and hit it.” Throw in some swing consistency and you have the ingredients. What Bradley showed last year was that he could hit. What he’s showing this year is that he can adapt.

Over the past calendar year, Bradley owns a higher isolated slugging than guys like Nelson Cruz, Miguel Sano, and Anthony Rizzo. I think that’s misleading, because one of the things Statcast has demonstrated is that Bradley doesn’t have upper-level raw strength. The numbers should come down somewhat, and some swing-and-miss remains in his game. I don’t think that Bradley is one of the very best hitters on the planet, but I definitely do think he’s turned himself into a threat. A year ago, Jackie Bradley Jr. fixed his swing. This year, it seems he’s improved his approach. There was a time this would’ve been unimaginable, but that’s probably more the fault of our collective imagination.