The bulk of Jackie Bradley, Jr.’s career offensive production came in one six-month stretch across two seasons that he hasn’t been able to sustain.
This time last year, Jackie Bradley, Jr. was coming off the best-hitting month of his career and was on his way to his first All-Star Game appearance. He had always been known as a great defensive player in center field, but he had started to hit during the previous season and that continued into 2016. Through his first 50 games of the 2016 season, Bradley was slashing .331/.409/.601 and had nine homers and 37 RBI.
He had really turned it on in the month of May, when he’d hit .381/.474/.701, good for a wRC+ of 208. The wRC+ metric measures a hitter’s value and is adjusted for park effects and the run environment. A 100 wRC+ is league average. Above 100 is good, below 100 is bad. Bradley’s 208 wRC+ last May meant he was more than twice as good as the average hitter (208 percent better). A wRC+ of 50 would mean the hitter is 50 percent as good as a league average hitter.
That great month was part of a good stretch dating back to August of 2015 for Bradley. In fact, the bulk of his career offensive production has come between August of 2015 and July of 2016. Consider the numbers for Bradley:
4/1/13 to 7/31/15: 576 PA, .191/.264/.274, 29% K%, 47 wRC+
8/1/15 to 7/31/16: 617 PA, .289/.370/.548, 22% K%, 142 wRC+
8/1/16 to 5/30/17: 358 PA, .211/.299/.383, 26% K%, 77 wRC+
Early in his career, Bradley didn’t get much big league playing time. He appeared in 23 games and had just 107 plate appearances in his rookie year of 2013. He didn’t hit at all that year. He played more in 2014 (423 PA in 127 G), but still didn’t hit at all. He continued his anemic hitting in 2015 right up until August, when he broke out with a .354/.429/.734 month (207 wRC+). It was an exciting development for the young hitter.
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This was the beginning of a six-month period across two seasons during which Bradley was 42 percent better than league average as a hitter and terrific on defense. He was an All-Star player who looked to have a bright future with the Red Sox. Fans were envisioning a stellar center fielder who would hit 20-25 homers, score 80-90 runs with 80-90 RBI and a good ability to get on base and hit for power.
Then it all came to an abrupt end. Bradley stopped hitting last August (70 wRC+) and didn’t hit much better in September (88 wRC+). He started off slowly this year, with a poor April (55 wRC+). He’s just now hitting a bit in May, but is still below league average as a hitter for the month (87 wRC+).
A graph of Bradley’s wRC+ by month going back to 2014 shows a player who was a well below average hitter until he suddenly had a monster month (August 2015). He was then just about league average during the final month of that season and a little above league average the first month of the next season. He exploded for another terrific month last May, then dropped back down to an above-average hitter for two months before slipping back down to a below-average hitter ever since. This tweet shows Bradley’s month-by-month wRC+ going back to the beginning of the 2014 season (he didn’t get many at-bats in 2013):
— BobbyBaseball (@bballonthebrain) May 31, 2017
That graph shows the stretch of play when Bradley was roughly league average or better every month, including those two terrific months. If you combine August of 2015 and May of 2016, you have Bradley with a .369/.454/.716 batting line and 13 home runs in 205 plate appearances (1 HR every 16 PA). Over the entire rest of his career, he’s hit .214/.293/.361, with one home run every 42 plate appearances. Those two great months have really propped up Bradley’s career numbers. It’s probably not surprising that he had an out-of-this-world Batting Average on Balls In Play (BABIP) in each of those months. His BABIP was .451 in August of 2015 and .392 in May of 2016. His career BABIP is .292.
Outside of a handful of months, Bradley has regularly been a below-average hitter in his career. That being said, there may be something to make Red Sox fans hopeful that Bradley didn’t just get incredibly hot for two stretches of his career and is truly a well below average hitter. If you’re looking for a reason to be optimistic, you could consider the early part of Bradley’s career as a time where he was still adjusting to big league pitching. Then he had that great six-month stretch from August of 2015 to July of 2016 before struggling in August.
Last August, when Bradley had a 70 wRC+, he played with a toe injury that may have carried over into his sub-par September. This April, he missed more than a week with a sprained knee. In his first 13 games after returning from the injury, he hit .136/.208/.205. Since then, Bradley has hit .232/.338/.500. It’s possible that Bradley’s struggles have been injury related.
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Whether injury related or not, Bradley has been a below average hitter for four straight months now. Since last August, he’s hit .211/.299/.383, for a 77 wRC+. His skills on defense give him some leeway with the bat, so he doesn’t have to replicate his big 2016 season to be a solid contributor to the Red Sox, but it would be nice if he could at least get close to league average as a hitter.
The FanGraphs Depth Charts project him to be slightly better than league average on offense over the remainder of this season (102 wRC+), which would make him about a 2-win player. That’s a far cry from the 4.8-win season he had last year, but it would be an improvement on his current pace to be a 0.6-win player.