Jackie Bradley Jr.’s Breakout Season is Looming
I feel like I’ve been saying this for a few years now: Jackie Bradley Jr. could have a breakout year this season.
It’s easy to forget about Bradley, considering he resides in the best outfield in baseball, surrounded by dangerous bats like J.D. Martinez, Andrew Benintendi, and reigning AL MVP Mookie Betts.
It’s also safe to assume that Bradley has served as more of an afterthought due to his up-and-down career thus far.
From 2015-’16, Bradley was rather productive, slashing .262/.345/.489, hitting 36 combined home runs, and posting an impressive 119 wRC+ (where 100 is league average) and a .355 wOBA.
He followed that up with two lackluster seasons in ‘17 and ‘18, slashing .240/.319/.403 with a 89 wRC+ and a .312 wOBA.
Bradley has been one of the more frustrating players over the last few seasons, because we’ve seen so many flashes and stretches of his talent at the plate. He just hasn’t been able to string it together over the course of an entire season.
There’s plenty of reasons why a hitter regresses – more strikeouts, fewer walks, weaker quality of contact, chasing pitches, and, of course, bad luck. I wanted to dig into the numbers to see if I could figure out why Bradley has struggled the past two seasons and why we might want to expect a breakout in 2019.
One of my favorite things to look at is hard hit rate; it’s the best thing you can do as a hitter – hit the ball hard. All it is is the percentage of balls hit 95 mph or harder. Bradley is elite in this aspect. His hard hit rate of 50.1 percent placed him in the 96th percentile. Of all the players who had at least 300 batted balls this year, Bradley’s hard hit rate was good for 8th in the league, behind Kendrys Morales, J.D. Martinez, Matt Olson, Nelson Cruz, Christian Yelich, Giancarlo Stanton and Mookie Betts – some impressive company.
I also wanted to take a look at Bradley’s home/road splits. At home in ‘18, Bradley slashed .277/.351/.442 with a .344 wOBA and a 109 wRC+ – not exceptional, but certainly above average. On the road, however, it was really ugly. Bradley posted a .193/.279/.368 line with a .278 wOBA and a 73 wRC+. I dug a little deeper to see if I could find why there was such a large dropoff on the road for someone who has never really struggled away from home to that degree (outside of a 118-AB sample size in 2015).
In 2018, Bradley had 171 total hard-hit balls – the ones hit with 95 mph exit velocity or more; 84 of them came at Fenway, 87 of them came on the road – a pretty even split. However, a significantly greater amount of his hard-hit balls on the road were turned into outs (54 out of 87), compared to the mere 39 hard-hit balls he had turned into outs at home.
This means that Bradley was not having nearly as much success on the road than he was at home, even when he made really solid contact with the ball. On his hard-hit balls at home, Bradley had an expected batting average of .534 and an xwOBA of .649; he had an actual batting average of .536 and an actual wOBA of .602. On the road, it was an entirely different story. On Bradley’s hard-hit balls away from Fenway, he had an expected batting average of .504 and an expected wOBA of .650; he had an actual batting average of “only” .379 and an actual wOBA of .497. That’s a really staggering difference, and one I don’t know how to explain. I don’t feel comfortable claiming Bradley is at fault for underperforming that drastically, but maybe a combination of underperformance and just some bad bounces and breaks away from home.
When you hit the ball hard and are struggling to find success, some of it can certainly be explained by bad luck, but luck doesn’t tell the entire story.
Yes, Bradley has a 50.1 percent hard hit rate in ‘18, but I wanted to look at the distribution of his hard hits. I was curious where they were going.
From ‘15-’16, Bradley had 228 batted balls that were hit 95 mph or harder. Eighty-four of those were hit on the ground, which is roughly 36 percent of his hard-hit balls during that time span. From ‘17-’18, Bradley had 314 batted balls that exceeded 95 mph, but 40 percent of them were smacked into the ground. Bradley didn’t hit more grounders overall this past year; he actually posted a career-best ground ball rate (43.7 percent) in ‘18, down from 50.3 percent the year before. He’s simply wasting more of his hard-hit balls on the ground, which you can see from his spray chart.
Another trend that’s obvious upon first glance at Bradley’s stats is home run totals have regressed each year since 2016.
When you look at Bradley’s fly balls and line drives from 2016 and look at his average distance (in feet) and compare them to the ones he hit in ‘17 and ‘18, you’ll notice a somewhat concerning pattern.
Bradley has lost a rather substantial 13 feet of power to his pull side since 2016; that’s enough distance to convert deep fly balls into home runs. Oddly enough, he added a few feet of power back to center field and left field from 2017, but still lost a couple more feet to right field.
As I mentioned earlier, when you’re hitting the ball hard and struggling to find success, some of it can be attributed to bad luck and misfortune. In Bradley’s case, this is true – for the most part.
One way I like to look at this is through barrels. Barrels is a Statcast metric that refers to a batted ball that has the perfect combination of launch angle and exit velocity and produces a minimum expected batting average of .500 and a minimum expected slugging percentage of 1.500. In other words, it’s an extremely high-value hard-hit ball and the absolute best possible thing you can do as a hitter. It’s really, really good.
Bradley had 35 barrels in 2018, a good chunk more than the 27 he had in ‘17 and one fewer than the 36 he had in 2016. The difference here is that Bradley was super unlucky with his barrels in ‘17 and ‘18, much more so than he was in ‘15 and ‘16.
In ‘15 and ‘16, Bradley had a combined 46 barrels and only six of them were turned into outs; he hit .870 with a 3.178 slugging percentage. In ‘17 and ‘18, Bradley had 62 combined barrels and a full 19 of them were turned into outs; he hit “only” .694 on them with a 2.262 slugging percentage.
Here is what one of those outs looked like, for example:
A ball that would have almost certainly been a home run at Fenway, or any other park, for that matter. The exit velocity on this ball was 103.9 mph with a 28-degree launch angle; it travelled 378 feet before Jacoby Jones made a great catch right in front of the wall.
Whatever the reason for this misfortune might be, Bradley had three times as many high-value batted balls turned into outs in ‘17 and ‘18 than he did in ‘15 and ‘16. I wouldn’t expect that trend to continue in 2019.
The difference between some of these balls bouncing in Bradley’s favor is pretty substantial. Bradley has all the tools, he hits the ball hard, he makes consistent contact, he doesn’t chase too many balls out of the zone, he doesn’t hit the ball on the ground too often. If I had to bet on it, I’d say that Bradley is poised for his best season yet in 2019. And he’d be just what the Red Sox need: another dangerous outfielder.
