Jackie Bradley, Jr. is showing signs of breaking out of his half-season slump.

The World’s Streakiest Hitter (patent pending) has been awful all year, and there is virtually no statistic that will tell you otherwise. Red Sox manager Alex Cora has taken every opportunity to tell anyone who will listen that Bradley is due to break out because of good signs in his hitting, namely that he’s hitting the ball hard lately: Hard hits mean better swings, more power, fewer balls on the ground — presumably good stuff all around. And he’s seen some results of late, with hits in five of his last nine games, including three on Sunday.

I started looking into JBJ’s career stats, however, and an odd correlation pops up.

Bradley has played a significant part of the season every year since 2014 (we’ll throw out his 2013, where he appeared in 37 games, for the purpose of this analysis). Based on wRC+, he’s had two above-average offensive seasons — 2015 and 2016, highlighted in the subsequent charts — and three below-average offensive seasons (all numbers via Fangraphs):

YEAR	PA	AVG	OBP	SLG	wRC+
2014	423	.198	.265	.266	46
2015	255	.249	.335	.498	123
2016	636	.267	.349	.486	119
2017	541	.245	.323	.402	90
2018	254	.189	.283	.297	60

Note that his 2017 most closely resembles his career numbers, which, after nearly 600 games, we can probably safely assume is his baseline talent level offensively (about 10% worse than league average). But in total, Bradley’s inconsistency is pretty plain: He’s all over the place. His 2014 and 2018 seasons are awful, 2017 is at least acceptable for an all-world defensive center fielder, and 2015 and 2016 are really good.

Now let’s look at his hard-hit numbers:

YEAR	SOFT%	MED%	HARD%
2014	13.5%	51.5%	35.0%
2015	16.7%	51.3%	32.1%
2016	16.0%	48.1%	36.0%
2017	17.5%	49.2%	33.3%
2018	12.0%	51.9%	36.1%

Highlighting the same two good years for emphasis, you can see some strange correlations. One of his best offensive seasons, 2015, featured his worst hard-hit rate; two of his highest soft-hit rates were his two good years, with his best being his average year.

You can see similar correlations in his line drive/groundball/flyball breakdown:

YEAR	LD%	GB%	FB%
2014	18.0%	46.4%	35.6%
2015	15.6%	48.1%	36.4%
2016	18.4%	47.3%	34.4%
2017	18.4%	49.0%	32.6%
2018	20.9%	44.9%	34.2%

His two bad years feature his lowest groundball percentages; 2018’s numbers show that he is indeed hitting a bunch of line drives, but it hasn’t correlated to success — though I should note that he has a BABIP of .247, 45 points below his career mark, so you could argue he’s merely been unlucky.

As someone with a passing interest in advanced stats — not an MIT degree or a certainty that I know what I’m talking about — my take on these numbers, combined with what my amateur eyes tell me from having watched a lot of his games, is that when he’s struggling he’s trying too hard to break out of it — swinging hard, trying to crush the ball in desperation.

So, last chart: Let’s check out his pull numbers:

YEAR	PULL%	CENT%	OPPO%
2014	36.1%	36.5%	27.4%
2015	45.5%	32.1%	22.4%
2016	46.0%	34.3%	19.8%
2017	41.9%	33.6%	24.4%
2018	48.7%	30.4%	20.9%

My amateur hypothesis isn’t totally right, the numbers aren’t as nicely correlated as my other charts. However, his 2018 is his career-high PULL%, and he’s hitting by far his lowest CENT%. Now, hitting the ball hard and pulling the ball aren’t necessarily synonymous, but I think it stands to reason that a desire to hit the ball harder might cause you to swing harder, which often results in earlier swings, earlier contact, and pulling the ball.

The solution might not be as simple as hitting the ball hard, it might also be in placement: JBJ might want to consider trying to think about hitting the ball to all fields — or even more simply, just try to hit the ball right back at the pitcher up the middle, and he might find himself tapping into his more career-norm performance.