BOSTON (WHDH) - Baseball is a fickle mistress. One night a guy could hit four screeching line drives that land directly in the well-heeled mitt of a fielder. The next night the same guy could reach base multiple times on the dinkiest of ground balls.
No wonder then, given the whimsical bounces the game both giveth and taketh away, that players’ statistics often vary considerably from one week to the next. It’s a streaky business. Yet, some players run streakier than others. And then there’s Jackie Bradley Jr.
Other Beantown baseball writers (thank you, Alex Speier at the Boston Globe) have tried their hand at explaining why Bradley is so streaky, but just looking at how often he runs hot and cold is stunning. Bradley’s is a schizophrenic offensive profile not often seen even in this streakiest of pastimes.
Take this month as a microcosm of JBJ’s entire career: from June 1st to the 23rd, Bradley appeared in 19 games and went hitless in 12 of them while going a brutal 8-for-63. Then Sunday afternoon he began to rake. Bradley went 3-for-3 in the final game of Boston’s series with Seattle. Then on Tuesday night, he went 3-for-4 with four RBIs and finished a triple shy of the cycle. He’s hitting .636 over his last three games.
There have been frigid streaks: from July 27th to the end of the 2014 season, JBJ hit .071! He had one hit for all of the month of September!
But there have also been scorchers thrown in: Bradley hit an insane .415 during his 29-game hit streak in 2016.
So we’ve established he’s streaky, sure, but you might think, there are plenty of big league hitters like him who go through hot and cold streaks. Just how streaky is the guy? I’m glad you asked.
To get a sense of Bradley’s streaky ways, we looked at his rolling 15-game batting averages throughout his career. Rolling averages are game-by-game snapshots of a player’s career. For example, a player’s 15-game rolling average for the 15th game of his career would look at games 1-15. His 15-game rolling average for his 16th game would be from games 2-16 and on and on it goes.
To see just how streaky Bradley is, I compared him to two other players with very similar batting profiles: Aaron Hicks and Derek Norris. All three are in their late 20s and broke into the league in either 2012 or 2013.
First, take a look at just how similar all three players offensive profile is (all stats through 6/27/18):
PLAYER PA AVG. OBP. SLG. WRC+
Bradley 2,224 .235 .315 .397 90
Hicks 1,904 .234 .318 .385 92
Norris 1,963 .234 .307 .384 93
Next, I broke down each 15-game stretch by a range of batting averages. For example, Bradley has hit between .000 and .049 in 15-game stretches seven times in his career. Hicks has done it twice and Norris zero times. Then, because each player has slightly different numbers of plate appearances and games played, I looked at the number of times each player hit in a certain batting average range and turned it into a percentage of their total 15-game rolling averages. Here are the results:
Batting average Bradley Hicks Norris
.000-.049 7 (1.2%) 2 (0.4%) 0 (0%)
.050-.999 25 (4.2%) 8 (1.6%) 11 (1.8%)
.100-.149 60 (10.3%) 33 (6.5%) 57 (9.6%)
.150-.199 111 (19%) 101 (20%) 151 (25.4%)
.200-.249 156 (26.8%) 150 (29.7%) 133 (22.4%)
.250-.299 113 (19.4%) 143 (28.3%) 129 (21.7%)
.300-.349 53 (9.1%) 50 (9.9%) 69 (11.6%)
.350-.399 34 (5.8%) 17 (3.4%) 36 (6.1%)
.400-.449 17 (2.9%) 1 (.19%) 4 (0.7%)
.450-.500 6 (1%) 0 (0%) 4 (0.7%)
Looking at the top of the table, you can see when Bradley is bad, he can be really bad. JBJ has hit below .100 in more than 5% of his 15-game rolling averages, more than Hicks and Norris combined. By the same token, he can be really good for stretches at a time. Bradley has hit .350 or higher in close to 10% of his 15-game rolling averages.
You can also see how much of the time Bradley has been in the extremes. While Hicks and Norris hit between .150 and .300 close to 70% of the time, Bradley is at just 65.2%. That means JBJ is hitting either below .150 or above .300 close to 35% of the time.
This exercise certainly isn’t meant to give us the full picture of how streaky Bradley is compared to the entire league, but we can at least say his offensive output contains quite a bit more variance than two players whose careers in total look an awful lot like his.
The famine follows the feast follows the famine. Round and round we go.
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