Bradley assuages Red Sox concerns
With a voice as gentle as an evening breeze and barely more audible, Jackie Bradley Jr. speaks softly. The problem was, for much of the last three seasons, so had his bat.
A former South Carolina star, Bradley has been a superb outfielder, one of the best in baseball, and the promise he showed in the Boston Red Sox system was a reason the team didn’t bust its budget two years ago to retain center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury. But then every time the Red Sox gave Bradley an opportunity, he showed them he couldn’t hit major league pitching — until now.
The New York Yankees were witnesses to this awakening this week. Until reliever Dellin Betances struck out Bradley to end the eighth inning Tuesday night, he had been 5-for-5 with three doubles and three runs scored in two games. During his last 21 games, Bradley is batting .426 with five home runs among 19 extra-base hits and 23 runs batted in.
“I feel comfortable,” Bradley said. “I’m putting good swings on the pitches, making a lot of solid contact. I’m in one of those streaks where you try to ride it out as long as you can.”
In what has become another lost season for the Red Sox, who suddenly seem incapable of doing anything other than winning the World Series or finishing last in the American League East, there are signs of promise in the rubble that prompted the recent hiring of Dave Dombrowski as the top baseball executive to chart a new course.
They exist largely in the outfield, where Mookie Betts, Rusney Castillo and Bradley — ages 22, 28 and 25 — appear to be foundational pieces.
The question about Bradley has not been his glove but his bat.
After helping South Carolina to back-to-back College World Series titles - he was the Series’ most outstanding player in 2010 — Bradley was the 40th overall pick in 2011. He has hit well in the minor leagues, with a career .853 on-base-plus-slugging percentage, which is often a predictor of major league success. This season, he batted .305 at Class AAA Pawtucket.
But it wasn’t translating in Boston.
Bradley was a sensation in spring training in 2013, and had a strong debut in the season-opening series at Yankee Stadium. But he quickly tailed off and was sent back to the minor leagues.
Given the opportunity to play in the majors often last year, he batted .198 in 127 games. It seemed more of the same when he arrived at the end of July and had one hit in his first 20 at-bats.
But in early August, Bradley said, he incorporated a small leg kick, which he used in college, to help with his timing. He has been better at not pulling off the ball, and his numbers have taken off.
This sort of progression is not unusual.
“To expect a guy in his second or third full season of professional baseball to be good at the major league level is unfair,” said Andrew Miller, the Yankees’ closer, who was a teammate of Bradley’s in Boston for a year and a half. “Some guys, when the time frame gets sped up a little, can struggle. People think every prospect should be Mike Trout — it’s the world we live in now. It used to be guys came up, you kind of hid them, you broke them in. There are great players that it has taken them time to figure it out. It’s a hard game.”
Bradley has made it easier on himself by being more coachable. It bothered some people in the organization that he was not communicative, preferring to work in relative silence and sometimes on his own. But the team’s hitting coach, Chili Davis, said Bradley had shown an increased willingness to express what he was working on or thinking at the plate, which isn’t only a sign of maturity but also a key to consistency.
“When you’re going well it’s not just ride it through and when you’re going bad you’re lost,” Davis said. “You need to know what you’re doing when you’re going well so that when things start to slip away — not when they’re gone — you can feel it and say, uh-oh, I need to fix this before it gets real bad. That’s hitting: maintaining, not fixing.”