Jackie Bradley Jr.’s ‘Freakish Talent’ and Determination Spark Playoff Spurt

BOSTON — Work gets done in the shadows. Long before the spotlight found him in the American League Championship Series and well before the bright lights will shine on him this week as the Boston Red Sox play in their fourth World Series in 14 years, Jackie Bradley Jr.‘s grunts and groans led him to this moment.

It was May, and his hitting was stinking worse than a campground outhouse.

So around 2 p.m. before every night game, Bradley had a standing appointment with hitting coach Tim Hyers in the indoor batting cage of whatever ballpark they were at. It wasn’t ever formalized. Hyers just knew. The routine was the same: Get to the park; head to the cage, 2, 2:15; there was Jackie. And the process continued: Thwack! … “Your hips are rotating too fast.” … Thwack! … “Stay back on the ball!” … Thwack! … “Let’s check your hands.”

He couldn’t buy a hit. Couldn’t find a hole. Squibbers wouldn’t squib, and bleeders wouldn’t bleed. He was rolling over on pitches, and second basemen throughout the American League reaped the benefits, scooping up easy ground balls night after night.

“It was weaker contact,” Hyers says. “And he was like: ‘Hey, I don’t care what we do, let’s keep working. I’m better than this, and I’m going to be there. You guys hang with me, and we’ll work through this.’”

He was in the right place, and with the right team.

Because here’s the thing about the 2018 Red Sox: You don’t steamroll through a summer to a franchise-record 108 wins without a pretty cool benefits package coming with it.

And in Bradley’s case, the benefits were these: The constant winning gave him cover in the lineup as he worked to figure it out. And, if there’s one thing this particular group of Red Sox does more than win, it’s rally around a teammate when he’s down. Particularly a beloved teammate like the man they know as JBJ.

“Speechless,” Bradley said the other night in Houston after his two homers and nine RBI earned him the ALCS Most Valuable Player Award.

“It’s amazing. I have amazing teammates, amazing staff. Everybody’s such a blessing.”

There are only two other Boston players who have had more than Bradley’s nine RBI in an ALCS: David Ortiz (11, in 2004) and Manny Ramirez (10, 2007). And yet Bradley wasn’t even supposed to be here on Opening Day, let alone now. When Boston signed free agent slugger J.D. Martinez to a $110 million deal in February, most folks figured Bradley’s ticket out of town came with it. The Sox already had Andrew Benintendi and Mookie Betts. Now here came the new savior, Martinez.

While armchair general managers across the land speculated on a new home for Bradley, he simply kept his head down and pushed forward.

“No, I was not worried,” he says of the potential of a trade. “It was something out of my control.

“But I’m glad J.D. is here, and I’m glad to still be here. This is what we’ve all wanted to do, go to the World Series. And, ultimately, we want to win the whole thing.”

The Red Sox fooled people. Martinez settled mostly into the designated hitter role, and Bradley continued playing Gold Glove-caliber defense in center field. But as the team raced to a 17-2 start, Bradley was left behind. And it wasn’t getting any better.

One month into the season, he was hitting .195 with a .290 on-base percentage. Two months in, he was at .199 with a .292 OBP. And at the end of June, he was at .200 and .289.

As one of the most popular players in the Red Sox clubhouse, Bradley’s locker became a prime tourist area for empathetic colleagues: Betts, Hyers, Dustin Pedroia, assistant hitting coach Andy Barkett and, especially, first-year manager Alex Cora. All rallied around Bradley during his darkest moments and championed him at every opportunity.

“Asking him, ‘How ya doin’?’ Things like that,” Pedroia says. “He’s always going to say, ‘Good.’ But just putting a hand on him sometimes gets him going.”

As spring became summer, the feeling among many grew stronger: This Red Sox team was becoming a machine, and while Bradley’s defense remained spectacular, patience isn’t exactly overflowing for those who look helpless at the plate. Externally, the howls grew louder: Trade him. Bench him. Do something.

“What you’re trying to figure out is how you get him out of it,” says Dave Dombrowski, Boston’s president of baseball operations. “Other people are saying, ‘Get rid of him.’ We never think that way. It’s like: ‘OK, we know this guy’s a good player and will contribute. How do we get him out of it? Give him some days off? Rest him versus lefties?’”

By late May, Bradley statistically was one of the worst hitters of any starting player in the majors. He went through one stretch that month in which he was flummoxed by fastballs, striking out 18 times in a 10-game stretch.

In June, though he reduced his strikeouts, he still wasn’t getting results, except in one category: Boston’s analytics staff saw that he ranked toward the top of the league in percentage of hard-hit balls (defined as exit velocity at 95 mph or higher). At season’s end, Bradley ranked 12th among the 338 players listed in that category, per baseballsavant.com.

It was this nugget of information Cora took to Bradley during one of their frequent talks. The manager delivered this message: Just slow it down. The game, the at-bats, everything. Don’t press. You’re hitting the ball too hard not to come out of this. You’re going to be fine.

“It’s a credit to Alex to step in [at that point] and say, ‘Hey, man, I believe in you,’” Hyers says. “It’s how he communicates with his players.”

It was especially a credit because Cora is a rookie manager. His natural instinct could have been to bail on an unproductive player for self-preservation. He didn’t.

Cora checks in with just about every player every day—even if it’s just with a quick, cheerful hello—and one of Cora’s memorable drive-bys with Bradley came when the Red Sox were playing at Yankee Stadium in May. Memorable, at least, to Hyers, who was nearby and remembers Cora simply telling Bradley that day, ‘Hey, man, I’ve got your back.’”

Betts knew it would only be a matter of time before his friend got going. He knows him too well. The two were both drafted by the Sox in 2011—Bradley 40th overall, Betts in the fifth round—and they roomed together in the instructional league that fall. Bradley was one year removed from being named the College World Series Most Outstanding Player while at the University of South Carolina.

“I was in awe,” Betts says. “I watched the College World Series, then I walk into my hotel room in instructs, and it’s Jackie there. It took me a second to kind of realize. I didn’t want to be a fanboy.”

The two quickly developed a bond. Over the years, Betts has learned not to underestimate Bradley.

“He’s just a normal dude, a normal dude with freakish talent,” Betts says. “I acted normal with him and knew that when we stepped on the baseball field [together], he’s about to show something special.”

Hyers, too, has history with Bradley. Now in his first season as Boston’s hitting coach following two years as the Los Angeles Dodgers’ assistant hitting coach, Hyers had been Boston’s minor league hitting coordinator from 2013 to 2015. It was during that time that he developed a relationship—and trust—with Bradley.

Together as this summer unspooled, they figured out Bradley needed a stronger base—better balance in his lower half—and to slow down the rotation of his hips. They were firing too quickly during his swings and pulling him off the ball, which delayed his hands enough to have a negative effect.

“His direction to the ball is better,” Hyers says. “He has incredible hands, and I think sometimes his body gets in the way and makes it difficult for him to get to the contact point consistently.”

Finally, there was a breakthrough. After the All-Star Game, Bradley hit .269/.340/.487, as compared with .210/.297/.345 before it. To those watching him every day, the improvement came in leaps and bounds. To those simply looking at the box scores, well, his numbers were so low for so long that they were never going to spring back noticeably.

His bat is staying in the strike zone longer now, and the lefty is driving more balls the opposite way, to left field, which is a very good sign.

Nobody is expecting a future batting champion: Lifetime into this season, Bradley’s slash line was .239/.318/.407, and his second-half improvement simply pulled his 2018 numbers in line with those: .234/.314/.403. And he’s susceptible to left-handed pitching (.185/.260/.303 in ’18), which could be problematic against Dodgers starters Clayton Kershaw, Hyun-Jin Ryu and Rich Hill in the World Series.

But this also is a guy who slammed a career-high 26 home runs in 2016, punched 17 last year and 13 this year, including eight out of the No. 9 hole. And, his ALCS power show (grand slam in Game 3, go-ahead homer in Game 4) is still hot out of the oven.

“He’s always been a guy who’s dangerous when he gets going,” Dombrowski says. “When he gets hot, he gets hot. Now what we’re trying to do is create a time period when he gets hot—not quite like this, although we like this to be there all of the time—but then doesn’t drop off quite so much.

“We’ve gotten much more of that the second half of the season. When he’s at the bottom of the order, he’s a threat down there. And then you hit him in front of Mookie [who bats leadoff], well, people are not going to pitch around him by any means.”

Already looking ahead to the middle three games of the Fall Classic in Los Angeles, where they will lose the DH because of National League rules, the Red Sox are working out the Gold Glover Betts at second base. They will have to do something, because Betts, Bradley, Benintendi and Martinez don’t all fit in the outfield.

That this is a conversation is an enormous compliment to Bradley, whose importance is especially intriguing now considering the trade whispers and his wretched first half.

“We’ve been through the ranks together,” Betts says. “It’s one of those things where I can live next to him and know we’ve been together every step of the way. I know what kind of player he is. He’s proven it, he’s proving it now, he proved it [in the ALCS].

“He’s not just a glove out there. He can do it all.”

As the champagne sprayed the other night in Houston, it sure seemed like it.

“All of my hitting coaches and the coaching staff, they’d sit there and watch me day in and day out, constantly put work in … and they’d say: ‘That’s OK, that’s OK. At the end of the year, you’re going to do something special,’” Bradley says.

“So it’s pretty cool to be sitting here with y’all and being able to hold the MVP trophy. They were right.”

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report. Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.