Katie Stratman-Imagn Images

Not very much has gone right in Cincinnati this season. Having fought through injuries, slumps from key hitters, and total no-shows from their closer and the back end of their rotation, the Reds sit just under .500, which in the surprisingly competitive NL Central is good for last place. It’s not how the Reds wanted to build on their playoff appearance a year ago.

One of the few bright spots has been JJ Bleday, who’s hitting .270/.363/.568. Despite appearing in just 39 of Cincinnati’s 67 games, he’s third on the team with 11 home runs and tied for fourth in total bases.

Unlike other Reds standouts, like Sal Stewart and Chase Burns, Bleday wasn’t really expected to do much. The Reds picked him up off the street for $1.4 million after the A’s non-tendered him last November. I was about to make a joke about what it says that Bleday couldn’t even stick in Sacramento, but the A’s are actually pretty deep at his position. At any rate, he was just below replacement level in 98 games in 2025 — that’ll get you non-tendered anywhere.

I get why the Reds wanted him; in 2024, he hit 20 homers and posted a 120 wRC+ while playing mostly in center field. Bleday also had a strong prospect pedigree, as the no. 4 overall pick in the 2019 draft; the next two players off the board were Riley Greene and CJ Abrams. Maybe that elite talent would still be in there. If not, all Cincinnati needed was a lefty bench bat and someone who could occasionally spell Spencer Steer or Noelvi Marte.

Even so, I would’ve looked elsewhere. Bleday’s defensive metrics cratered in 2024; if he was ever a competent center fielder, he isn’t any longer. He’d just hit .212/.294/.404, which just isn’t good enough even for part-time work, especially if you can’t play center field.

And that top-five pick sheen wore off quickly. This is a 28-year-old corner outfielder with neither elite speed and athleticism nor elite raw power. Thinking about his draft status just makes me sad.

If you’ve spent any time in a big city in the Northeast or Europe — really, anywhere that’s old enough to have meaningful architectural heritage — you’ll see the city’s grand old edifices renovated to serve the flimsy frivolities of postmodernity. The old art deco post office is now a coworking space. The Louis Sullivan building is an Orangetheory. This building that used to be a theater is now a Burger King. (OK, bad example — Burger Kings are depressing everywhere.)

Maybe I’ve just listened to “Big Yellow Taxi” too many times, but I get that feeling when former top prospects turn into interchangeable role players. Seldom more so than when the Marlins traded Bleday to Oakland for A.J. Puk, one of the most dominant college starters I’d ever seen, by then a middle reliever.

If you’re going to bring in some minimum-salary nobody to hit 10 dingers in 300 plate appearances and post a .290 OBP, you don’t need name recognition.

Or so I thought. Because the Bleday we’re seeing now is not the Bleday of last season. Last year, Bleday had a .276 xwOBA. This year, he’s up to .380 (all the stats from here on out are through Tuesday’s action). You know how many players in the league have made bigger strides from 2025 to 2026? Zero!

In this vast and mysterious and ungovernable sport of ours, we often search for answers and come back with nothing but a set of more difficult questions. This is not one of those cases.

You want to know why Bleday added 50-odd points of wOBA from last year to this year? He’s hitting the ball harder.

Bleday’s EV90 is 105.3 mph, a full mile an hour faster than his previous career high. His barrel rate, 12.3%, beats his previous career high by almost half. His hard-hit rate, 47.4%, also beats his previous career high of 38.7%.

Bleday has always biased his swing for pull-side power in the air, but he’s only gotten more extreme in that respect. He’s pulling 52.6% of his batted balls, which puts him in the top 10% of all hitters with 150 or more plate appearances. His pulled air rate is 32.5%, which is up 7.6 percentage points from last year, and ranks ninth out of 333 hitters on the Baseball Savant leaderboard. This is Kyle Schwarber–Cal Raleigh–Isaac Paredes territory.

That in-air pull rate is buoyed by an increase in his line drive rate from 15.7% last year to 24.6% now. Bleday’s GB/FB ratio, which also dropped 20 points year-over-year, would have you believe he’s hitting more fly balls. That’s not the case: He’s turned about a quarter of his grounders into line drives, which is even better.

By any measure you want to use, Bleday is making better contact than ever. Does that mean he’s making better swing decisions?

You bet it does!

Bleday has always been a reasonably patient hitter, but last year, he dropped into the realm of passivity, swinging at just 63.7% of pitches in the strike zone. You can get away with that if you do enough damage; Bleday’s teammate at the time, Nick Kurtz, swung at just 63.9% of pitches in the zone. But he slugged .720 on those pitches; Bleday slugged just .464.

This year, Bleday is swinging at 68.9% of pitches in the zone, making contact at a slightly higher rate, and more or less matching Kurtz’s power numbers: .632 SLG/.588 xSLG for Kurtz, .640 SLG/.577 xSLG for Bleday.

Wow, that’s quite an improvement. Maybe that means Bleday has changed something in his swing.

Boy, has he ever. Bleday has goosed his average swing speed from 71.7 mph last year to 74.1 this year. I wrote a few weeks ago about how Miguel Vargas of the White Sox has added more bat speed than anyone in the league. Bleday has added the third-most bat speed. Vargas is unusual in that little else about his swing or his game has changed.

By contrast, here’s Bleday in 2024, when he had a 120 wRC+:

And here’s his stance from last year, when he stunk:

Finally, here’s Bleday’s stance this year:

Bleday figured out that he was hitting better with an open stance, and he went back to it. There’s actually more to it than that: He’s also standing an inch or two farther back in the box and an inch or two farther off the plate, with his feet closer together and his stance even more open than it was before. He’s in the Andres Galarraga Zone now.

If you remember Derek Jeter, or if you played as Amir Khan in Backyard Baseball, you know that a closed stance will lead to hitting the ball to the opposite field. Conversely, an open stance leads to pulling the ball more, which Bleday is doing.

Not only is Bleday’s bat moving faster, his swing has gotten shorter. He’s killing breaking pitches — .763 SLG this year, up from .463 last year — and while he continues to struggle against off-speed stuff, his .186 average and .302 SLG against that category is still an improvement from last year, when he batted .060 and slugged .084.

I said earlier that if I were running the Reds, I wouldn’t have signed Bleday. Apparently, Nick Krall didn’t sign Bleday either; he signed someone who looks like Bleday but swings the bat harder and sees the ball better. It’s still early, but as of right now, that looks like a pretty good piece of business.