What’s behind Bruce’s slugging rebound?

It seems likely Jay Bruce is going to be moved before Monday’s non-waiver Trade Deadline. That much is clear. With a hitting line of .271/.323/.572, he’s having the best offensive year of his career, immediately after having his two worst years, hitting .222/.288/.406 over 2014-15. That much, also, is clear.

But what’s far less clear is why exactly Bruce is having such a return to form this year. Even Bruce himself doesn’t seem to know, at least if he was being honest in speaking to local media earlier this week. That’s a big deal, because if teams are going to give up the big return Cincinnati is looking for in order to acquire Bruce, they need to be pretty certain they’re getting the version we’re seeing now, and not the version we saw over the last two years.

Yet it’s not as simple as it looks. Bruce is actually not hitting the ball harder than he did last year, as his average exit velocity has dropped from 90.5 mph to 89.4 mph. His overall launch angle is different by less than a degree, which is negligible. Bruce is striking out less than he has since 2009, but he’s also walking less than he has. So what is it? Let’s put out a theory: It’s about being healthy, and about using the whole field.

Bruce has always been something of a pull hitter (just look at this spray chart of his home runs since 2012), but he’d managed to have success to the opposite field, too. For example, in 2013, he hit .396 with a .694 slugging percentage when going to the left side. Yet in the aftermath of his 2014 knee surgery, that skill was largely lost. Bruce hit .254/.313 to left field that year, and .242/.374 in 2015. (His numbers right up the middle followed the same trajectory.) Meanwhile, his pull power numbers were largely unaffected; he’s slugged between .700 and .800 on pulled balls each of the past four seasons.

Opposing teams follow these trends, of course, and they reacted. In 2013, Bruce saw shifts when he put the ball in play 133 times. So far this year, with a third of the season yet to play, that’s already up to 224 times, or nearly 81 percent. Even just last year, it was only 55 percent. (Obviously, all of baseball has seen a …

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