Surprise: Jon Jay is a perfectly good hitter again

This belated thread is brought to you by Jon Jay, at least half of the time. The other half of the time you're beginning to think it should be brought to you by somebody else, on account of his recs-on-balls-in-play average was always a little high even when he was doing well, and Oscar Taveras is right there.

.728 is the highest Jon Jay's OPS has been since May 27, and it's been a long time coming—he's now hitting .339/.392/.505 in the second half. League-average OPS, above-average OBP, everybody's happy. (He's also set a career high in walks, which is a comfort to those of us who worried about his BAbip all these years.)

For a guy whose first three seasons produced a nearly identical 112-3 OPS+, Jay's rarely looked like "himself" for any length of time. After his 2010 call-up he hit .431 for a month and then didn't do much of anything, putting up a .661 OPS in August and slugging .269 in September. He repeated the trick in 2011, hitting .397 in May and .280/.324/.396 the rest of the way. 2012? On May 5 he was hitting .405; he hit .285/.357/.377 the rest of the way, basically where he is now.

It's not that anybody is as consistent as his baseball card would indicate—only that with Jon Jay his every hot streak and cold jag seems to become an outsized part of his narrative that season. We don't quite trust him. But here's to somehow being an above-average hitter all the way through arbitration.