MIAMI _ JJ Bleday's marathon of a 2019 baseball season is finally nearing its conclusion.
It started with a four-month college season that ended with Bleday hitting an NCAA-leading 27 home runs as his Vanderbilt Commodores winning the College World Series on June 26. It continued after the Miami Marlins selected him with the No. 4 overall pick in the 2019 MLB Draft and sent him directly to the Class A Advanced Jupiter Hammerheads. He made his professional debut on July 20 and played 38 games with the Hammerheads.
And now, for one more week, he will take the fields at the Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium complex in Jupiter to finish up the Marlins' three-week instructional league camp, an opportunity to get a few more at-bats in an organized setting before transitioning to an offseason regiment.
"I'm feeling good," Bleday said. "I thought I handled it really well. I thought my body handled it really well."
It showed _ after some early struggles.
Bleday, the No. 30 overall prospect in baseball according to MLB Pipeline, hit his stride during the final three weeks of the minor-league season. The 21-year-old, left-handed-hitting outfielder posted a .310 batting average (26 for 84) during his final 23 games with the Hammerheads with seven doubles, two home runs, 11 RBI and 11 runs scored to close out the year. He recorded hits in all but four of those contests and strung together a career-best 11-game hitting streak from Aug. 8 to Aug. 20.
"He's got a great swing and a great tempo to his game," Marlins director of player development Dick Scott said. "Sometimes baseball players need to have a good pace. They're not too frantic, they're not too wound up, and he has a great pace to his game and it's hard to teach; he just shows up.
"He has kind of that it factor, although it's a little calmer."
Bleday leaned on his teammates in Jupiter as much as the coaching staff to improve in his first year of professional baseball. The adjustments, he said, were more mental than physical _ figuring out how to build on his early failures and help him improve his game.
"It took a little bit," Bleday said. "I knew I had to be patient with it. It's not one of those things where you can just come out and take off. ... The quicker you can adjust, the quicker you can accept what you're doing and the better you can be."
It's the first step of what the Marlins hope is a short minor-league career for Bleday. A call-up at some point during the 2021 season would not be questioned if he continues on his early trajectory.
Bleday, however, knows he can't put his focus on that just yet.
"You have a goal that you want to make it to the big leagues," Bleday said, "but there's no preset date on that. That's something that you can't control. All you can control is your effort and your attitude. That's going to put you in a position to get you on the field."
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