Zach Wilt: Taking a look at Adam Jones' hot streak

Over the past week, no hitter has been better for the Orioles than Adam Jones. In 33 plate appearances, he has slashed .394/.394/.758. He's belted three homers, just one shy of All-Star Jonathan Schoop, and driven in nine while scoring seven times. Jones leads the O's in wOBA (.478) and wRC+ (205) over the last seven days.

It's one of those classic stretches for the Orioles center fielder. We have seen No. 10 heat up like this countless times over his decade in Baltimore. On July 17, he was hitting just .258. Today on July 28, he's bumped that batting average up to .276.

There's something different about how Jones has been making contact lately compared to what we saw earlier in the season. The ball is flying off his bat and it's a noticeable change. I dug into the Orioles' batted ball statistics on FanGraphs.com over the last seven days and discovered that Jones is making hard contact 55.2 percent of the time, ranking just a tick behind Manny Machado (56 percent) for the club lead over that span. This season, Jones has made hard contact a respectable 31.3 percent of the time and has averaged 31.8 percent over his career. For perspective, the league average this season has been 32.1 percent. Jones has been crushing opponents' pitches.

Jones has always been a pull hitter, and 40.3 percent of the balls he puts in play are hit to the third base side of the field. Over the last seven days, there hasn't been much of a change in that department. He's pulling just above his season average at 41.4 percent. The only change I took note of was the fact that he's hitting the opposite way 7 percent more over the last week than he has this season. With some added pop, Jones is finding success by going the other way and spraying the ball around the field. In doing so, he's avoiding the deepest part of the yard, center field, by finding gaps in the corners.

It's easy to pinpoint these changes and highlight a hot streak, but getting to what's causing it is the true challenge. For a veteran like Jones, it could be a combination of factors. For starters, baseball players go through these kind of hot streaks. That's a boring answer, but it's one of the most logical. He's bound to go through stretches where he's one of the league's best hitters because he's that talented.

That's not a fun answer though. What else could we go with? The obvious change Jones has recently undergone has been the consistently at which Buck Showalter his listed him atop the Orioles lineup. Jones has hit leadoff for the Birds in 13 consecutive games. Coincidentally, he's hit .333/.377/.614 in 61 plate appearances during that span. Over his career, Jones has been effective in that role. He's hit .280/.320/.454 in 651 plate appearances. He's not your prototypical leadoff guy, but he's been getting on base over the last two weeks and Showalter continues to go with him. Perhaps Jones is comfortable in that spot and the result has been this recent hot streak.

The last reason I could conclude is a bit harder to measure. I have always considered Jones the face of this Orioles club. He was the player that the team was built around during the lean years and grew into an important role as the clubhouse leader. I can't think of a better guy for that position. With the uncertainty of the Orioles' future not only at the trade deadline, but also in the years to come, it's possible that Jones has stepped up once again at a critical turning point for the organization. No one wants to win more than Jones and I am certain that he feels this club can still achieve their goals in 2017. He's doing everything in his power to avoid making Dan Duquette sell at the deadline.

Like everything in this wacky game of baseball, it's likely a combination of several factors. I'm sure Jones has found his groove at the plate, likes batting leadoff and wants to propel the Orioles to October. It's all come together to form a hot streak that has been fun to watch as a fan and important for his club.

Zach Wilt blogs about the Orioles at Baltimore Sports Report. Follow him on Twitter: @zach_wilt. His views appear here as part of MASNsports.com's season-long initiative of welcoming guest bloggers to our pages. All opinions expressed are those of the guest bloggers, who are not employed by MASNsports.com but are just as passionate about their baseball as our roster of writers.