Joc Pederson’s OPS was 234 points lower after the All-Star break (.617) than before (.851).    (Getty Images)

This is Part 35 of a series in which every member of the 2015 Dodgers has his season juxtaposed with an episode of the greatest sitcom of all-time. Don’t take it too seriously.

Joc Pederson, CF

Key stats: .210/.346/.417, 26 home runs, 170 strikeouts in 585 plate appearances; -3 DRS, -3.9 UZR, -1.8 dWAR in 147 games in center field.

Seinfeld episode: “The Betrayal” (Season 9, Episode 8)

One hundred eighty episodes of Seinfeld went to production in the show’s history. All of the episodes were told in a traditional, chronological order with one exception: “The Betrayal,” which was shown backwards, one scene at a time.

On a related note, here were Joc Pederson’s month-by-month hitting totals in his rookie year:

Because these numbers were so completely unexpected, they were fairly well-chronicled. We’ll get to the reasons behind those numbers in a minute.

First, a thought exercise. Imagine if those numbers played out in reverse. Imagine that Pederson were hitting .170 three months into the season. Maybe he would have gone to Triple-A for a time to work on his mechanics. Then, maybe his gradual improvement in the season’s final three months would have fit nicely into a familiar narrative. Pederson would be getting better as he got closer to his baseball prime. Fans would be optimistic about Year 2.

Of course, that’s not what happened.

Never a contact hitter, Pederson relied on keen discipline and prodigious power to move up the lineup early in the season. It was a big deal when Pederson supplanted Jimmy Rollins as the Dodgers’ leadoff hitter on April 29. In that game, he drew a walk, hit a home run and struck out. It was generally accepted that this type of performance was typical of who Pederson was as a hitter.

Then, over the next few months, Pederson’s strikeouts went up. His walks and home runs went down. Opposing pitchers figured out how to crack Pederson’s impeccable plate discipline by widening his strike zone and lengthening his swing.

On July 29, Pederson was dropped from the leadoff spot when manager Don Mattingly noticed that the rookie “seemed frustrated.” In the coming days, Pederson began to shorten his swing and used it to get over his worst slump of the season. But the fact remained that Pederson was not nearly as dangerous in August and September as he was in April. In the playoffs, Pederson began three of the Dodgers’ five games against the Mets on the bench.

And so, the question of whether Pederson could ever get back to being the .298/.461/.596 hitter he was in April lingered into the off-season. Even president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman admitted that he can only hope Pederson hits well enough in 2016 to be a starter again.

Pederson is only 23. If nothing else, he’s got time.

For our purposes, the plot of “The Betrayal” is secondary to the whole backwards thing. If told forwards, “The Betrayal” would crudely reveal Elaine and Jerry as people who, respectively, can’t keep a friend’s secret and can sleep with his best friend’s girlfriend. Those details seem a bit funnier when revealed in reverse. Maybe it’s better that way: