BRADENTON -- Baseball is fun again for Calvin Anderson.

He is hitting for power, hitting for average and walking up to the plate with an air of confidence.

A month ago, Anderson, a designated hitter in his second season with the Single-A Bradenton Marauders, wasn’t having much fun at all. He wasn’t hitting much either and watched his average plummet to .178 on May 20.

That was then.

“You know whatever the pitcher throws, he’s not going to fool you,” Anderson said Wednesday. “You’re just so confident that you’re just waiting for him to throw the ball.”

It’s doubtful pitchers are as eager to face Anderson as he is to face them. He got the day off Wednesday, when the Marauders capped the first half of the Florida State League season with a 5-4 victory over Jupiter.

So when Bradenton begins the second half tonight in Fort Myers, Anderson will be riding a 10-game hitting streak and a white-hot surge that has seen his average spike 77 points to .254. He’s batting .375 in June and is 18-for-41 (.439) with four home runs during his streak.

“His bat is back to being quicker, and his at-bats look comfortable,” said Marauders second baseman Jarek Cunningham. “He has all the confidence in the world right now.”

Anderson’s recent run begun with a small mechanical tweak: He simply lowered his hands while in his batting stance, putting the 6-foot-7 righty in a better position to explode at the ball.

“Once I did that, I gained more confidence,” he said, “because I started impacting the ball a lot better. It enabled me to be more confident at the plate and doing what I wanted to do instead of guessing.”

Rather than letting the pitcher dictate an at-bat, Anderson is now in full control. Rather than flailing at a slider away, he sits back and waits for his pitch.

“It’s a combination of things all coming together at once,” he said.

There were other factors in play, too. A first baseman last summer, Anderson is now a full-time designated hitter. Instead of being involved in nearly every play, Anderson sits the bench and waits for his turn to hit.

It wasn’t an easy adjustment.

“It’s pretty difficult. You’re sitting for a long time, and you finally get the opportunity to hit, and you want to help the team out so bad,” Anderson said. “And if you don’t do it, you’ve got to go back and sit down for another three innings. I’m learning to adjust well with it to do what I need to do before my at-bats.

“It’s a process you need to learn.”

Anderson can say the same thing about baseball in general. He has already hit 12 home runs after hitting 11 in 125 games last year, and he’s slugging .505, nearly 70 points higher than his career mark.

But he also has struck out 76 times. Entering Wednesday, that was the second-highest total in the FSL.

That’s the life of a baseball player. And Anderson is learning more about it with each passing day.

“You just have to know when you’re playing baseball there’s going to be so many ups and downs, you can’t get too high or too low,” he said. “Even when I was hitting bad, I was coming to the ballpark with a better attitude than I had before. So that’s what I’ve learned in minor-league baseball, to take the highs with the lows.”