A baseball season features its full complement of ups and downs, and everyone seems to have a metaphor to try to explain the phenomenon. Red Sox manager Terry Francona often describes how players “find their levels.”

Dustin Pedroia has taken the notion one step further in explaining his diminished productivity at the start of 2011.

“You get in the elevator and go up to the top,” Pedroia told reporters in Cleveland following the Red Sox’ 14-2 demolition of the Indians. (Recap.) “You have to start somewhere.”

For Pedroia, who hit his first homer since April 15 on Wednesday – ending a 136 at-bat drought, the starting point is near ground level. The second baseman is off to his most challenging start to a season since his rookie season of 2007.

Even then, though he carried a .172 average and .518 OPS on May 1, he managed to transform his numbers in a matter of weeks. By the end of May, he had pulled his average above .300, and the Laser Show was in full effect.

This year, in Pedroia’s return from the broken foot that sidelined him for all but two games over the final three-plus months of 2010 and that ultimately required the insertion of a screw to promote healing, the slump has lingered longer.

Pedroia burst out of the gates, with three straight three-hit games in the season’s early days. Through April 15, he was hitting .348 with a .988 OPS and two homers.

And then, nothing. Over 34 games from April 16 through Tuesday, Pedroia’s numbers were almost unrecognizable for a player

Over the 34-game span, he hit .211 with a .342 OBP, .226 slugging mark and .567 OPS. He had just two extra-base hits (both doubles) during that spell. While he at least remained a consistent on-base presence thanks to an unusually high number of walks, even that trait may have represented part of the problem.

A year ago, in 351 plate appearances, Pedroia walked 37 times and struck out on 38 occasions. This year, in less than two-thirds of those at bats (220), he has already matched those totals, walking 32 times and striking out on 36 occasions.

He is walking in 14.6 percent of his plate appearances, a significant increase over his career rate of 9.2 percent. Similarly, he is striking out at a career-high rate of 16.4 percent, double his career norm of 8.2 percent. He has swung-and-missed 75 times (in 406 swings) this year, more than the 71 times he came up empty (in 644 swings) last year, and nearly matching the 81 swings and misses he had in 154 games, 714 plate appearances and 1,097 swings in 2009.

Simply put, Pedroia hasn’t been putting the barrel on the ball with his typical frequency. Whereas in the past, he’s had limited walks and strikeouts because he makes hard contact and drives the ball somewhere when he swings – the byproduct of freakish hand-eye coordination – this year, he’s been making weaker contact, fouling balls off or missing altogether.

All of that, of course, makes it natural to wonder about the impact of the screw in his foot. While Pedroia concedes that there’s an adjustment involved, he also downplays its impact.

“I’m pretty violent on my front side and it’s my front foot. You know, I don’t think that has anything to do with it,” Pedroia told reporters. “I’ll be fine. I have 400 more at-bats to rake.

“It’s just taken some time to get used to,” he added. “Some days it feels good, other days it doesn’t. I don’t think it’s affected me that much.”

That said, the second baseman did acknowledge that his foot felt better on Wednesday, following just his second off-day of the season. And after the off-day – which followed the stinger he suffered to his surgically repaired foot on Monday – he ended a streak of 34 games without a homer, the second longest of his career.

Only time will tell whether the longball in Cleveland marked the start of one of the second baseman’s signature hot streaks, in which he scalds everything in sight for a period of a couple weeks.

About a year ago, it is worth remembering, Pedroia was amidst a similar funk to the one that has characterized his 2011 season. Over a span of just over four weeks, he hit .181 with a .569 OPS and one homer. He assured everyone then that he would snap out of it, and he was right – over the next 14 games, he hit .491 with four homers and a 1.397 OPS, a spectacular run that came to a sudden halt when he broke his foot.

This year, Pedroia anticipates, he will have a similar run to bring his performance back to more customary levels – one that he hopes will not come to the same crashing halt. Instead, whether Wednesday marked the beginning of it or not, Pedroia expects that the elevator will soon collect him and take him to a level with a better view.

“The last probably three weeks that I’ve had a tough time. you go through that. But there will be three weeks where I can’t get out,” he told reporters. “Think of it like this, I’m on level four right now. We have to go to level 10. I’m hitting .240-whatever. Six more stops.”