Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is a land of contrasts
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is a land of contrasts
Part three of a series of Statcast Post-Mortems on some of the Jays' most important and confounding players.
Welcome to part three of my multi-part end-of-season series of Statcast Post-Mortems on some of the Jays’ most important and confounding players.
In part one, where you can also read a preamble explaining the series in a much less concise way than in the sentence above, I looked at the whirlwind success of Bowden Francis. In part two, it was George Springer and how he seems… you know… probably cooked. So, in this edition, we’ll move back into positive territory, taking a look at what the data does and doesn’t say about the exceptional season of the man who will be the Blue Jays’ franchise player for—GULP!—at least one more year: Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s season took off when he started swinging harder. That’s it. That’s the tweet.
I mean, obviously we’ll get into more than just that here, but the story of his comeback season is written pretty clearly in his month-to-month bat tracking data.
Sort of.
Thing is, as I wrote about in my piece on George Springer, this data isn’t always quite as simple as it appears. While player pages at Baseball Savant will show raw bat speed on all pitches, which is what we’re seeing above, their leaderboards only include a player’s fastest 90% of swings, plus any swings greater than 60 mph that produced an exit velocity higher than 90 mph—i.e. they eliminate “swords” (awkward, incomplete swings defined here) and other swings deemed incomplete.
In Springer’s case, this means somehow going from raw numbers to look like this…
…to adjusted month-to-month numbers that look like this, with April actually appearing at the left—easily his worst month for bat speed.
In Vlad’s case, what we can see is that while his bat speed improved after the season’s first month (April is also the farthest left of the months represented below), the more meaningful change appears to have been in the quality of his swings.
Vlad produced his slowest bat speed in April, plus his lowest rates for blasts, squared-up balls, fast swings, and competitive swings—often by pretty significant margins.
Bat speed in April: 75.1 mph
After April: 76.0 mph
Fast swing rate in April: 48.5%
After April: 59.1%
Squared up rate in April: 22.1% on contact, 16.4% of total swings
After April: 36.6% and 29.9%
Blasts in April: 15.6% on contact, 11.5% of total swings
After April: 25.6% and 20.9%
Competitive swings in April: 88.7%
After April: 91.4%
All nine of Vlad’s “swords” also came in the opening two months of the season.
He wasn’t locked in at first, but he certainly got there, didn’t he?
Of course, that hardly counts as news. We all knew that. We saw it. But other than the fact that Vlad may need to change how he ramps up for the season in order to avoid a repeat of his poor start, what does the data tell us?
Some of most interesting stuff, I think, is actually what it doesn’t. It doesn't tell us that he needed to start pulling the ball more in order to get the most out of his bat, as has been repeatedly suggested throughout the years. His 35.3% pull rate was a career low, and well below his overall career rate of 39.7%. His pull rate on fly balls (18.3%) was also well down from his three previous years (~26%).
It doesn't tell us that ground balls were the issue—another thing we’ve heard a lot of chatter about over the years. His 48.1% GB-rate this season was actually higher than it was in his weak 2023 (46.2%). It doesn't tell us that he needs to be chasing launch angle, either. His 7.4° mark exactly matches his career norm, and came in well below the 10.5° one he produced in 2023.
It also doesn’t tell us that Vlad is some kind of a GIDP machine, as he hit into the fewest number of double plays of his career outside of 2020. “Coincidentally,” Vlad batted third in the lineup 122 times, and Jays’ lead-off and two-hole hitters got on base at .297 and .308 clips respectively.1 Weirder still, Aaron Judge batted behind Juan Soto and his .419 OBP all year and hit into nearly 50% more double plays than Vlad did (23 to 16). STRANGE HOW THAT WORKS.
It certainly doesn’t tell us that he only produced once the pressure was off, as a whole lot of fun-hating weirdos seem to have decided. Sure, Vlad didn't slug a ton in May (.469 SLG, .112 ISO), and part of his success was down to a .413 BABIP that month. But he had a 168 wRC+ and he also ranked 16th out of 177 qualified hitters by RE24.
What is RE24? According to Tom Tango, it “is the single most important metric to understand baseball and statistics, and also is the bridge between old-school and new-school.”
FanGraphs’ Ben Clemens touched on this in a great recent piece on the Padres' misuse of Luis Arraez as a leadoff hitter, explaining:
What’s the point of hitting in baseball? It’s to score runs, obviously. There’s a wonderful statistic, RE24, that measures this directly. RE24 is quite simple. It takes the run expectancy of an inning before each plate appearance and compares it to the run expectancy afterward, with the difference credited or debited to the hitter. It’s context-dependent, which is clearly important when you’re talking about scoring runs. Men on second and third with two outs? A single is way better than a walk, and RE24 tells you that: A two-RBI single counts for 1.63 runs above average in that situation, while a walk counts for 0.22 runs. Bases empty to lead off the inning? A walk and a single are the same, 0.4 runs.
Some of the few guys ahead of Vlad on May's RE24 leaderboard? Judge, Ramírez, Seager, Ohtani, Rooker, Harper, Witt, Soto. Add in the fact that the Jays entered June—when Vlad surged to greatness—just 4.5 games back of the third Wild Card spot, and were just 4.5 back with only one team between them and the holders of that spot on June 16th, and I think we can just about end this ridiculousness, eh?
On the other hand, we can see that Vlad is far from unable to hit at the newly reconfigured Rogers Centre. The thing that took his wRC+ all the way down to an unfathomable 118 in 2023 was his awful performance in home games: .238/.324/.391 (98 wRC+). I tend to think his struggles at home last year significantly added to the perception that he was some kind of a spent force or irreparably broken. It was ugly! And yet he’d have been a 137 wRC+ hitter—better than he’d been in 2022 (133)—if we only counted his games played on the road.
None of this was an issue in 2024, as he mashed to a 174 wRC+ at the Rogers Centre and a 154 mark on the road.
We can also see that whatever weird thing happened to his platoon splits in 2022—when he hit right-handed pitching to the tune of a 139 wRC+ but was exactly league average (100) against lefties somehow—doesn't appear to be anything to worry about. He's now had two straight years with those splits ending up within four points of each other.
Interestingly, what we can maybe see the very most—more than a lot of players and certainly more than with a guy like Springer…
…or Judge…
…or Bo Bichette…
…—is that Vlad goes as his exit velocity goes.
Here we’re using hard hit rate because that’s all FanGraphs has available in their graphs tool, but the result would be the same. For all of the words and energy expended trying to figure out the source of his weird dips in 2022 and ‘23, outside of the shortened 2020 season, Vlad’s productivity at the plate has hewn remarkably close to the rate at which he hits the ball hard.
Now, there’s likely some chicken-and-egg in there. The years when he’s been seeing the ball better, and more locked-in mechanically, could very well be the years when he’s been able to strike the ball harder. I might not be advising him to go out there purely chasing exit velo if I was the Jays’ new hitting coach, David Popkins—and speaking of him, I’ll have some thoughts on that addition for paid subscribers in an upcoming episode of Deranged Factor—but clearly very good things happen when Vlad is hitting the ball really friggin’ hard.
There’s also potentially some injury factor in there, too. We don’t know the full extent of the wrist injury that forced him out of the 2022 Home Run Derby, or the knee injury that he dealt with early and again late last year (“from head to toes” is what he said back in the spring when asked where he’d been hurting during his 2023 campaign), but it’s plausible they played a role in him not looking himself, both physically and mechanically.
Whatever it was, in 2022 and 2023, his percentile rankings for xwOBA, xBA, xSLG, Average Exit Velo, and Hard-Hit% ranged from 85th to 96th. In 2021 and 2024 they ranged from 97th to 100th. Not massive differences relative to his peers, and still very good, but meaningful enough to make entire seasons underwhelm.
He should keep doing the second thing. For many, many more years in a Blue Jays uniform.
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