Half a season at half-a-billion...

What's up with Vlad? (Plus some housekeeping!)

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“Hey Vladdy, how many total bases in one plate appearance is too many?”

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. started at first base for the American League in the All-Star Game this week in Atlanta. And—would you believe?—he took a sinker over the heart of the plate and turned it into a single?

That is, of course, a fine enough and unsurprising outcome. Unsurprising because Vlad’s great at getting hits. Unsurprising because he didn’t send it to the moon.

Vlad has been brutal by his own lofty standards here in July, sitting currently with a wRC+ of just 87 for the month. But a catch-all number like that doesn’t quite get to the nut of what’s making people so understandably cranky about his performances of late.

The new mega-contract will make him an even easier target when he struggles than in years past, which is part of it. And some of it is to do with the way he’s looked at the plate, and especially the way he’s looked when it matters—exemplified by the game-ending double-play he hit into to close out the club’s ugly first-half-ending Oakland series.

Fans lately have been getting the sense that Vlad shrinks from big moments, and they can be forgiven somewhat for thinking that. He’s produced just a 33 wRC+ in high leverage situations since the start of May. Go back to the start of last August and he has a 54 wRC+ in high leverage.

Concerning? It says here “no.” We’re talking about just 54 high leverage plate appearances over the latter stretch, and just 27 since the start of May. And if we look at a similarly clutch-seeming stat, like Vlad’s wRC+ with runners in scoring position, he’s got a mark of 132 over 162 PA since the start of last August, and 139 in 74 PA since the start of this May.

Zoom out and look at his entire career and we see a hitter with just about 4,000 plate appearances, a 136 wRC+ overall, and a nearly identical 133 mark in 360 plate appearances in high leverage. Haters will point to his postseason performances until Vlad does something to make that narrative go away, but even there we’re talking just 25 PA. Get away from small sample noise and there really isn’t much of an issue here at all—at least, if we’re only talking about leverage.

As for what we’ve seen so far this month, it’s definitely ugly. And while I’ve had it suggested to me that this is especially frustrating because Vlad always seems to be finding himself in skids like this, that simply isn’t true.

If it were to hold up, that 87 wRC+ mark would be the lowest he’s put up in a calendar month since July 2020—a month in which, you may recall, he caught ire from then-manager Charlie Montoyo for his post-COVID conditioning and was moved all-but-permanently off of third base. You may not recall that the Jays’ 2020 season began on July 24th of that year, meaning Vlad only made 30 trips to the plate in that month. So if you’re looking for a more complete month to compare to we have to go all the way back to September 2019—the final month of his rookie year, in which he produced a wRC+ of just 46 in 87 PA—to find a worse one.

On one hand, it’s obviously not good that he’s running so cold right now. But on the other, he’s played 29 calendar months of baseball since he’s had one that’s gone as poorly as this one. And because of the All-Star Break we’re only just 11 games in.

In only five of those 29 months has Vlad even dipped below league average by wRC+, registering marks of 99 (April ‘24), 98 (May ’22), 97 (August ‘23), 93 (May ‘23), and 92 (September ‘22).

He can be frustrating, absolutely. The timing of his struggles lately has too often been inopportune. But there is beyond enough data to tell us that this isn’t him. We’re talking about a guy who slashed .290/.383/.516 in a month that ended just eleven games ago!

But yes, the power. The elephant in the room. It’s too many singles, it’s not enough extra base hits, and it’s definitely not enough home runs. Your half-a-billion-dollar elite slugger shouldn’t be behind Addison Barger in doubles, homers, and extra base hits despite having taken 148 more trips to the plate than the breakout youngster so far. We can all agree on this. (Though, if you're going to keep bringing up the contract like it’s a normal one that can simply be compared to what other players make you’re going to have a pretty miserable next sixteen years.)

For me, though, there’s still a ton to be optimistic about on this front. His average exit velocity, barrel rate, launch angle, expected batting average, expected slugging, wOBA, xwOBA, xwOBA on contact, and hard hit rate are all the third-best marks of his career, trailing only his ultra-elite 2021 and 2024 seasons. He’s pulling the ball in the air more than last year, he’s hitting fewer ground balls than last year, his chase rate (89th percentile) is by far the best its been in his career, his squared-up rate is the best its been since that metric started being measured in mid-2023.

Where I see him lagging is in his expected ISO, his percentage of “no doubter” home runs, and the distance he’s producing on his line drives and fly balls—something you may recall from when we were trying to diagnose his struggles in 2023.

That season, Vlad averaged 289 feet on fly balls and line drives to the outfield. This year he’s at just 285—his worst mark since 2021. Unsurprisingly, the best averages of his career here came in that crazy 2021 season (306 feet) and in his outstanding 2024 (298).

Some of the year-to-year variance here can be explained by Rob Manfred’s balls, and this year there appears quite clearly to be more drag on the baseball. (Re: the chart below, Baseball Savant tells us that “as a general rule of thumb, a decrease in the drag coefficient of 0.01 will increase the distance of a batted ball with an exit velocity of 100 mph by approximately 5 feet (and an increase of 0.01 will decrease batted ball distance by 5 feet).”)

Variance would be less expected within a single season, and yet if we split this metric up by month we see it’s been especially bad for Vlad here in July. His 271 foot average distance on fly balls and line drives is the worst of any month he’s had since 2021 by six whole feet, and lower than his next-lowest month this season by eight feet.

Part of this has to do with the smaller sample, I’d wager. Part of it could also be explained by the fact that he was pulled from a game in Cleveland after getting hit in the forearm by a Tanner Bibee pitch on June 26th, which forced him to go for X-rays and nearly caused him to miss the following game. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but I think it’s worth contemplating here that his slugging percentage has dropped from .516 in June down to just .286 in a month that began mere days after that incident.

But there are other curious things going on with him lately. For example, he’s been pulling the ball a lot—47% of his balls in play in July have been to the pull side, which if it holds would be the second-highest rate of his career.

Now, I know we all would sort of like to see a version of Vlad that pulls the ball more, particularly if he gets it in the air, and that this has been talked about a lot over the years. But I’m actually not so sure this is good.

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Below we see a rolling 50 PA sample of his attack direction since this data became publicly available in mid-2023.

As you likely know, the times when he was going best during this span were in the middle and latter parts of 2024, and in May and June of this year. When he’s been at his worst has been most recently, and also in late ‘23/early ‘24.

Looking at the chart, those good bits certainly line up well with when his attack direction has been more neutral or leaning toward going oppo, and when he gets pull-heavy it’s an indication that things aren’t quite right.

What we need to know about attack direction here is that while it does correlate well to pull rates—and, in fact, the most pull-heavy month of Vlad’s career was September 2023, which certainly tracks with the data above—it’s actually telling us more about the timing of a batter’s swing, and not necessarily what he is trying to do.

As MLB.com defines it, attack direction “measures the horizontal direction that the sweet spot of the bat is moving at the point of contact with the baseball (or the point the bat and ball cross paths on a swing-and-miss).”

Does Vlad want to be swinging it more like he did last season, but for whatever reason has lately been getting out in front of pitches? I think that’s certainly possible based on what we see above. This suggests his timing could simply be off.

That said, another of those things that have been unusual for him this month is his bat speed, which is currently at a peak as long and as sustained as any he’s had since that data has been tracked.

Compare the two graphs and it certainly looks as though he’s just swinging harder and thereby catching balls out in front more. But why?

Timing off? Compensating for a balky forearm?

I obviously can’t say for sure, but I can offer another, rather optimistic theory. Right now Vlad has the lowest swing rate of any year in his career at 41.5%. That’s well down from last year’s 48% rate, and for the month of July the number is down farther still to 39.9%.

To me, this tracks somewhat with the hitting philosophy stuff we’ve heard since the arrival of new hitting coach David Popkins, as well as a team-wide trend. Every Blue Jays batter with at least 250 plate appearances in both 2024 and 2025 so far has seen his rate of pitches swung at dip. Other than Vlad the biggest decrease has come from George Springer—from 49.2% to 45%—and we know what’s going on there: he’s trying to pull the ball in the air to hit for more power, and succeeding.

Now, it would be a little too rich of me to look at Vlad’s awful stretch here and suggest that maybe he’s just having a bit of a rough transition as he tries to make changes to better tap into his power. And if that was actually what he’s trying to do we’d expect to see changes to his attack angle, which we do not.

Vlad’s attack angle is anything but peaking here…

…whereas we can clearly see the rise in Springer’s chart.

Still, I’m going to pull at this thread a little bit anyway. (And not even just because the change for Springer seemed to begin taking place in the middle of last year—take that, Mattingly weirdos!—suggesting that, as we should all already be aware, tweaks to a swing or an approach can take time before they manifest into production.)

The “we’d rather you be 0-and-1 than 0-for-1” line is one that we’ve heard a lot this year so far, but there’s certainly more depth to it than appears on the surface. In a recent Stray Thoughts… post, I cited a quote from David Popkins via Sportsnet’s Shi Davidi:

“It’s just the freedom to let guys take aggressive swings when they want to take aggressive swings and it’s OK to miss, it’s OK to chase when you've earned the count or the scenario where you can get your best swing off and the situation calls for it. A lot of guys, they get into situations and are afraid to be embarrassed swinging and missing or chasing a bad pitch, and their swings get a little more reserved, they don’t allow themselves to be the dangerous athletes that they are. We let guys fail, we let guys work through certain things and with that you get aggressiveness, you get fearlessness.”

Be aggressive and be fearless, yes. But the concept, though it doesn’t always sound like it, isn’t just to be unafraid of going up there hacking. It’s much more disciplined than that. And I think we get to that other side of the coin in a quote from Popkins that comes from a Ben Nicholson-Smith piece back in April, as relayed by Mike Petriello in a great MLB.com piece from just over a week ago about Springer’s comeback season.

Speaking of Springer’s struggles over the past couple of years, as seen from across the diamond as hitting coach for the Twins, Popkins explained:

“You’d see him kind of sacrifice bat speed just to put balls in play and really reaching for balls and weak contact early. Almost like he’s scared to get to two strikes. Versus the best version of him I feel like is not afraid to take a couple borderline pitches and then if you make one mistake he’s going to hit it really hard.”

Petriello sums it up as “don’t sacrifice bat speed to put balls in play.”

Vladdy’s so unbelievable in terms of bat speed and exit velo and those types of metrics that he’s never seemed like a guy who could possibly have another gear in this regard. But the recently-peaking bat speed chart above suggests that there genuinely could be more in there, at least in terms of producing a high overall average, if he’s more selective about those borderline pitches and really intent on getting off his “A-swing” as much as possible.

We can see in that same group of Jays hitters with at least 250 PA in each of the last two years—for the record, it’s Alejandro Kirk, Bo Bichette, Ernie Clement, George Springer, and Vlad—that there’s been no sort of explosion in swinging strikes since the “we’d rather you be 0-and-1…” stuff came about. In fact, only Clement and Kirk have seen their rates rise, and only barely—by a cumulative three-tenths of a percentage point. What has gone up more noticeably for the other three, more power-oriented guys, is their percentage of called strikes. Bo from 11.8% to 14.1%. Springer from 14.5% to 15.5%. And Vlad from 15.6% to 17.1%.

In other words: they’re doing the thing. They’re buying in. They’re accepting borderline strikes to hunt better pitches to hit. Or so it, at least, seems. And the bat speed thing suggests buy-in, too.

So, maybe the story here is actually that Vlad started moving in this direction more recently—as indicated by the bat speed—but that it just hasn’t quite clicked yet.

That something isn’t clicking is at the very least true, as Statcast puts his run value on pitches out over the heart of the plate at just +2. Last year that mark was +24. (For context, this year Aaron Judge is at +34 and Springer is +12.)

That should certainly change in the positive direction, whether it’s because of the sting coming out of the arm, a timing correction, tweaks starting to pay off, or whatever else. By how much will ultimately define his season, I’d wager.

So, yes, there are still questions to be asked about what’s going on with Vlad. And I can’t say here with anything resembling certainty that he has come around to the idea that he needs to hit more home runs and is definitely working on something to that effect and will come out the other side all the better for it, as pleasing as that would sound to a lot of Jays fans. Nor would I want to, even if I am intrigued by the possibility, simply because it feels too much like cope given the awful run he’s on and the still-concerning lack of power.

But I will say that I think he’ll absolutely be fine, that there’s more than enough data to convince anybody of that, and that I’d personally bet on him catching fire in the second half long before I’d bet the opposite.

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Housekeeping

• In case you missed it, Nick and I have started a Patreon page for Blue Jays Happy Hour, where we’ll be hosting ad-free episodes as well as a bonus show each week. Check out my explainer here.

• Something that I added late to the post about the Patreon was the fact that there is, apparently, some kind of a dispute between Patreon and Apple that could cost you money if you want to support us and are using Patreon on iOS. The short-ish version—if I have this right—is that Apple threatened Patreon with removal from the App Store if they didn’t switch to their in-app purchase system on iOS, and when Patreon relented Apple decided to take a 30% fee on new sign-ups for themselves. To combat this and not have their creators pay the fee, Patreon made it so the fee gets added to new sign-ups that come in through Apple/iOS/the App Store.

The even shorter version is: sign up through a web browser and you won’t have to pay Apple anything!

• Lastly, I mentioned in yesterday’s explainer that I’m looking to do a mail bag later on this week, which is true! But I also mentioned that I’d be putting up a formal call for questions here on Wednesday, which is not true! I’ll be doing that tomorrow. But if anybody wants to submit a question early, feel free to do so in the comments on this post.

(Top image via the Toronto Blue Jays/@BlueJays)

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