Power Hungry

Some thoughts on a Blue Jays team that is once again struggling to hit the ball out of the park...

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We’re rapidly heading toward the end of the 2025 MLB season’s first month, and already the Toronto Blue Jays—or, more specifically, Toronto Blue Jays hitters—have a familiar problem. Power. Or lack thereof.

The team that smashed its way to an MLB-leading 262 home runs in 2021—21 more than the next best team, and 40 more than the team that finished sixth—has since seen its ranking drop to seventh in 2022, 16th in 2023, and 26th in 2024. Currently their 15 home runs rank 29th.

The Yankees, to put these figures in perspective, have already hit 30 more bombs than the Jays after having out-homered them four to one across Sunday’s doubleheader.

What on earth happened here is a question that’s been asked and theorized about plenty of times over the last couple years, with parts of the answer fairly obvious, some of the theories blindingly stupid—looking at you, anti-Mattingly weirdos—and nothing about it has been very satisfying. Least of all having to watch an offence that continues to perform like this.

Also not very satisfying, I think, is the simplest explanation I can come up with for why we’re here yet again.

But before we get to that, let's go back a couple of years. The 2023 Blue Jays were a slightly better than average offensive club. As mentioned, they ranked 16th in home runs, but they were actually better than that by metrics like runs scored (14th), OPS+ (tied for 10th) and wRC+ (eighth). Those are hardly numbers to write home about, but they’re far from abysmal.

They were also numbers put up by a team that had already traded away both Teoscar Hernández and Lourdes Gurriel Jr.—departures that, for many, marked the dramatic shift of the Blue Jays from a bat-first team to a glove-first one. And from a power-oriented team to one looking for singles.

To my mind, this is an oversimplification fans use because it makes it incredibly easy to point fingers. Ross Atkins chose gloves over bats, chose stringing hits together over dingers, chose redassery over Piña Power, and chose a coaching staff to make it happen.

There may even be a little bit of truth in that. But it’s human nature to try to make sense of what we see in the most concrete, black-and-white, and least abstract way possible. Even when we obviously don’t have all the information we need to understand something our brains tend to fill in the gaps. And when what we do know about a problem points more to the randomness of the universe, we have a tendency to still want to point to something on the ground.

This is already well-worn territory for me, so I don't want to get into it too deeply again, but even if there may have been some philosophical changes that came about between 2021 and ‘23, or tweaks to the way the staff was trying to get the most out of their hitters—and even though Ross talked up the all-fields approach on Opening Day, and a bunch of people willfully misinterpreted some Don Mattingly quotes (despite him not even being involved in the offence that season!)¹—the idea that at some point the team decided power and home runs are bad is absurd.

The 2023 Jays acquired Daulton Varsho coming off a 27 home run season at age 25, and power was one of the many qualities of his that Ross Atkins lauded after the deal was made official. The GM even went as far as to suggest that the team saw him “continuing to be a very effective offensive player, but if there’s upside it's probably there.”

Varsho hasn’t been the left-handed power-hitting Teo replacement that the team saw him as, but that’s certainly what was envisioned. We can see in his numbers that they’ve really tried to get him to elevate the baseball more—his ground ball rate against right-handed pitching was 37% in Arizona, whereas it's been 31% with the Blue Jays. We can also see that in his average launch angles since the trade. His expected stats—xBA, xSLG, and xwOBA—all improved from 2022 to 2023, as did his average exit velocity and maxEV. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the hits and the homers didn’t come.

I should also point out here that Varsho got slightly away from pulling the ball as much as he had in ‘22, and that may have been a mistake, and may or may not have been something the coaching staff was nudging him and/or other Jays hitters to do. But that doesn’t change the analysis for me. They clearly weren’t intending on making Varsho less of a power threat—just as they weren’t stopping Danny Jansen or Davis Schneider from doing their pull-power thing, or Orelvis Martinez in the minors.

Thing is, I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all explanation for what happened to the 2023 Jays. Vlad played through pain and it showed up in his numbers. An aging Springer wasn't ready yet to make the adjustment that so far has worked wonders for his bat this year. Varsho might simply be the inconsistent type. Bo traded fly balls for line drives and really leaned into going the other way. Matt Chapman had 15 home runs and a 121 wRC+ with 43 games still to go when he caught his right middle finger between a weight and the rack in the club's weight room, then put up a 54 wRC+ with just a pair of dingers the rest of the way. All of them saw their power numbers dip from the previous season, yes, but that hardly reads like the result of some kind of a concerted effort to not hit for power being imposed by the team on a bunch of players who—it must always be noted—have a ton of their own agency in the matter.

I’ve seen people suggest the fact that the club didn’t bolster the lineup by trading for a power bat at the deadline was some sort of indication that they were satisfied with their offence as it was, but I think that’s more for the sake of finger-pointing than being realistic, too. Not only was power scarce on the trade market at that deadline, they did pretty well—and stuck their necks out pretty far—by trading young, controllable pitching depth in Sem Robberse and Adam Kloffenstein for Jordan Hicks. Having a lockdown bullpen is no small thing in the playoffs.

Moving on into 2024, the power dip is quite a bit easier to explain: they simply didn’t have the personnel. Or, more accurately, they didn’t have the personnel to make up for Bo’s lost year, Springer’s deepening age-related woes, Varsho not improving enough on a poor 2023, and Alejandro Kirk doing the opposite of rebounding to something closer to his 14-homer, 129 wRC+ form from 2022.

Should they have found a way to add more power? In retrospect obviously yes, and I think this was just as obvious even before the season started. But that doesn’t mean they had somehow decided power wasn’t important. For one thing, they desperately chased one of the greatest power hitters in the game, Shohei Ohtani. For another, there just weren’t great ways in which they could add it otherwise.

Teoscar Hernández would certainly have been the right play here, and not appreciating the run-suffocating environment he'd been playing his home games in the previous season isn’t a great excuse. Teo produced just an 84 wRC+ at home in Seattle, but was at 126 on the road. But Atkins wasn hardly the only GM wary of making him a big offer—the Dodgers got him on a one-year deal at $23.5 million—and the market simply didn't really offer any other great solutions for the Blue Jays’ particular problem. Remember pining for Jeimer Candelario? Jorge Soler? J.D. Martinez? Cody Bellinger? It was not the most appealing crop of bats on the power-hitting side, and none of those guys ended up having game-changing seasons in them anyway.

A Matt Chapman reunion would have been nice, though that would have been a tough one for a lot of fans to swallow given his struggles late in the ‘23 season—and his penchant for seeming to always swing and miss when the team needed it. Chapman posted a truly awful 77 wRC+ with runners in scoring position that season, and if you want to take that and the fact that he improved in that regard, and smashed 27 home runs in a much more pitcher-friendly environment, the following year—despite a nearly identical pull and oppo rates, hitting fewer fly balls, and fewer hard hit balls—as some sort of indication that the Jays had screwed him up... go ahead I guess. It’s not impossible! But I tend to think that sometimes these things just happen.

Anyway, the 2023-24 offseason was undoubtedly a bad one. The team ended up only spending $41 million on free agents, choosing to spread their dollars around rather than go for one especially splashy addition. And since power tends to be expensive, and wasn’t very available in the first place, their additions tilted toward defence (Kiermaier, IKF), doubles (Turner), and pitching depth (Yariel Rodríguez).

And so now, with all of that in mind, we come to 2025.

So far, power has very much continued to be a problem for this organization. But it’s a problem no one can say they haven’t tried to fix. They've restructured their offensive coaching staff, hired a new lead hitting coach in David Popkins, and led their press release announcing his hire with the fact that his Twins team topped the AL in home runs in 2023 and that during his tenure they’d “ranked top five in the American League in extra base hits, home runs, OBP, SLG, OPS, average exit velocity, and hard-hit rate.” They’ve continued to talk about damage. They’ve got George Springer swinging for the fences and buying in on that “we’d rather you’re 0-1 than 0-for-1” quote we’ve been hearing lately. They obviously were happy enough with Vlad returning to 30-homer plateau to pay him half-a-billion dollars over the next 15 years. They also paid well over the odds for one-dimensional slugger Anthony Santander, and after that kept on chasing Pete Alonso seemingly quite hard. Even literally today they’ve chosen to give a longer look to Addison Barger and his high exit velocities while sending down Will Wagner as the reciprocal move for activating Varsho from the IL.

They recognize that power has been a problem and have clearly been desperate to fix it. Hell, Ross Atkins even called power—in one of the most profoundly and dumbly misunderstood quotes I’ve ever heard—“low-hanging fruit to add” this winter. As in, as Webster's puts it, “the obvious or easy thing(s) that can be most readily done or dealt with in achieving success or making progress toward an objective.” Seriously, people! Read a goddamn book!

So what gives? Why are they still so bad?

Well, there’s never just one reason. Part of it is that it’s still not a lineup that’s going to hit for a ton of power, even at the best of times. The bottom of the order isn't nearly as horrific as some seem to have convinced themselves...

...but there still isn’t a ton of pop beyond Vlad-Bo-Santander-Springer-Varsho. And seeing as Bo is now 255 plate appearances since his last bomb, maybe he shouldn’t even be included among those names. But looking at those guys they're relying on, it’s certainly a lot better group than last year. We also still haven’t seen Varsho yet. And Santander is a notoriously slow starter.

In other words: it’s just not going to be as bad as it looks right now.

And I think the number that most emphatically tells us precisely that right now is 5.8%.

That’s the Blue Jays’ HR/FB rate so far this season—the second lowest in the majors. For those unfamiliar with the stat, what it means is that just 5.8% of the fly balls that the Jays have hit so far have turned into home runs. League average right now is pretty much where you'd expect it—10.7%. So the Jays are well below average, but not only that: no team had a month with an HR/FB rate that low all of last season, or the season before that. In 2024, only four teams had a month that was even below 7.0%!

Granted, one of those teams was the Jays back in September (6.5%), and it's not like it's a lineup full of guys you’d expect to consistently be going yard. But still! The Jays finished last season ranked 28th by HR/FB rate , and even that poor showing had them way up at 9.7%. Some regression to the mean is undoubtedly on its way.

I know, I know. Regression to the mean! Good lord. That’s far too familiar a message for anyone who has followed this team these last few years to take any comfort in. Many won’t take it seriously at all, I’m sure. And understandably so. It feels like we’ve been told that improvement is just around the corner for three whole goddamn years now. But I really do think this is a different sort of power outage than we’ve seen, or at least a different one than we saw last season. It’s just been magnified—and maybe for some been made to feel terminal—because there’s nothing else the 2025 Blue Jays have done yet, it being April and all. There is no proof of concept to point to for this particular iteration of the Jays, and a lot of proof that very similar ones couldn’t make it work.

It also doesn't help that the team has sunk so far to a 70 wRC+ with runners in scoring position—fourth-worst in MLB.

Now, we know that there’s no particular skill to hitting with RISP. Teams generally hit just about as well in those situation as they do overall. And even the team’s brutal RISP numbers back in 2023—a three-month run with wRC+ marks of 87, 76, and 81, which I suspect are the basis of the common perception that this, too, is a constant problem area for the Jays’ offence—were undone by fantastic RISP results that August (123) and September (137), which nobody seemed to notice. But it happened! And the current, surprisingly low HR/FB rate should almost certainly also even out as well.

But I digress...

Nobody owes these Blue Jays their faith that things will get better on either front. I mean… it’s never a great sign when you’re hearing about guys pressing in April, or teams emphasizing the strong pitching they’ve had to face so far—even if Jays hitters genuinely have had it rough, facing the highest average velocity on fastballs in MLB so far. It’s also not great when the conversation feels so familiar to the bad times, right down to pointing out things like Bo, Vlad, and Giménez among the 50 (of 262) hitters who are most underperforming their xwOBA. I’VE SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE! OR WAS IT JUST THE TRAILER?

But the thing is... I really do think a lot of what we’re seeing so far is genuinely weird, and that it’s OK to consider how we got here, and the changes that have been made, and not necessarily jump to the conclusion that what we’re witnessing is a obviously just a continuation of all the dread-inducing, season-suffocating problems we’ve seen before.

That’s not to say anyone has to act like they’re having fun while this all gets sorted, but… I mean, the Jays were 20th in barrels-per-plate appearance last year, now have a healthy Bo, Springer going well, have added Santander, and yet so far in 2025 have sunk to 29th???

Stuff like that simply doesn’t compute. And while that alone doesn’t mean they’re going to solve this lack-of-power problem—or solve it well enough and quickly enough not to waste another season—it's worth letting our minds breathe about it just little bit, I think.

Just hanging around .500 seems like it’s going to give any AL team some kind of a fighting chance this year. And we’d do well to remember that, at the end of April of last year, the team’s best hitters had been Justin Turner (152 wRC+), Davis Schneider (135), and Varsho (134), while Vladdy was out here slashing a pathetic .229/.331/.347 (100) and had been a just a 112 wRC+ hitter over nearly a thousand (970) previous plate appearances. You know?

Yes, that’s right. This has been your first of 17 annual reminders that nothing is ever quite as good or bad as it seems, and that things in this sport can change. Deal with it!

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1. I wrote about this back in mid-September, in my “fairly safe big picture predictions for the Blue Jays' offseason” post. A post that, I realize now, I haven't referenced since the Vlad extension came about—which was another thing I had on there!

So... to review:

• Atkins stays as GM ✅
• Vlad gets his extension but we have to wait ✅
• Mattingly's job title changes ✅
• Bo won't be traded or extended ✅
• Schneider will be back as manager ✅
• “Buffalo Boys” will be traded ✅ (Only one but that counts!)
• We'll talk about a six-man rotation too much ✅ (🙏 Griff)
• They'll go into 2025 looking one piece short ✅

Not bad if I do say so myself!