Impressive Blue Jays have more HRs than Ks in first two games
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NEW YORK -- The Blue Jays aren’t just leaning into their own superpower in the American League Division Series, they’ve stolen the Yankees’.
With more home runs (eight) than strikeouts (seven) in the first two games of the ALDS, of course the Blue Jays are up 2-0, already putting the Yankees on the ropes ahead of a potential clinch game Tuesday night at Yankee Stadium. They’re just the second team with more homers than strikeouts through two their first two postseason games, joining the 2005 White Sox (six homers, four strikeouts).
They’re winning by getting the best of both worlds. Power and strikeouts typically come hand-in-hand, the risk and reward balancing one another out. Just take the 2025 Yankees, who led Major League Baseball with 274 home runs this season but struck out 1,463 times, the third-highest total in the Majors behind only the Angels (1,627) and Rockies (1,531). On the other end of the spectrum, those pesky high-contact teams rarely strike out, but rarely blow they game open with their power.
If the Blue Jays are showing us the best of both worlds through two games, the Yankees have shown us the worst with one home run and 21 strikeouts. It’s all of the risk with none of the reward, and even though this sample size is microscopic, there’s no time for patience in the postseason, one loss away from elimination. If this doesn’t change, the results won’t, either.
“If you don't win the home run game against them, probably not,” said Giancarlo Stanton. “But you can still manufacture runs. But if they're hitting them, and we're not, more often than not, we're not gonna [win].”
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In the regular season, you could call the Blue Jays a high-end contact team. They led the league in batting average (.265) and on-base percentage (.333), but they weren’t a bunch of slap hitters. Toronto’s 191 home runs were tied for 11th. A team that’s “great” at getting on base and “good” at hitting home runs is going to win a ton of ballgames.
What we’re seeing now is the peak outcome of that approach.
“We're going to put the ball in play,” said manager John Schneider. “We've done that over the course of the year. I think the home runs are a by-product of a really good approach against specific pitchers that you're really focused on at this time of year. Looking at all the home runs, with the exception of Ernie's, he was just trying to hit a sac fly, and like he said, he just kind of blacked out. I think it's just consistent, a really, really deliberate approach against guys that we're going to be facing.”
What we’re seeing on the Yankees' side of things, however, is the bottom end of their offensive identity.
It’s easy to point to Aaron Judge and Stanton as the two who need to snap this terribly timed slump for the Yankees, but this lineup had seven batters with 20-plus homers and 10 with 10 or more.
That said, would a home run even be enough right now? They’ll need two or three with the way the Blue Jays have been playing, putting up 23 runs through their first two postseason games, a new MLB record. On top of it all, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is suddenly a man on fire, setting the tone in Game 1 with a first-inning homer and then breaking open Game 2 with a grand slam.
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“He's a guy that hits the ball incredibly hard, has a good idea of the strike zone, has power when he gets kind of in that mode a little bit,” said manager Aaron Boone. “Obviously he's hit a couple balls out of the ballpark but also shown his kind of bat-to-ball skills where he can kind of spray it around the yard too. He's certainly hurt us so far, and hopefully we can contain that a little bit tomorrow.”
If the Yankees want there to be another tomorrow, they need to win the power battle. It’s how they’ve won all season long.
This series was supposed to be a clash in styles, the steady Blue Jays versus the boom-or-bust Yankees. A 3-2 Blue Jays win and a 9-1 Yankees win in Game 1 and 2 wouldn’t have surprised anyone, but here we are.
The Blue Jays beat the Yankees with “Blue Jays baseball” in 2025, enough to claim the season series for the eventual tiebreaker that decided the division. Now, they’re beating the Bronx Bombers at their own game, too.