Vladimir Guerrero Jr. just finished off the weakest full month of his career (.498 OPS), which might be written off as a slump, if not for the fact that it followed the third-weakest month of his career (May’s .623 OPS), which might itself be a minor concern if not for the fact that the defending American League champions are muddling along at five games under .500, in large part thanks to a lineup that’s hovering around 25th in runs scored.
It’s now been nearly nine months since the last time Guerrero Jr. hit a home run in Canada, dating back to Game 6 of last year’s ALCS. Since that day, 76 different players have crushed at least one tater in Rogers Centre, including Tristan Gray, Oswald Peraza, Taylor Trammell, and two Max Muncys. Guerrero Jr., incredibly, has not. But it’s not really a home/road thing, either; Guerrero has just six dingers anywhere since that last home-field homer, and only four this season.
Two months into this skid, coming after a good start to the season, it’s no longer a minor concern. The Blue Jays are still in the race in a weak American League, because basically every team outside of the Angels and Royals remains hopeful. But while the offense isn’t the only problem here -- the defense isn’t what it was, and the rotation has hit some bumps as well -- Toronto’s hopes largely come down to the answer to this one single question:
What’s behind Guerrero’s slide? And can it be fixed?
It’s not, as you might imagine, a simple answer -- otherwise it would have been fixed already. Nor is it even the first time we’ve asked this, because three years ago, we had to do the same thing. It’s been a career of ups and downs.
We won’t force you down the rabbit hole of 11 different theories, as we did back in 2023, but the truth is that it’s once again not one, obvious, clear thing, which seems to be a recurring theme here. Yet when you’re a star this big, and coming off a postseason as incredible as he had last October -- .397/.494/.795 in 18 games against the best pitching in the sport -- the questions have to be asked. What’s going on?
Let’s start with the clearest issue we know about. Could it be as simple as the back tightness that cropped up in mid-June and then forced him from Tuesday’s lineup 90 minutes before first pitch?
It’s the obvious answer for anyone who’s tried to get through even a day at the office with a sore back, and so perhaps the correct one, though that still doesn’t answer all of our questions. For one thing, the downturn began weeks before that first report; for another, most of the obvious metrics you’d look to in order to see physical limitation have not meaningfully dropped; for another, Blue Jays manager John Schneider not only downplayed the severity, but made it seem like he had quite a bit of near-term optimism about his struggling slugger.
“I don’t want to push it with him,” Schneider said after Tuesday’s game. “He’s been working a lot and I think that plays into how he’s feeling. He’s taken a lot of swings over the last week or week and a half. With where he was yesterday and making progress, albeit with just the single to right, I think he’s where we want him to be. He’s really close, so I didn’t want to set him back.”
Guerrero was indeed back in the lineup for Wednesday’s Canada Day matinee, seemingly no worse for wear on a first-inning double that was one of his eight hardest-hit balls of the season. As noted on the Blue Jays broadcast, he’s been taking 300 swings before each game and 100 more after, trying to work his way back. A lot of swings, indeed.
The back issue can be considered a probable factor yet maybe not the entire thing, so let’s also speed-run through a few other things that it’s mostly not.
- It’s probably not "bad luck." Is he underperforming his expected stats, yes, a little -- as you’d kind of have to be when you have a .498 OPS for a month -- but not in a way that’s an outlier in the sport, and even if he was performing exactly to what the metrics say he should be getting, those numbers would still be well below his career averages.
- It’s not "he was only good in 2021." This is a popular suggestion, given that his career-best 48-homer season came in a year where the Blue Jays spent months playing in Dunedin and Buffalo, but that’s easily disproven if you look at his excellent 2024 (164 OPS+) or tremendous 2025 postseason. He’s been plenty good in plenty of places over plenty of years.
- It’s not about pulling it in the air or not. As always, Guerrero’s exceptionally low attack angle, like that of Tampa Bay’s Yandy Díaz, limits the high-end slug he can access. But that’s always been true, good times and bad, and his rate of pulling the ball in the air is consistent with where it’s always been. (Nor is his seasonal bat speed down, another leading indicator.)
Enough, then, with what it’s not.
Here’s what it is:
He’s not hitting it as hard (hard-hit rate down to 65th percentile from his usual 90s), in part because he’s squaring it up less effectively, and also because he’s chasing more. When he hits it hard -- which again, he’s doing that a lot less often -- his barrel rate has been cut in half, and that’s a pretty big deal, because a barrel is the ideal combination of exit velocity and launch angle, the most valuable kind of batted ball.
Put all that together, and you get a chart that looks like this, showing that the expected slugging percentage, based on quality of contact, has collapsed. This is the "it's not bad luck" aspect of it.
Put another way, on hard-hit balls, his ground-ball rate is way, way up.
Guerrero Jr. ground-ball rate on hard-hit balls
- 2019: 51%
- 2021: 41%
- 2022: 47%
- 2023: 47%
- 2024: 46%
- 2025: 43%
- 2026: 56%
(Note, also, the appearance of his elite 2021 at the extreme low end of that list. The Minor League parks in Dunedin and Buffalo maybe helped the ball fly, but they didn’t likely have much to do with him crushing it in the air in the first place.)
So that’s it, then, as deceptively simple as it sounds. When he hits it hard (which he’s doing less) he’s hitting on the ground more (which is bad). Even one of those rare home runs, in Detroit on May 16, was barely "in the air," because it was a smoked line drive that’s tied for the lowest launch angle on a home run anyone has hit all season, going out in part because it was aimed at one of the shortest walls in baseball.
Schneider, appearing on MLB Network Radio’s “Power Alley” on Wednesday morning, offered continued confidence. When asked why he believed that Guerrero Jr. was close to breaking out, the Toronto skipper dove into some pretty deep mechanics talk that explained the “hard hit but on the ground” problem, to some extent.
“I think when he is just a little bit more engaged with his lower half, when he stacks his weight on his back leg, when he’s got some real force on his back leg, instead of just drifting forward, he’s really kind of engaged in the ground, and it’s almost a slighter leg kick, if you will,” said Schneider.
“So, the front foot is going to be a little higher off the ground,” he continued, “and really hit the ground and create some force. When he’s at his best, he’s doing that, and I think he’s just been kind of sliding through that a little bit, and that’s what leads to, yeah, you’re still hitting the ball hard, but you’re hitting the ball hard on the ground. So I think just being able to get stacked up on his back side, then do your stride and put the brakes on and rotate, is when he’s at his best. He’s been working really really hard with [Blue Jays hitting coach David Popkins and his staff] and I feel like he’s pretty close to being there pretty consistently.”
It’s hard to see the difference with the naked eye, but the results are clear. When that’s working right, as it did last June when he crushed this Brandon Pfaadt pitch 448 feet into the seats, he’s coiled up and ready to attack.
When it’s not quite right, as with a very similar pitch (also fastball, similar location and velocity) from Simeon Woods-Richardson earlier this year, he’s late on it and ends up with a ball that’s hard hit, but into the ground -- which is quite often what's happening.
You can see this in the data a little, too. In the playoffs last year, on hard-hit fastballs, Vlad was late on just 6% of his swings. That rose to 10% this April, and had nearly tripled to 16% in May, the highest rate of any month in the nearly three years that kind of data is available. (We’re talking about a player who, back in August 2024, was late on just 3% of swings on these pitches. He also had an 1.127 OPS that month.)
That mark, to be fair, dropped down to just 5% in June, which definitely doesn’t explain why this past month was so poor, though it might point to what Schneider says he sees about improvement starting to happen.
On Wednesday’s double, for one swing at least, everything looked about right.
What are we left with, then? It’s probably not realistic to expect 2025 Postseason Vlad indefinitely, in the same way that it was never reasonable to expect Ernie Clement to perform the same way for an entire season. You can see here, in this monthly comparison dating back to July 2023, that what he did last October was the short-term mark of a hitter truly and deeply locked in, in a way that’s difficult to maintain.
Of the 21 months (regular and postseason) we have bat tracking data on, June 2026 featured his seventh-fastest swings, so it’s mostly not that. If Schneider is right, if it’s merely a matter of timing and mechanics, then it’s the kind of thing that could resolve itself at any time, particularly if you buy into the idea that under-the-hood improvements are already happening.
The Blue Jays, however, have played their final home game of the first half, taking a three-city road trip to Seattle, San Francisco and San Diego before finally returning to Canada to welcome the White Sox on Friday, July 17.
We know there’s at least two more weeks yet to go before Guerrero Jr. finally gets that first home run at home. How much more time it takes after that, well, it’s not too much to say the fate of the Blue Jays season depends more than a little on the answer.