Blue Jays Can't Ignore What's Happening With Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
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Who's Your Vladdy?
Is he the one who slashed .397/.494/.795 in the 2025 postseason and was so feared he tallied nearly as many intentional walks (6) as he did strikeouts (7)?
Or is he the one slashing just .215/.313/.273 with just one home run since May 1st?
The chant starts again the next time he is up.
Who's Your Vladdy?
Is he the one who averaged 28 home runs from 2022-2025 (and that does not even include the odd post-COVID 2021 season when he hit 48 HRs during the Jays’ travels from Dunedin to Buffalo to Toronto)?
Or is he the one with just three home runs this season and an Isolated Power (ISO) (slugging percentage minus batting average) of .085, down from .175 last year and .221 in 2024?
That .085 mark ranks last of 11 Blue Jay batters with more than 100 PA, behind such noted sluggers as Myles Straw.
The chants grow louder in his third at-bat.
Who's Your Vladdy? Who's Your Vladdy?
Is he the one with a good eye that pitchers still fear enough that he has a team-high 11.7% BB% rate and a career and team low 10.6% K%? And whose 2026 Maximum Exit Velocity of 116.0 MPH ranks 10th in baseball, just .2 mph behind 8th place Aaron Judge.
Or is he now the hitter whose 6.8% barrel percentage is less than half of what it was in 2024 (13.7%) and a sharp decline from last season (12.2%)?
By his fourth at-bat, the chants have reached playoff baseball decibel levels.
Who's Your Vladdy? Who's Your Vladdy?
Is he the franchise cornerstone who the Blue Jays signed to a 14-year, $500M contract extension last season?
Or is he a burlier version of a singles contact hitter like Luis Arraez?
Before you laugh, Arraez has a higher SLG, OPS, and ISO in 2026 than Vladdy, the same number of RBI, and just one fewer HR. Arraez signed a one-year $12 million deal with the San Francisco Giants late in the offseason. The market for his services was tepid even as a three-time batting champion with a .317 career batting average.
Teams don't hand out half-billion-dollar contracts to singles hitters.
Hitters with half-billion-dollar contracts are supposed to be, in the famous words of Reggie Jackson, 'the straw that stirs the drink.'
So far this season, Vlad has been one of those soggy paper straws.
Where has all Vlad's power gone? And will he get it back?
Let's dig deeper into what is going on. We will start with his swing itself. His bat speed of 76.0 mph is in line with prior years, as is his swing length.
The knock on Vladdy as a hitter has long been that he hits too many ground balls and therefore lacks the launch angle to turn his raw power into more home runs.
In 2026, his 9.1-degree launch angle is actually higher than his career mark of 7.6 degrees. His 48.8% ground ball percentage is right in line with his career average of 48.4%, though both are higher than the MLB average of 44.4%.
His pull percentage is slightly below his career average, but his pulled-air percentage of 14.4% is higher than his career percentage of 13.8%. Balls pulled in the air account for roughly 17% of batted balls, but nearly 2/3 of home runs, making them an important metric for sluggers.
So if his bat speed, launch angle, ground ball rate, and pulled air percentages are roughly the same, what is going on here, and will it get better?
The Heart of The Matter
Let's get to the heart of the matter. Guerrero is not mashing the pitches in the heart of the zone that he, like most hitters, typically does the most damage on. These are the ones announcers describe as middle-middle.
Baseball Savant's attack zones break pitches down into four types: heart, shadow, chase, and waste. The four regions are shown below with the green box being the strike zone.
Guerrero typically crushes those pitches. This year, not so much.
I Don't Go Up There to Miss
There is a second issue, though, that is a little more complex.
On Sunday, Guerrero told Keegan Matheson, who covers the Blue Jays for MLB.com, "I always tell the guys, don't worry about me. When I get hot, I'll get hot. I don't go up there to miss."
The issue, though, is that he is chasing more pitches in the 'chase zone,' and because he is so good at 'not missing,' or making contact, more of his batted balls are of the type that almost all hitters do less damage on. In 2025, he had just 16 batted balls on pitches in the chase zone. This year, he already has 13.
As Table 3 shows, Guerrero Jr. is actually making more contact on those chase pitches this year, but that is a bad thing because they are the type of pitches announcers would label as 'pitchers' pitches' or bad ball swinging. Let's use four pictures to illustrate what four thousand words have been used on at the Rogers Centere, most of the not-so-kind variety, eh.
The not-doing-the-damage-on-pitches-in-the-zone problem seems more concerning for the long term than the chase problem. When Toronto signed Vladdy to a 14 year extension, 2026 was supposed to be one of the prime years of his career where he does damage on the center cut pitches.
Guerrero Jr. is signed for 13 more years after this one, nearly half of those in his mid-to-late 30s, when sluggers typically do less damage on those pitches than in their primes. Just look at Miguel Cabrera and Albert Pujols as two slugging first basemen whose power dropped off dramatically in their 30s. And their primes were far better than Guerrero Jr.'s so far.
Chasing Too Much
The swinging at more pitches out of the zone could be a temporary problem. When hitters slump, especially the key player on a struggling team, the tendency is to try to do more, which often leads to chasing balls out of the zone. Others like George Springer, Daulton Varsho and Addison Barger, whom the Blue Jays were counting on for power, have also been injured or have struggled, or both.
The paradox for Vladdy is that he is so good at making contact on those balls that this works against him even more so than others.
Guerrero and John Schneider both insist he is close to regaining his form. All it could take is one swing or one big game for Vladdy to be Vladdy.
Where has Vladdy's power gone?
He gets hot, as he is sure he will, and that question could be a distant memory by Canada Day.
For the sake of Toronto's season, and any chance of a return trip to the World Series, it had better be.
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Adam Steinmetz writes about the Toronto Blue Jays for SI.com. Adam is also the editor and publisher of the Boston Sunday Sports Section, a weekly digital publication covering the Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics, and Bruins. A two-time winner of the Best Collegiate Sports Writer award in Philadelphia, he began his career with freelance work for The Philadelphia Daily News and The Palm Beach Post before building a successful career outside of journalism. He returned to sports writing last year, contributing to Pitcher List—including coverage of the Toronto Blue Jays—before launching Authorenticity on Substack, where he explores the human stories within baseball. The Boston Sunday Sports Section is his most ambitious project — the thinking fan’s modern Sunday Sports Section focused on the Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics, and Bruins.