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Alden Gonzalez, ESPN Staff WriterAug 26, 2024, 07:15 AM ET
- ESPN baseball reporter. Covered the L.A. Rams for ESPN from 2016 to 2018 and the L.A. Angels for MLB.com from 2012 to 2016.
HIS CONFIDENCE BEAMED, even as his aura faded.
“In my mind,” Vladimir Guerrero Jr. said earlier this month, “I’m the best in the world.”
Guerrero firmly believes this now, while reemerging as one of the game’s best hitters. But he also believed it in 2022, when his numbers dipped in the wake of a breakthrough season. In 2023, when his production fell even further. At the end of this past April, when his batting average stood at just .229. And a month later, when he was stuck on five home runs through the Toronto Blue Jays‘ first 56 games.
“I never really lost sight of the type of ballplayer I am and the type of potential I have within me,” Guerrero said in Spanish. “It’s just a process you have to go through. Thankfully I was able to get through it.”
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Guerrero has been incredible since the start of June and otherworldly since the All-Star break. His overall numbers — a .320/.395/.557 slash line, a 33-homer pace and 167 weighted runs created plus — nearly mirror what he attained in 2021, when only Shohei Ohtani prevented him from becoming the American League’s Most Valuable Player at 22 years old. If not for the transformative seasons of Aaron Judge and Bobby Witt Jr., Guerrero, still just 25, might be in the thick of the MVP discussion once more.
And as the Blue Jays flail toward a lost season that has placed them at a crossroads, one certainty seems to have emerged: Guerrero needs to be the face of whatever comes next.
BLUE JAYS OUTFIELDER George Springer likes to call Guerrero a “one-percenter,” a term that applies specifically to the types of pitches he confronts.
One of the more recent examples occurred Aug. 12 against Los Angeles Angels right-hander Davis Daniel. Daniel throws changeups to opposing right-handed hitters less than 3% of the time and didn’t throw any in that situation through the first two innings that night. Guerrero came up again with one out in the third inning and ran the count full. Daniel thought he’d surprise him by going away from his fastball-slider combination and unveiling a changeup. He placed it perfectly, low and in and on the very edge of the strike zone — and Guerrero hit it 113 mph for a double.
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“If you watch the swing, if you watch the at-bat, there’s no way he’s looking for it,” Springer said. “It’s just something in his brain and in his swing that made him see it and hit it. For me that’s hard to explain. It’s something you can’t really coach. He just has it in him.”
Springer became Guerrero’s teammate three years ago and noticed the trait almost instantly. In his mind, it was a separator. From there, he watched Guerrero’s OPS dip from an AL-leading 1.002 in 2021 to .818 in 2022 to .788 in 2023. He was still good — still a yearly All-Star, still producing more than 15% above league average, still the cover athlete for a popular video game — but he was far enough removed from excellence to make one wonder if it was still attainable.
Like Guerrero himself, though, Springer remained bullish.
“I didn’t think,” he said when asked if he thought Guerrero could someday return to his 2021 levels. “I knew.”
Seeing him now, Springer believes Guerrero is “just beginning to scratch the surface of the player he’s going to be.”
“I think it gets lost on a lot of people how young he actually is,” Springer said. “At 25 years old I was basically in my second season in the big leagues. He’s, in my opinion, a top-five player in this game, and he’s going to be for a long time. I think once he kinda discovers that next level, he’s going to be unbelievable.”
Guerrero believes he was too hard on himself last year and has since learned to “control what I can control and let the rest go.”
It’s a mindset rooted in discipline.
Guerrero went into the offseason focused on establishing a routine he wouldn’t waver from. He’d go to the gym every day, no matter how he was feeling. Food outside the regular season was cut off at 6 p.m., with no exceptions. Rather than fixate on the results, he drowned himself in the monotony of the work. It offered him security. And when things went wrong — when the results weren’t there early, when the outside world kept talking about how he might never be great again — Guerrero found comfort in the dependability of his process.
It kept him positive, and it only strengthened his confidence.
“Ultimately if you don’t believe in yourself, nobody’s going to believe in you,” Guerrero said. “I’m the one who goes out there on the field to play. Nobody goes out there for me. If you put negativity in your mind, things aren’t going to turn out well, no matter what kind of talent you have. But if you stay positive and stay with the process, staying with it every day, the same routine, happy, things are going to change.”
Guerrero and manager John Schneider have worked together since their Class A days in 2017. Nick Turchiaro-USA TODAY Sports
JOHN SCHNEIDER, WHO is winding down his second season as the Blue Jays’ full-time manager, has coached Guerrero dating back to his days in the lower minor leagues. What he’s seeing now is someone with a clear understanding of the pitches he wants to do damage on. It’s evident through his hard-hit percentage, which sits at 55.6%, a career high that places him within the top 1% of his sport. Guerrero has never been more efficient.
“That’s kind of the next step of a great hitter,” Schneider said. “He can cover the entire zone, but I think he’s just really doing a good job right now of focusing on pitches that are really, really ones he can do damage on.”
A comparison of Guerrero’s tendencies between the season’s first two months and the ensuing 12 weeks reveal drastic inconsistencies. Since the start of June, he’s striking out less but also walking less. He’s displaying patience by letting pitches travel deeper to drive them into the opposite field, but impatience by seeing fewer pitches per plate appearance. He’s making more contact, but he’s swinging less often within the strike zone and more often outside of it. To Schneider, it all paints the picture of someone who’s secure, relaxed, willing to be unconventional for the sake of his own comfort. It’s evident in the movement of Guerrero’s hands.
Early in the season, Guerrero’s hands were upright and stiff as he began his pre-pitch load. Now they’re loose, fluid, shifting up and down in perfect sync with the toe-tap he uses before his swing. The kinetic chain, as hitters call it, is harmonious.
Guerrero’s launch angle is still comically low for a power hitter — 7.2 degrees, down from 10.5 degrees last year and ranked 129th among 136 qualified players — but it hasn’t mattered. He’s homering at a 7% rate since the start of June, tied with Juan Soto for sixth highest in the majors in that stretch.
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“It sounds really simple,” Schneider said, “but when you start thinking about getting the ball in the air, when you start thinking about hitting home runs, I think it can be a little bit more rigid. He hits the ball so damn hard, he doesn’t have to get it in the air. It’s just him realizing that what he does is enough.”
Guerrero has an OPS of 1.081 since the end of May and 1.354 since the end of the All-Star break. He hit safely in 22 consecutive games from July 14 to Aug. 10, during which he slashed .494/.558/1.025 with 10 home runs. Right around then, he put together a 25-game stretch that is up there with some of the best in history, with 11 home runs and 12 doubles. He probably won’t match the 48 home runs and 111 RBIs he accumulated in 2021, but he’s on pace to set a career high with 43 doubles. His baserunning has been bad and his first-base defense has been, by some metrics, dreadful, but his offensive production still has him on pace for 5.4 FanGraphs wins above replacement.
Guerrero noticed around late April that his hands had become too stiff (Schneider believes it was the result of trying too hard to elevate pitches). He went about fixing it then, but it took weeks.
“Day by day, I kept working at it and I knew I was going to get there again,” Guerrero said. “I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I also knew it wasn’t going to change from one day to the next. It’s a process. And within a week, two weeks, I was starting to get them where I needed them to be. In three weeks, they got there. After three weeks, it’s there. ‘Now that it’s there, let’s maintain it there.’ And that’s when things started going the way they should. It’s been like that for three months.”
GUERRERO’S RESURGENCE COULDN’T prevent the Blue Jays from floundering. After a full-throated pursuit of Ohtani this offseason, one in which they agreed to match the significantly backloaded $700 million contract he ultimately signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Blue Jays’ front office didn’t pivot to another impact player. By the All-Star break, the Blue Jays found themselves 44-52 with a minus-66 run-differential. Guerrero’s name — like Bo Bichette‘s, another superstar scheduled for free agency after the 2025 season — was suddenly bandied about in trade rumors, though rival executives sensed the asking price would be exorbitant.
Guerrero was never assured he wouldn’t be traded, but he never asked.
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“I knew they weren’t going to,” Guerrero said. “I’m the type of person who feels like if a team has the thought of staying with you, has the thought of having you for many years, they would never think of trading you. If they have long-term plans with you, they’re going to stick with you. There’s always going to be rumors. They traded a bunch of my teammates, but you already knew they were going to. With me, that was never talked about.”
The Blue Jays engineered eight present-for-future trades before the July 30 deadline, most notably acquiring two high-end Houston Astros prospects — right-handed pitcher Jake Bloss and left-handed hitter Joey Loperfido — for starting pitcher Yusei Kikuchi. But only two of the players dealt, reliever Nate Pearson and utility man Isiah Kiner-Falefa, were controllable beyond this season. The team’s core remained intact.
On the seventh day of August, Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro held a rare media availability and pointed to those who didn’t move — namely Guerrero, Bichette and two of his core starting pitchers, Kevin Gausman and Chris Bassitt — as proof they will attempt to compete again next season.
“We haven’t said the word ‘rebuild’ once,” Schneider told ESPN a week later. “And that’s been pretty clear from everyone.”
The Blue Jays are guaranteed only one more year of Guerrero and Bichette, the once-heralded prospects who only a half-decade ago represented the start of a potential dynasty in Toronto. They’re expected to explore extensions with both this offseason but remain open-minded about potential trade opportunities. In all likelihood, though, both will be back in some form next season.
“I think because we’re so familiar with those guys,” Schneider said, “you want to kind of owe it to them and you want to kind of follow through with what our goal was.”
So they’ll bank on a Bichette bounce-back, look to free agency to augment a lineup that could use significantly more punch, overhaul a bullpen that is suddenly in shambles and hope to squeeze at least one more shot from a group that might not have many more shots left.
What comes next could hinge entirely on whether they can lock up Guerrero, whose re-emergence has put him back on a path to great riches.
“I’ve always said it — I’d love to stay here,” Guerrero said. “But it’s a business. Let’s see what happens.”
