What's wrong with Vladimir Guerrero Jr.? A rare power outage has Blue Jays fans concerned

The Toronto Blue Jays are having a bad season. But Vladimir Guerrero Jr. really isn’t having a “bad” season … for a decent contact-first bat who you want to get on base all the time and get moving on the base paths. For Vladimir Guerrero Jr., though, he’s having a bad season.

The most glaring problem, so glaring that it has challenged us to a staring contest and is winning, is the home runs. Guerrero Jr. has hit just three all season, and is thus on pace to hit about 10, which would be less than a third of his FanGraphs-projected 32 coming into the year. That’s not the ideal Vladimir Guerrero Jr. outcome, and he’d tell you that himself. But it’s also not like he hasn’t been making an impact offensively — Vladdy is much more than his raw power. 

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has still managed to make an offensive impact for the Blue Jays

Despite being a power hitter, Guerrero Jr. has excelled throughout his career as a high-average, high on-base player who has always managed to limit his strikeouts. It’s a pretty unique skill set that has made Vladdy one of the premier offensive weapons in the game — in 2025, among players in the top 100 for hard-hit rate, Guerrero had the third-lowest strikeout percentage. Only Alejandro Kirk and Josh Naylor struck out less, and both had nearly 200 fewer plate appearances than Guerrero Jr. 

That’s a mouthful, but the executive summary is a pretty complex problem for opposing teams to solve: a two-hole power hitter who you can’t reliably strike out. Many of the best power hitters in the game also strike out nearly a third of the time, but Guerrero Jr. sits at 15.1 percent for his career. In 2026, Vladdy is striking out a career-low 11.1 percent of the time. Is that enough to mitigate the lack of home runs? 

Well, he is hitting .285, which is about his career average, he's technically above average in the quality of his contact and he’s getting on base over 37 percent of the time. Problem is that Guerrero is not super valuable when he is on base, routinely notching low scores in base-running run value; in short, he’s not that fast. The other issue is the trend of his contact quality, which doesn't necessarily suggest an immediate surge is coming.

Vladdy must hit home runs for the Blue Jays to generate enough runs

It is fairly well-established (and decently intuitive) that home runs are the most valuable offensive play in baseball. Put simply, if Vladdy isn’t hitting homers, he’s leaving runs on the table. Napkin math with his home run projection relative to his actual numbers now leaves him on the hook for about 30 fewer runs than the Blue Jays were expecting. He technically has a positive run value as a hitter, but it’s way below what Toronto needs. 

So now we must try to figure out why he isn’t hitting home runs. I’m a big believer in contact quality equaling success over time. Using xwOBA is one such metric, but barrel rate is far more concerning for Guerrero Jr. — currently the lowest of his career. It’s possible that's because he isn’t seeing quite as many fastballs as he did last year, though he hit a great many home runs in 2021 and 2022 under similar circumstances. 

In reality, there isn’t one singular issue. He is seeing fewer fastballs and finding fewer barrels and sweet-spotting less and striking out less (which may mean he is seeing fewer good pitches to launch, but that is a very noisy statistic to demonstrate). That has, in total, led to fewer home runs. But he’s also still Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and can still lift baseballs with the best of them. His maximum exit velocity this season is still well up there, so I do believe he’s up for a course correction. But you can’t always predict these things; sometimes, they just have to happen because they should. Whether or not they will is up to the heart of the cards. 

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