Shortly after the quarter-point in the season, I picked one stat for each Blue Jay that I though was reflective of their season to date, starting with the infield. I checked back in at the end of June. Today, I wanted to take another round now that we’re three quarters of the way through the year.
Vladimir Guerrero jr.: 40.6% swing rate. Update: 39.2% since June 29. Vlad’s newfound patience has turned out to be 100% real. Davy Andrews over at Fangraphs actually did a whole write-up about it yesterday.
The upshot is that Vlad is hitting it as well as ever, but his increased selectivity has juiced his walk rate without leading to more strikeouts because pitchers don’t want to attack him in the zone. After a slow start, Vlad has a 213 wRC+ in his first 114 PA of the second half. That’ll play.
Alejandro Kirk: 56.6% zone rate. Update: 46.3% since June 29. Opposing pitchers were willing to test Kirk early in the season, attacking him in the zone higher than almost anyone in the league. That made a degree of sense, as he doesn’t chase much and, at least for the last couple of seasons, hasn’t had much impact at the plate. You can come after him and the worst he’s likely to do is hit a single, while if you work around him he’ll just take the walk. A red hot May and June allowed him to chase pitchers off that approach. He’s cooled off a lot in July and August so far as he’s dealt with some injuries, but the respect he earned earlier in the season has allowed him to keep walking more often than he strikes out even as he’s produced less power. That’s kept an otherwise ugly line on the right side of playable.
Bo Bichette: 9.7% barrel rate. Update: 6.2% since June 29. Bo bounced back from a rough 2024 by regaining his ability to hit the ball hard. His barrel rate has cooled off in the last quarter, but in terms of hard hit rate he’s still right back at his career norms. He’s still making lots of contact too, and his .349/.398/.557 line over his last 36 games is third best on the team among close to everyday players.
Tyler Heineman: 170 wRC+. Update: 151 since June 29. Good job everyone. Nobody looked down into the canyon, and the Wile E Coyote that is Heineman’s season has made it 3/4 of the way across without plummeting into the river below.
Ernie Clement: 15.7% strikeout rate. Update: 11.9% since June 29. My point with Ernie is that he needs to keep his strikeout rate in the basement because he rarely walks and doesn’t have a ton of power. Overall he’s done that this season in spite of a rough start. It hasn’t been a great quarter for him, as his 85 wRC+ is ahead of only Kirk and Straw on the team, but as long as the Ks are at or not far above 10% he’ll do enough for his glove work to shine.
Andres Gimenez: .220 BABIP. Update: .471 since June 29. Gimenez spent almost all of July on the shelf with an ankle injury. That’s become the pattern of his season. He’s actually been the best hitter on the team since the last check-in, showing that anything can happen over 7 games. Originally, I argued that Gimenez’ metrics showed an average hitter who’d just had some bad luck. His xwOBA is still a respectable .329, so I think that holds. If he’s healthy, he should be able to return to being the gold glove/at least not cardboard bat player who was worth almost four wins in 2023, even if his star turn in 2022 continues to look like a fluke.
Davis Schneider: 24.1% pulled fly ball rate. Update: his season rate is now 32.9%. Schneider doesn’t make a lot of contact (though his 75% rate this season is a significant step forward and now within spitting distance of average), and he doesn’t hit the ball all that hard (his 35.4% hard hit rate is in the 27th percentile). But waits for his pitch, almost never chasing, and when he gets it he pulls it down the left field line. If he’s off at all he looks completely lost, but when it’s all clicking he’s a three true outcomes machine. Right now it’s clicking. Schneider has hit .288/.381/.589 in his last 84 PA. For the season he’s 13th in the league in the rate of his batted balls that are barrels (hit hard at an optimum launch angle), one spot behind Giancarlo Stanton and just ahead of Ronald Acuna jr. and Juan Soto. He is 5’9” and looks like a software engineer.
New Addition: Leo Jimenez: 95.5% zone contact rate. This is really a placeholder. Jimenez’ season was derailed early by injuries. He rehabbed and then spent July with the big league club, but really only operated as a defensive sub and picked up only 32 PA. What I want highlighted is that after somewhat surprising struggles with his K rate in his debut last season, in a tiny sample his sterling minor league contact ability is starting to translate to MLB. If he keeps building on that, his ceiling is still as a plus hit, below average power guy who can be something like a league average hitter, with solid to good defence at short.
New Addition: Ty France: 36 PA. I, like a lot of us, didn’t really see the need for bringing France as part of the Louis Varland deal. It’s turned out to have been handy in the early going, though, as he’s produced an (enormously BABIP aided) .375/.444/.531 line filling in mostly at DH while George Springer has been on the shelf. He basically takes the place Will Wagner had, which make sense because his career is basically what you’d hope for if Wagner pans out. We’ll see whether it keeps up, but his xwOBA for the year suggests his league-average production has been a little unlucky on balance and that he could settle in somewhere in the ~20% better than league average range he occupied in Seattle. As a bench bat that’ll do.
