Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s Postseason for the Ages

In his first postseason since signing a 14-year, $500 million extension, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has powered the Blue Jays to within one win of their first trip to the World Series since 1993. The 26-year-old slugger continued his October heroics during Sunday night’s ALCS Game 6 in Toronto, helping the Blue Jays stave of elimination at the hands of the Mariners by clubbing his third home run of the series and sixth of the postseason while also displaying a key bit of baserunning savvy. Guerrero has rebounded from a season-ending slump to put up some absolutely astronomical numbers this fall.

Sunday night’s game didn’t start out that way for Guerrero. As they had done in Games 1 and 2 in Toronto, and Game 5 in Seattle, the Mariners kept him from doing major damage through his first two plate appearances against starter Logan Gilbert. In the first inning, with Nathan Lukes on first, Guerrero chased a low slider and grounded softly into a forceout. In the second, with the Blue Jays having rallied for two runs and with George Springer on first, he hit a scorching 116-mph grounder to the left side, where third baseman Eugenio Suárez made a diving stop, then threw to second from his knees to end the inning.

That 116-mph exit velocity was Guerrero’s hardest-hit ball of the postseason, and the eighth-hardest contact of any player this fall; the other seven, by the likes of Shohei Ohtani, Seiya Suzuki, Kyle Schwarber, Giancarlo Stanton, and Aaron Judge, all went for hits. No such luck for Vladito.

By the time Guerrero led off the fifth inning, the Blue Jays led 4-0. On a 1-1 count, Gilbert hung a curveball; Guerrero didn’t hit it as hard as in his previous plate appearance — a mere 102.6 mph — but he elevated it to his pull side for a 384-foot homer to left field, boosting the lead to 5-0.

Guerrero figured in the Blue Jays’ next run as well when Matt Brash — the only Mariner to strike him out in this series — plunked him on the left elbow. After Alejandro Kirk singled, Brash threw a wild pitch; Guerrero tore for third base, and when catcher Cal Raleigh’s throw sailed into foul territory in left field, he scored standing up — and vented some emotion.

In his final plate appearance of the night, with two outs in the eighth, Guerrero shattered his bat and managed to bloop a high-and-tight 98.5-mph sinker from Carlos Vargas into left-center for a single. When you’re on, you’re on.

So far in the ALCS, Guerrero is hitting .409/.519/.955 (285 wRC+) with three doubles to go with those three home runs in 27 plate appearances. During the Division Series against the Yankees, he hit .529/.550/1.059 (324 wRC+) with three homers and just one strikeout in 20 PA. If there’s any consolation for the Mariners, it’s that his three ALCS long balls represent his only runs batted in during the series, whereas during the Division Series, he drove in nine. Among his three hits in the Blue Jays’ 10-1 victory in Game 1 was a solo homer off Luis Gil, and he later added a sacrifice fly. In Game 2, he collected three hits again in a 13-7 win, including a grand slam off Will Warren. He put the Blue Jays up 2-0 with a two-run first inning homer off Carlos Rodón in Game 3, but the Yankees came back to win that one, 9-6. Guerrero again put the Blue Jays ahead in Game 4, with a first-inning RBI single off Cam Schlittler, and while the Yankees soon tied the game, the Blue Jays won 5-2 and advanced.

The Mariners shut Guerrero and the Blue Jays down during the first two games of the ALCS; he went 0-for-7 with a walk while the team scored just four runs. He hit with just one runner on base in four plate appearances in the opener, but had runners on in his first three of four times up in Game 2; he grounded out with Lukes on second in the first inning against Gilbert, advancing Lukes to third, but when Guerrero hit a 109-mph grounder with runners on first and third in the third inning, it was right at second baseman Jorge Polanco, a routine play. The score was tied 3-3 at that point, but by the time he batted again, against Eduard Bazardo (who induced a soft grounder), the Blue Jays were down 6-3, and when he faced Emerson Hancock to lead off the eighth, they were down 10-3 (he walked).

The unstoppable version of Guerrero returned during the Blue Jays’ 13-4 win in Game 3, when he went 4-for-4 with two doubles, a home run, and a walk. Facing George Kirby, he hit a hot chopper to Suárez, who elevated to spear the ball but threw to first wildly; Guerrero was credited with an infield single. He smacked a double off Kirby and scored during the Blue Jays’ five-run third; hit a 406-foot solo shot off Kirby to start the fifth and extend the lead to 7-2; was intentionally walked with a runner on second and first base open in the sixth (he scored on Kirk’s three-run homer); and doubled again off Luke Jackson in the eighth, by which point the Jays led 12-2. His 2-for-5 effort in Game 4 included a third-inning single off Luis Castillo with a runner on first, and a 359-foot solo home run off Bazardo in the seventh inning, which extended the Toronto lead to 6-2.

The Mariners minimized the damage Guerrero could do during their 6-2 victory in Game 5. He ripped a 113.5-mph double into the left-center gap against Bryce Miller (against whom he went 0-for-3 in Game 1) in the first inning, but it came with two outs and nobody on, and he ended up stranded. He was intentionally walked twice and didn’t score either time, first drawing a free pass from Miller in the fourth following Lukes’ leadoff double and the Blue Jays down 1-0, and then again in the seventh from Bryan Woo, with two outs and a runner on first and the Jays leading 2-1. Between those walks, with men on first and second, two outs, and the score still tied in the fifth, Brash struck him out on a sinker that at best may have grazed the inner fringe of the strike zone; had Guerrero not swung, it might have been ball four. The Mariners eventually came back to win in the eighth on a game-tying skyscraper solo shot by Raleigh and then a grand slam by Suárez.

By multiple measures, Guerrero’s postseason performance stands among the greatest since division play was introduced in 1969. I prefer that cutoff for such comparisons because the expansion of the postseason from a World Series-only affair to one with multiple rounds of playoffs bulks up the sample sizes. Nobody has ever taken more than 36 plate appearances in a seven-game World Series (the record is 37 in an eight-game series), and we’re not even to this year’s World Series yet, so if we want to put what Vladito is doing into perspective, a good place to start is at a 40-PA cutoff. By wRC+, he’s second so far:

That’s some esteemed company. Guerrero’s slugging percentage ranks second only to Beltrán, and his on-base percentage fifth. In terms of Blue Jays postseason history, he’s outdone the slash stats of Molitor, the 1993 World Series MVP, and he’s surpassed 2015 hero José Bautista’s total of four homers. For as great as his run has been, the Blue Jays need one more win to ensure he avoids the fates of Alvarez and Beltrán, both of whom missed out on the World Series despite remarkable individual performances.

All of this follows a regular season in which Guererro was very good (.292/.381/.467, 137 wRC+), if not the unstoppable force that he was in 2024 (.323/.396/.544, 164 wRC+) or ’21 (.311/.401/.601, 166 wRC+). He closed the season in a funk, batting just .256/.299/.263 without a home run over his final 21 games, and finished with 23 homers, his lowest full-season total; he hit 30 last year, and averaged 34 from 2021–24.

During the regular season, Guerrero demonstrated new-found selectivity by setting career lows in overall swing rate (42.2%), in-zone swing rate (61.1%), and chase rate (21.2%). So far in October, he’s outdone the last of those (20.5%), and while his other rates aren’t even lower, both his 43.6% overall swing rate and 63.9% zone swing rate are substantially below his 2024 and career marks. The big deal is that he isn’t missing; he’s cut his swinging strike rate from 8.4% to 5.8% — nine swings and misses in 10 games — and struck out in just 4.4% of his plate appearances, down from 13.8% in the regular season.

We’re in especially small sample territory in terms of individual pitch types, but one thing that stands out is that the only pitch Guerrero particularly struggled against during the regular season was changeups, against which he hit just .239 and slugged .324, with just one home run and a 25.6% whiff rate. He’s seen only 10 changeups in the postseason, but he’s 2-for-4 with a pair of homers against them (off Gil and Rodón) and has yet to whiff on one. Additionally, he hit just .275 and slugged .407 against sliders with a 25.3% whiff rate during the regular season, but so far he’s 2-for-7 with a home run and a double (both off Kirby), good for an .857 SLG.

When he has connected, Guerrero is hitting the ball much harder and in the air more often than he did in the regular season:

For comparison, Guerrero’s career lows in groundball rate and groundball/fly ball ratio were in 2021 (44.8% and 1.23, respectively); that year, he set career highs in average exit velo (95.1 mph), xSLG (.597), and barrel and hard-hit rates (15.1% and 55.2%, respectively) as well. His highest average launch angle was in 2023 (10.5 degrees); he averaged 9.4 degrees during that incredible ’21 campaign.

Guerrero’s inconsistency when it comes to hitting the ball in the air remains the big what-if in his career. His bat speed is elite, and he can put a charge into the ball with the best of them; his maximum exit velocity this year (120.4 mph) outdid those of Ohtani (120) and Judge (118.1). Those sluggers hit fly balls with greater consistency, however, and end up doing more damage, which places their production on another level. Of course, they also strike out much more often than Guerrero, and as we’ve seen time and again this fall, contact does have its virtues in forcing defenses to make big plays in high-pressure situations. As the two aforementioned plays by Suárez demonstrate, sometimes they make ’em, and sometimes they don’t.

Nobody’s going to sustain this level of performance forever, but what Guerrero has done has placed him in the pantheon among October performances. Whether or not the Blue Jays reach the World Series, they have to be thrilled with what their seeing from their half-billion-dollar slugger.