ATLANTA – Vladimir Guerrero Jr. arrived at Truist Field for his fifth All-Star Game under vastly different circumstances than No. 4 a year ago, his long-term future now settled and his Toronto Blue Jays atop, rather than buried at the bottom, of the American League East.
Correspondingly, the questions around him have changed, too, from pondering his looming free agency and a coming deadline sell-off to what’s gone right for the Blue Jays and the expectation of win-now additions before the July 31 cutoff comes and goes.
Crazy how much things can shift in a mere 12 months.
“We believe in each other,” Guerrero, who signed a $500-million, 14-year extension in April, said of what he’s liked about the club’s surge to a 55-41 record, even after losses in three of four games before the break. “We’re winning games and we’re playing the game the right way. That’s the thing I can tell you.”
Fair enough, since it isn’t easy to explain the Blue Jays’ rebound from an unproductive April that felt eerily reminiscent of 2024’s ills. Trying to understand their remarkable 39-21 run since falling a season-high four games under .500 on May 7 can feel like staring at an advanced algebra problem and struggling to figure out how the steps led to the solution.
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Last week, when their winning streak hit 10 games, Max Scherzer described the Blue Jays as having “an ‘it’ factor” that’s “hard to measure, hard to describe, but when you see it, you know it.”
Guerrero framed it as a “trust in your teammates” that takes the belief he said the Blue Jays have for one another and turns it into a tool that helps productivity.
“When you trust your teammates,” he said through interpreter Hector Lebron, “especially in the lineup, whoever is either in front or behind you, it makes your job easier. If they’re not pitching to me, if they walk me, I’m OK, because whoever is hitting behind me, I trust that teammate. That allows us to be who we are right now.”
Ephemeral as such sentiments may be – fellow all-star Alejandro Kirk’s team-high 3.0 fWAR, George Springer’s rebound to a team-best wRC+ of 137 and Addison Barger’s 2.0 fWAR since his April 15 promotion, among other contributors, have underpinned the club’s success – the Blue Jays have learned to not just trust, but also to depend on one another.
For instance, Anthony Santander, Daulton Varsho, Andres Gimenez, Scherzer and Yimi Garcia, expected to be pillars for the club, have all missed substantial time with injuries and the Blue Jays have simply found others to step up in their place, be it Ernie Clement, Nathan Lukes, Myles Straw, Eric Lauer or Braydon Fisher.
And while Guerrero has been good this season, batting .277/.384/.434 with 12 homers and 46 RBIs, he hasn’t yet gone air-ship-carrier mode the way he can and hasn’t tried to force it, walking 56 times for a 13.5 per cent rate that’s the highest of his career.
For context, he had 52 walks at the break during his MVP runner-up season of 2021 and walked only 58 times in all of 2022, 67 times in 2023 and 72 times last year, demonstrating just how careful pitchers are being with him.
“If you notice,” he said, “I have 50-something walks already, it’s the first time at the break that I’ve had so many walks.”
Trying to deter some of those walks, along with trying to capitalize on more of them when they do happen, is one reason the Blue Jays recently slid Bo Bichette to the clean-up spot. They need Lukes and Clement to remain hot while sharing the leadoff spot and Springer to keep rolling in the two-hole to keep that working, although the eventual returns of Varsho and Santander will give manager John Schneider more options.
No matter how that plays out, the lineup-wide pressure created by a .258 batting average that’s tied for best in the majors, a .330 on-base percentage that’s third and complemented by a 17.7 per cent strikeout percentage leaves the Blue Jays in a good spot to buy ahead of the deadline.
Their priorities lie on the pitching side, and they’ll cast a wide net for both starters and relievers. To that end, they recently sent scouts to evaluate both their own farm system and those of other teams, too, doing some of the preliminary groundwork for the 2½ weeks ahead.
Last year, they made eight subtraction trades in five days, an experience Kirk described as “not easy when you play with guys for many years, but it’s part of the game.”
Being in position to add, Kirk continued, is “very emotional, knowing the front office is seeing what we’re doing. It’s important to us. And that will be great and it’s going to be great when we get back.”
Guerrero, who isn’t thinking about last season any longer – “We passed that and we continue this year,” is how he put it – said being back on the buying side “means a lot.”
For now, he’s relishing his latest all-star experience, giving him a chance to “only think about having fun and trying to enjoy this. When you go home you’ve got to be prepared to stay in the first place and that’s hard. I feel very, very good (about) how we’ve been playing as of now and I hope we continue like that in the second half.”
