TORONTO – Much like the Toronto Blue Jays as a whole, George Springer is in the midst of a season that’s tough to wrap your mind around.
At 135 games and counting, he’s on pace for the heaviest workload of his career, second only to 2016 when he appeared in all 162 regular-season contests for the Houston Astros. His 1,004.2 innings in the outfield are his most since logging 1,108 in 2018. Few players in the majors hit the ball as hard as him, with his 115.9 m.p.h. max exit velocity ranking in the top three per cent of the league, while his sweet-spot rate, hard-hit percentage are right around his career norms. His average exit velo and expected slug are down a touch from last season, and off a little more from his career average, but still well above the big-league midpoint.
There’s nothing there not to like.
Still, Springer endured a slow start to the season, picked it up in May and June before going ice-cold from July 29-Aug. 3, when he batted .170/.261/.255 in 119 plate appearances over 26 games with just two homers and eight RBIs, a spell that pushed him out of the leadoff spot.
Since then, however, Springer has steadily turned it on, with Saturday afternoon’s two-homer, three-hit, four-RBI effort in a 5-1 win over the Kansas City Royals his latest set of contributions to the Blue Jays’ late-season push.
While Kevin Gausman spun one of his finest outings, allowing only one run on two hits over eight dominant innings, Springer homered leading off the fourth to open the scoring, delivered a go-ahead two-run single in the fifth and then helped pad the lead in the seventh with another solo shot in his first multi-homer game of the season.
Along with a Cavan Biggio RBI double in the sixth before a crowd of 41,443, the production helped ensure the Blue Jays will remain at least 1.5 games up on the Texas Rangers, who are hosting the Oakland Athletics, for the American League’s third and final wild-card spot.
