Article: George Springer’s Timing Couldn’t Be Worse

[Leo Morgenstern]

A resurgent George Springer has been one of the best hitters in baseball this season. Unfortunately for the Blue Jays, his hot bat keeps disappearing when the chips are down.

Where would the Blue Jays be without George Springer? The veteran outfielder was Jays Centre’s Hitter of the Month for March/April, and his bat has stayed hot into May. In three games this month, he is 3-for-9 (.333) with a double, a home run, three walks, and a stolen base. 

Since Opening Day, Springer leads Blue Jays batters in FanGraphs WAR. His .927 OPS and 166 wRC+ trail only Tyler Heineman and Daulton Varsho, the two of whom combined have fewer than half as many plate appearances as Springer. Thanks to his consistent hitting, Springer also leads Blue Jays position players in Win Probability Added (per FanGraphs), a statistic that measures how much an individual player has increased or decreased his team’s chances of winning with each plate appearance. In other words, no hitter has helped the Blue Jays win games more than Springer. No surprises there.

Yet, Springer doesn’t rank highly in every offensive category. In fact, he ranks last among Blue Jays hitters in FanGraphs’ clutch metric, which measures how much value a hitter has provided in higher leverage situations compared to what he would have offered in a neutral context. Compared to his overall performance, Springer has hit notably worse when the chips are down.

In situations that FanGraphs considers low-leverage, Springer has gone 12-for-42 (.286) with a .912 OPS and a 162 wRC+. Seven of his 12 hits have gone for extra bases. Somehow, he has been even better in medium-leverage moments, with three doubles, two home runs, a .349 batting average, and a 197 wRC+. And then there’s his performance in high-leverage spots. In 13 high-leverage plate appearances, Springer has slashed (brace yourself) .222/.333/.222 with a 42 wRC+. Small sample or not, that’s disappointing. For the sake of easy comparison, here are Springer’s leverage splits in table form:

Leverage	PA	Batting Average	OPS	wRC+
Low	49	.286	.912	162
Medium	53	.349	1.020	197
High	13	.222	.556	42

Here’s another way to break things down. Springer has a ridiculous 224 wRC+ in 64 plate appearances with the bases empty. Only Aaron Judge has a higher wRC+ in bases-empty situations (min. 50 PA). In contrast, Springer’s wRC+ with runners on is a mere 89. It’s even worse (37 wRC+) when those runners are in scoring position. Only one AL hitter, Vinnie Pasquantino of the Royals, has more plate appearances than Springer and a lower wRC+ with RISP. 

Baseball Savant’s run value (RV) metrics offer another way to contextualize Springer’s performance. He ranks among the top 10 batters (min. 400 pitches seen) in context-neutral RV per 100 pitches. That makes perfect sense, considering he ranks seventh among qualified batters in wRC+. However, his RV/100 falls dramatically when looking at the leveraged (i.e. context-dependent) version of the metric. Springer ranks 41st in leveraged RV/100, and his leveraged run value (.980 RV/100) is less than half of his context-neutral number (2.047 RV/100). A .980 RV/100 is still good production, but it’s underwhelming once you know how much higher that number could be. A ton of Springer’s big hits have been essentially wasted in less-than-opportune moments.

Look at Springer in comparison to his former teammate Teoscar Hernández. Like Springer, Hernández is off to a hot start. He has an .840 OPS and a 157 wRC+. He also has a similar average leverage index (pLI) to Springer, which shows (roughly speaking) that the two have faced an equivalent number of high and low-leverage situations. Hernández, however, ranks among the top 10 NL batters with a 0.63 clutch score. That means he has been better (compared to his own performance) in higher-leverage spots. As a result, his 1.56 WPA is almost a full win better than Springer’s 0.68 WPA. Similarly, his leveraged RV/100 is about 2.5 times better than Springer’s. The surface-level stats tell us that Springer has been the better hitter this season. And he has. Even so, Hernández has provided significantly more offensive value to his team, all because of good timing.

Poor timing helps to explain why Toronto ranks 22nd in MLB in wRC+ but only 26th in runs per game. The BaseRuns formula from FanGraphs suggests the Blue Jays deserve to have scored about 3.7 runs per game, but in reality, they have managed to score just over 3.5 runs per contest. Not only are the Blue Jays struggling, but they're not making the most of what few opportunities they create.

Springer’s “unclutch” performance can’t explain all of this, but it might explain a lot. Without Springer, Toronto’s offense would be worse. Much worse. Their collective OPS would fall from .661 to .636, while their wRC+ would drop from 92 to 84. However, if you remove Springer from the data, the team’s collective clutch score rises from -0.22 to +0.21. In other words, the rest of the lineup, on average, has overperformed in higher leverage spots. Springer’s performance alone drags that number down by 43 points. 

The good news here is that context-dependent statistics aren’t predictive. There’s no evidence to suggest that certain players are consistently more “clutch” than others. Past success in high-leverage spots doesn’t predict future success in similar moments. So, Springer’s low clutch score isn’t a sign that he’s doing anything wrong. There is no reason to believe his struggles in higher-leverage spots will continue. Over a long season, these things tend to even themselves out.

The bad news, however, is that Springer’s hot start almost certainly isn’t sustainable. We’re talking about a 12-year MLB veteran with a career 127 wRC+. His single-season high was a 155 wRC+ in 2019. From 2023-24, he posted a 100 wRC+ in 299 games. He’s 35 years old, turning 36 in September. Everything we know about the aging curve tells us his 166 wRC+ isn’t going to last. His .400 BABIP backs that up. It's beyond uncommon to see a player improve this much this late in his career. It's even more unusual to see a player maintain such a high BABIP over more than a few months.

So, there is a pretty solid chance that Springer’s first 30 games in 2025 will also be his best 30 games in 2025. And while his strong performance has helped the Blue Jays keep their heads above water, there is no denying that they didn’t get nearly as much value out of his hot hitting as they could have. That’s not necessarily anyone’s fault, but it’s a shame all the same. George Springer’s performance so far in 2025 couldn’t have been better. But his timing couldn’t have been worse

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