Article: The Blue Jays' Bats Are Back! Can We Expect Them To Stick Around?

[Owen Hill]

The Jays capped off a three-game sweep of the Mariners in Seattle on Sunday with a nine-run explosion. The victory marked the first time Toronto has scored nine runs in a game this year and only the second time they’ve scored at least eight since the second day of the season (the other being their 8-5 win against the Angels on Thursday).

As enjoyable as Sunday’s game was to watch, the impressive part of this weekend’s series was less the thumping on Sunday and more the consistent, relentless attack of Blue Jays hitters across multiple games, against many different pitchers. Coming into the series, the Mariners’ pitching staff was a perceived strong point and ranked 12th in baseball in ERA. However, it allowed a previously scuffling Blue Jays offence to put up crooked numbers in all three games, plating a total of 21 runs over the weekend.

To get there, the Jays received production up and down the lineup, hitting .315 as a team with 11 extra base hits, four of them homers. As we typically see when an offence is rolling, the top of the lineup was very productive. Bo Bichette was 4-for-11 with three walks while mashing his second homer of the year to right-centre field on Saturday. George Springer continued his defiance of Father Time with three RBIs and four runs scored, including a mammoth homer on Sunday.

Ernie Clement and Nathan Lukes also stood out as key contributors at the very productive bottom of the lineup, both reaching base six times in the series and both picking up multiple RBIs.

Just about every Blue Jay with a bat chipped in one way or another, which speaks to just how dominant the lineup was this weekend. 

Yet, easily the most exciting development of the series was the breakout of Addison Barger. I wrote just last week that I thought Barger was showing signs of an offensive breakout, but I can’t take credit for believing that this was on the horizon. 

Barger put 11 balls in play against the Mariners, eight of which were hard-hit balls, qualified by having exit velocities of 95 mph or higher. Of Barger’s eight hard-hit balls, five of them came off the bat over 110 mph, including a 116.5-mph line drive double – the hardest-hit ball of his MLB career.

Oh, and most importantly, all of those eviscerated baseballs turned into six hits, including three doubles and his first homer of 2025.

As you can see below, Barger now finds himself nestled between Oneil Cruz and Aaron Judge on the average exit velocity leaderboard across baseball (as of Monday), albeit in a much smaller sample than those around him:

It doesn’t take much analysis to tell you that that is one hell of a development. If Barger has truly unlocked something and can continue to produce elite exit velocities while keeping his strikeout rate low, he raises the offensive ceiling of this team in a big way. There’s not a whole lot a defence can do against baseballs that leave vapour trails.

Barger’s production has clearly not gone unnoticed by manager John Schneider and the Jays, as he found himself hitting in the three spot between Vlad and Springer on Saturday and Sunday in the absence of Anthony Santander, who missed most of the weekend with lingering shoulder soreness from a crash into the stands on Friday night.

I’m morally obligated to put the small sample size caveat on Barger here, but there is a whole lot to dream on going forward now that we’ve seen a little proof of concept that he is capable of producing at the top of the lineup at the big league level. 

Looking more broadly at the lineup and the season as a whole, it’s important to note that this weekend represented a run scoring outburst, not necessarily a power outburst. Even with a gaudy average of seven runs per game, the Jays had an ISO of just .171, which would currently be sixth in baseball if it held up over the full season. That’s a very encouraging number, but it tells us that the Jays still did the majority of their damage by stringing hits together, which may raise a few eyebrows when it comes to the sustainability of their newfound run-scoring prowess. Long story short, we’re going to need a larger sample to see if the process has truly changed in a way that would mark this weekend as a turning point for the Blue Jays’ offence.

With this weekend in the rearview mirror, the Blue Jays now rank 14th in baseball with a 99 team wRC+ and 27th in both ISO (.119) and home runs (30). There is a lot of work to be done to prove that the most recent three games are more representative of what this lineup will be than the 37 games previous, but if they are, it’ll be easy to look back at the end of this season and note this weekend as a major turning point for the offence.

Stats and rankings in article taken prior to games on Monday, May 12.

View full article

[Spanky99]

I sure hope so, it's moved into this Tampa series thus far.