Article: Milestone Alert! Bo Bichette Hits His 100th Home Run

[Mike LeSage]

In my pre-season milestone watch, I tagged Bo Bichette’s 100th home run as “likely to happen.” His four home runs in 2024 were a career low, but after the injuries he battled through last season, his power coming back (and especially the power outburst we’re seeing right now) wasn’t a guarantee.

If you'll allow me a moment for navel-gazing, I do have to note that before the season, I wrote, “The homestand against the Athletics at the end of May is where I would look for [Bichette's 100th home run] to happen.” That said, it took until the 33rd game of the season for Bo to hit his first home run of the campaign, so all seven of the homers he needed to reach 100 coming in the last 25 games was a bit of a surprise. Let’s take a second to appreciate #100, before looking back at some of the homers that got us here:

Bichette's first home run came in his third game with the Jays after a late-July call-up to the big league club in 2019. Leading off the eighth inning in Kansas City, he took the first pitch he saw over the wall in left-center. He would go on to hit 10 more that season over his final 43 games.

That first homer coming on the first pitch of an at-bat isn’t much of a surprise in hindsight. Bichette has always been a first-pitch-swinging guy. In fact, 24% of his homers (that’s 24 out of 100 for the math crew) have come on the first pitch of an at-bat. That’s more than any of the other home run leaders on the current Jays team: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (20%), Daulton Varsho (21%), George Springer (17%), and Anthony Santander (14%). 

Bichette’s most prolific home run season came in 2021 – the season he set the franchise record for bWAR from a shortstop. That year also included the longest homer of his career, a 468-foot blast that left Fenway Park in a hurry. For contrast, his softest-hit homer (as measured by exit velocity) was this dinger in Baltimore in 2022 that just caught the top of the wall. It was his second home run of the game, and based on the way he walked out of the batter’s box, he might’ve been the only one who knew it was gone off the bat. That was the sixth time in his career that he had a two-homer game. He hasn’t had a two-homer game since then, but that wasn’t his last multi-homer game. That’s because on September 5 of that same season, Bichette went deep three times:

Three homers, all to different parts of the park. It's a spray chart hat trick! Bichette is one of 19 Jays to have a three-homer game (Carlos Delgado is the only one to add a fourth) and the most recent to do it.

Camden Yards is the place where Bo has hit the most of his homers away from home (9), followed by Fenway Park (6) and temporary Jays homes Sahlen Field and TD Ballpark (5 each). In fact, in another first, he was the first Blue Jay to hit a regular season MLB home run in Buffalo when the Jays were forced to play there during the pandemic:

Bichette has hit homers in all nine innings of regular play, but his only one to come in extras was a 12th-inning walk-off against the Yankees in his rookie season. Similarly, he has 99 home runs as a starter, and his only home run as a sub came earlier this week when he hit a pinch-hit go-ahead homer against Texas.

Bo’s homers have some in all shapes and sizes, and today we celebrate them all.

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