How Addison Barger Can Achieve Results That Match His Elite Talent

[Matthew Creally]

There shouldn't be many Blue Jays fans out there who need to be reminded of how good Addison Barger is. He's a physical specimen with positional versatility and a knack for bludgeoning the baseball. He has 97th-percentile max exit velocity, 93rd-percentile bat speed, 99th-percentile arm strength, and is simply a fun watch at the plate and in the field. He first broke into the league in 2024 and mostly struggled out of the gate, but just a year later, he became the poster child for betting on tool-rich prospects, delivering a 188 wRC+ in the postseason despite not truly finding his groove until Game 6 of the ALCS.

Only, his high-upside skill set has yet to pay dividends over a full 162-game schedule. His offensive results in 2025 were merely good, not great. He had his first extended hot stretch in May and came into the All-Star break with a 125 wRC+, but finished the regular season at 107 after a choppy second half. He had a wRC+ over 140 in two separate months, but straddled the Mendoza Line post-trade deadline.

Especially for someone with Barger's raw power, consistency is often synonymous with discipline: He chased pitches at a rate in excess of 40% in July to set the stage for a cold August, but was at his most patient in September before catching fire in October. Concurrently, he was prone to extended periods of striking out at a 30% clip, but that rate will sit in the low-20s when he's at his best. 

Of course, it was his first full season in the league. He's only 26 years old and has just 727 regular season plate appearances to his name. He was an elite hitter for a greater portion of 2025 than he was hovering around replacement level, and saying the best is yet to come for him is an opinion that would fall into the category of freezing cold takes. Still, he hasn't proved himself worthy of an All-Star nod or anything of the sort. There are holes in Barger's game that prevented him from taking a truly meteoric rise last year. What are they?

The low-hanging fruit here is his plate skills. His chase, swing-and-miss, strikeout, and walk rates all placed between the 30th and 36th percentiles, and for that higher-than-average chase tendency, the rate at which he swung at strikes was actually below-average, indicating poor swing decisions overall (and as we now know, the discipline in particular can come and go at a moment's notice). He also recorded his fair share of mishits, evidenced by a 25th-percentile squared-up percentage, which is Statcast's measure for collision efficiency on contact. 

I don't want to spend too much time harping on him for this. It's a simple fact that hitters of this archetype, ones that swing hard with a high capacity to do damage and subpar bat-to-ball abilities, are likelier to experience a much wider range of outcomes over the course of a season compared to those with a lower ceiling but better plate skills (our beloved Ernie Clement, for example).

Besides, it's not like his contact or his selectivity is bad enough that he's a below-average hitter. I'd be able to make a significant dent in the supply of the nearest vending machine if I had a dollar for every time John Schneider has told the media that he preaches "being yourself" to his players. He says it a lot because doing what you're good at is a sound philosophy. If Addison Barger tries too hard to hit .290, he risks losing his calling card: damage ability. This version of him, the one that doesn't have a .370 OBP or a low-90s zone contact rate, can be great. No need to reinvent the wheel.

It may seem counterintuitive given his high bat speed, flat swing tilt, and general strength, but his pitch type splits from 2025 indicate some struggles with fastballs. Observe:

Pitch Group	Run Value	Zone Swing%	Chase%	Zone Contact%	wOBACON	EV90	Bat Speed 90	Barrel%	HH LA°
Fastballs	-5	65.3%	30.8%	81.8%	.380	105.3 mph	80.3 mph	11.5%	8.5°
Non-Fastballs	6	67.9%	31.2%	82.3%	.434	107.1 mph	80.0 mph	11.4%	9.1°

Fastballs include four-seamers, sinkers, and cutters.

It's worth noting the average chase rate on secondary pitches is about seven points higher than on fastballs, so it appears Barger simply doesn't have a good eye for the latter. Despite similar top-end bat speeds, contact rates, and batted ball angles on hard hits between these two groupings, he makes better swing decisions, hits the ball harder, and gets better results on contact against the slow stuff.

In theory, if he saw fastballs better, everything else would play up too. He'd be likelier to make more contact, and more quality contact at that, if he swung at better pitches. This is particularly true at the top of, and just above, the strike zone, where most of his swings and misses against velocity were. However, a deeper look at the bat tracking splits tells a much more revealing story:

Pitch Group	Attack Angle °	Attack Direction ° (pull = lower)	Pulled Flyball%
Fastballs	5°	6°	5.8%
Non-Fastballs	13°	-14°	8.7%

It's timing. I included pulled flyball rate at the end to emphasize what attack angle and direction tell us. Attack angle is in many ways a counterpart to launch angle, measuring the angle at which the sweet spot is traveling at contact point. Attack direction shows the position of the swing from a horizontal standpoint. Barger had a ~70th-percentile pull air rate in 2025, and most of that was happening against secondaries. He couldn't position his swing to hit home runs off fastballs with regularity.

He has power to all fields, so this could be by design to an extent, but regardless, it came at an apparent cost to his propensity for turning on velocity. He hit secondaries for grounders at a higher frequency than fastballs, but his popup rate on heaters was nearly double in comparison. Barger made some significant overhauls to his swing in 2025, adjusting his stance and catching the ball an average of 4.3 inches further in front of home plate than he did the year before, one of the largest increases in the league. Naturally, secondaries have a shallower average contact point than fastballs (they aren't as fast!), but he could stand to lean into that trend a little further to try to rework how he times the hard stuff.

Resetting timing on fastballs is a rather acute adjustment. From a thousand-foot view, if Barger wants to take another sizeable leap in 2026, he could also work on his swing against lefty pitching. He only saw 89 plate appearances against them last year, which resulted in a run value of -3. He still tore the cover off the ball when he managed to put it in play, but those poor results were mostly driven by suboptimal batted ball angles, disproportionate swing decisions, and low contact rates. His contact point was also much deeper than it was against righties, another telltale sign he didn't pick the ball up out of their hands. A platoon weakness is not uncommon among young lefty sluggers, and Barger is surely working on that through the offseason, but taking more competitive at-bats in same-handed matchups would go a long way toward earning him the unbridled trust of his coaching staff.

It's hard not to be excited about what Barger could accomplish in 2026. He has tantalizing bat speed and exit velocities and has shown he can lift and pull the ball without being totally reliant on one type of swing. The 2018 sixth-rounder showed impressive flashes of the player he hopes to become with more stability moving forward, already having developed from an extremely raw power-inclined prospect to an above-average third baseman/right fielder. If October was any indication, most of his road to becoming a truly excellent staple in this lineup has already been travelled, with solving lefty pitching and timing up velocity being some of the only boxes he has left to check on the way. In any case, with the sweepstakes for both Kyle Tucker and Bo Bichette being won elsewhere, his place on this roster is that much more important. 

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