Swinging Less Makes Vladimir Guerrero Jr. More Dangerous

[Jesse Burrill]

On Saturday afternoon, I found myself in an all-too-familiar situation: genuinely excited to watch TV.

It wasn’t reruns of Parks and Rec or Sportsnet’s Misplays of the Month. It was Blue Jays baseball. And for a moment, it was pure euphoria. It felt like I was sitting on a baseball-shaped cloud, with the voices of Ben Shulman and Madison Shipman ushering in another season.

Once the first pitch was thrown, my baseball brain was back. I started watching the radar gun after every pitch, tracking Eric Lauer's pitch mix, and watching Alejandro Kirk frame pitches like the maestro he is.

In the bottom of the first, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. stepped in for his first professional at-bat since Game 7 of the World Series. He looked locked in immediately.

He took a Bryse Wilson cutter inside for ball one. Wilson came back with a curveball that just missed the outside edge, a pitch close enough that Phillies catcher Rafael Marchan challenged via the ABS system. Vlad won. It was ball two.

That's when Shulman said this: “Part of Guerrero’s success has been this, he just is not going to expand, he’s going to make you come after him.”

When the plate appearance ended, Vlad had worked a five-pitch walk. He took four balls out of the zone, and took a healthy cut at the only one he got in the zone and fouled it back:



It’s exactly the type of approach you want to see from any player, but especially Vlad. Swing at the pitches you can do damage with, and take the ones you can't.

I got curious and wanted to look deeper into what Guerrero’s approach at the plate looked like under new hitting coach David Popkins. After doing some digging, I found it was still phenomenal, but different. Let me explain.

My main takeaway was that Vladdy was swinging less often than ever before:

What's more fascinating, though, is that swinging less didn't dramatically change his results. From 2019-2024, he swung at 48.5% of the pitches he saw and produced a .367 wOBA. In 2025, he swung at a career-low 42.2% of the time and posted a .366 wOBA. On the surface, nothing changed. The production was nearly identical. But the way he got there was different.

First things first, it's plate discipline that matters. Swinging less is good, as long as you’re swinging less at pitches out of the zone, but swinging less at the ones you should be swinging at can be a problem. To evaluate swing decisions, I like to use Baseball Prospectus’ SEAGER metric (named after Corey Seager). It measures the value of a hitter's decision to swing or take based on count and pitch location. It rewards hitters who attack pitches they can do damage with and who lay off the unhittable ones. Guerrero's career SEAGER is 22.4, and in 2025, it dipped slightly to 20.4.

The dip wasn’t about chasing more. It was about attacking less. In 2024, Vlad punished pitches in the heart of the zone. In 2025, he let more of those go by. When you pass on pitches you can drive, even elite hitters like Guerrero are leaving production on the table:

Compare this to his wOBA per zone from 2024 and 2025:



Now we can dive even deeper into his 2025 season and find more information. Here is a chart that shows Guerrero's Swing% and wOBA over the 2025 season:

The data shows something fascinating: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. actually does more damage when he swings less.

This doesn’t mean he needs to become more passive. It doesn't mean taking more strikes just for the sake of it. Passivity can be dangerous. Once pitchers learn that you’re unlikely to swing, they attack the zone and count leverage moves in their favor. So, for Vlad, it's not about passivity. It’s about eliminating the swings that don’t lead to damage.

When he trims his swing decisions, he avoids weak contact and forces pitchers back into the zone. And when pitchers are forced into the zone against him, he attacks. When he attacks, he’s special.

October was another sign of this philosophy. His Swing% dropped to 42.9%, and the wOBA rose to a stunning .517, showing that when Guerrero was swinging less, the damage was coming with him. It nearly led to a World Series banner being hung in Toronto. 

There’s more to it than just swinging. Vlad, like many others on the roster, was swinging harder than ever before, especially when he was ahead in the count.


So, what does this mean entering 2026?

Well, it seems like it's going to be more of the same. On MLB Network's "30 Clubs, 30 Camps," Guerrero explained his shift in philosophy:

“In the season, if I see a man on second and no outs, I try to hit the ball the other way, and now [the Blue Jays] told me let's go to home plate and do damage, and that’s what I do this spring training… they tell me to bring him in, so I bring him in.”

That sounds like a hitter who learned something in October.

With Bo Bichette gone, there's no more debate. This is Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s team now, and manager John Schneider has the utmost confidence in his superstar, saying, “[Bichette's departure] allows Vlad to have a louder voice, and to understand this has been his team and will always be his team.”

Guerrero hit just 23 home runs last season, but if he can maintain the changes he made into the postseason and the selective, damage-first version of Vlad carries into 2026, then the 48 home runs he hit in his MVP-caliber 2021 season don't seem out of reach.

And that sounds much more like must-watch television than any Parks and Rec rerun could ever be.

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