Jay Harry & Tucker Toman Are Red Hot. How Sustainable Is Their Performance?

[Simon Li]

The headlines have surrounded Sean Keys and his 20 homers in just 280 plate appearances, and for good reason. He’ll be in consideration for the major league roster with how well he’s hitting the ball and the major league team's scuffles at the plate. I want to take a look at the two guys who haven’t hit as well as Keys, but have been the second and third best hitters in the Jays' minor league system so far this season.

Meet Jay Harry and Tucker Toman, two batters with wildly different pedigrees and prospect status when they first came into the league, but were both considered almost non-prospects in the offseason prior to this year. 

Jay Harry was the Twins’ sixth-round draft pick in 2023, and despite having a name that matched the team name of the major league team he played for, he was an afterthought in the whirlwind 2024 trade deadline, as the confounding reliever Trevor Richards was sent to Minnesota to acquire him. Harry bounced between High-A Vancouver and Double-A New Hampshire, hitting under the Mendoza line with a sub-.300 OBP and SLG, and was primarily touted for his defensive versatility. 

Tucker Toman came to the Jays in a much different way, as one of the bigger signing bonuses that the Jays gave out in the 2022 MLB draft as their second round compensation pick for $2 million out of high school. He was known for having a solid hit tool with power potential as a switch hitter, but his prospect status quickly dwindled as he spent three years in Low-A Dunedin, where he was a below-average hitter until last season, when he earned a promotion to Vancouver and had 12 games of solid production. 

Things have taken a huge turn for those two this season, as Jay Harry has posted a 145 wRC+ in 223 PAs, slashing .330/.360/.592. Tucker Toman has been just as good with a 142 wRC+ in 238 PAs, with a .284/.403/.490 triple slash. As much as I would like to only celebrate their production, there are reasonable concerns regarding the sustainability of their production.

First, let’s take a look at Jay Harry. The biggest thing that stands out about his profile is that he’s now walking just 3.6% of the time. A lot of it is in-zone aggression, although we don’t have his Double-A pitch-by-pitch data. In the small sample of 10 games in Triple-A, he swings at 84.7% of pitches he sees in the zone. Only Elias Diaz has swung at more than that in the major leagues (min 50 PAs). Harry is not at all selective, though, as he equally chases at an absurd amount, with a 51.8% chase rate, which is 4% higher than the swing-happy Ernie Clement. While Harry does do damage when he makes contact, with a 48.5% hard hit rate and a 90.4 mph average exit velocity, he actually whiffs a lot at the pitches he swings at out of the zone. His contact rate for pitches out of the zone was just 60.5%, and although his in-zone contact was good at 88.5%, it isn’t elite like a lot of swing-happy hitters. 

Despite the solid hard hit rate, Jay Harry also doesn’t have the best raw power either, with him having just a 106.1 mph Max exit velocity and a 103.6 90th percentile exit velocity being just slightly above average in Triple-A. He makes up for the lack of raw power with a pulled air-approach, which lets his power play up, but the question remains if his swing-heavy approach can be sustained against more advanced pitching. Right now, he’s buoyed by a .397 BABIP, and he’s normally been more than .100 points of BABIP lower than that throughout his minor-league career. Harry was never going to sustain a 140 wRC+, but he does have some makings of a good hitter in him. The biggest question is whether he can be a productive hitter despite his aggressive approach. A comparison that seems apt is with Edmundo Sosa of the Phillies, despite being a right-handed hitter instead of left-handed like Harry, their contact and batted ball metrics are remarkably similar, except Harry has better Air-Pull rates and swung at more pitches in the zone. For Harry to carve his way into a major league role, Sosa would be a great player to replicate as a platoon infielder with great defensive versatility, except Harry would be a strong-side platoon bat as a lefty. Harry has much better numbers against righties than lefties.

Name	O-Swing%	Z-Swing%	Swing%	O-Contact%	Z-Contact%	Contact%	EV	EV90	maxEV	HardHit%	CStr%	CSW%	BB%	K%	SwStr%	Pull Air%
Edmundo Sosa	53.99%	72.68%	61.39%	64.50%	89.93%	76.42%	87.4	105.7	111.6	40.59%	12.91%	27.36%	2.16%	22.30%	14.45%	12.00%
Jay Harry	51.80%	84.70%	60.80%	60.50%	88.50%	75.80%	90.4	103.6	106.1	48.50%	11.90%	26.60%	3.60%	22.90%	14.70%	21.20%

(Data via FanGraphs, TJstats.ca)

Moving on to Tucker Toman, the infielder finally made the decision to drop switch-hitting as his righty swing heavily lagged behind his more advanced lefty swing. This has led to an uptick in performance and has made his breakout much more compelling. The best part about Toman’s game is his plate discipline. Toman, despite his struggles, constantly ran near 10% walk rates or above, and he’s been walking at a career best 13.9% of the time. He’s not just walking because of passivity either; he’s been good at not chasing but also with reasonable amounts of in-zone swings at 68.4% of the time. Toman’s production has been carried by a stretch of nine games where he homered six times and added another six doubles, but there are legitimate qualms about Toman’s raw power. Although we don’t have publicly available batted ball metrics for this season, Toman’s data last season wasn’t very impressive, with his Max Exit Velocity at 108.7mph and his 90th percentile at 102.2mph. 

Some would assume that Toman dropping switch-hitting may have impacted his power numbers and that his power production was mostly from that, but there are other factors at play that need to be considered.  As reported by JJ Cooper from Baseball America , the minor leagues have had an offensive explosion that we haven’t seen in a while, most likely due to changes in minor league baseball. Many hitters are experiencing gains in exit velocities and hard hit rates, perhaps not due to improvements as a hitter but due to changes in the baseball. 

Toman seems to be one of the bigger beneficiaries of those changes, as his batted ball profile is not conducive to hitting for power. He doesn’t lift the ball well at all with a 51.1% groundball rate, and when he does lift the ball, it’s often not pulled. With pulled flyballs being the easiest source of power for most hitters, it’s either that Toman has significantly improved his batted ball metrics or that he’s gotten really lucky with his flyballs. Prior to this season, Toman homered on around 7% of the flyballs that he’s hit, but this season he’s up to a 22.5% HR/FB rate (as of June 25th, 2026). Another problem for Toman is that although his patient approach works for him, he’s not very adept at hitting for contact, with just a 75.8% Z-Contact rate and a near 30% whiff rate, which has resulted in a below-average K rate. He is also running a quite high BABIP with a .365, although he seems to be a batter who naturally runs higher BABIPs. His middling contact rates mean that for Toman to continue to be a productive hitter, he needs to hit for power, or more advanced pitchers will challenge him in the zone as he moves up. I find it more unlikely for Toman to continue hitting for power at this rate with his prior middling raw power, whilst also having the same batted ball distribution that he has now. Those things need to have changed significantly for me to fully believe in the breakout. He has pulled the ball in the air more in previous seasons, and his worse results prior may mean that this works for him, but I’m still a bit skeptical about his abilities as a hitter. 

Harry's ultra-aggressive approach and Toman's questionable power indicators suggest that some regression is likely, but we should appreciate how much they've improved so far this season, as the two of them were afterthoughts in an improving Jays system. The remainder of the season will help determine how much of this breakout is actually real, and even if they aren't 140 wRC+ hitters by the end of the season, their development is another example of the progress that the Jays' development system has made. 

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