Shape of the Blue Jays: Springer, Varland, Giménez

Welcome to Shape of the Blue Jays, my column where I dig into Statcast numbers to analyze recent pitch shape and swing shape trends for Toronto Blue Jays players and discuss how they have impacted their performance. Click here to read the last edition.

Quick Hits: Another Rising Prospect

• After his first taste of big league spring training was followed by a .993 OPS in 49 games at Double-A New Hampshire, Toronto's 2024 fourth-rounder Sean Keys was promoted to Triple-A Buffalo earlier this month. Keys had never played above High-A before this year and was named the 20th-best prospect in the Jays' system by Baseball America in their preseason report. In 11 games so far with the Bisons, he's continuing to lay waste to opposing pitchers, slashing .343/.465/.771 with three homers. BA has already bumped him up to 14th in the system in their latest rankings.
• All Triple-A parks log Statcast data, meaning Keys's advanced stats are now available to the public. Since the promotion, his 90th-percentile exit velocity is a loud 108.7 mph. His hard hit rate is at 52%, his barrel rate is 12%, and his hard-hit balls are averaging a launch angle of 16°, indicating he's making his loudest contact in the air. To achieve these incredible batted ball numbers, he's had to fork over some discipline and contact, as his chase rate is a hair above the MLB average at 29.2%, while his zone contact rate is 79.7%. It's more than worth the tradeoff, though, if he's going to do this much damage.
• Keys is a lefty bat who just turned 23 and is limited to the corner infield positions, which somewhat limits the chances he'll play an immediate role in the majors in 2026, unless he picks up a new position like Charles McAdoo did. Still, his progression this year has nonetheless been exciting to see.

 George Springer 

George Springer is starting to look more like himself at the plate (122 wRC+ in June). It starts with his selectivity, as his chase rate this month is down to 19.2%, a decrease of 10% compared to May and the first time he's been under 20% in a month since August of last year. His mechanics have slightly changed too. His swing length this month is down a couple of inches from his season average without any material sacrifice to his bat speed. 

George Springer Bat Tracking Stats, 2026 overall vs 2026 June

The recurring issue with Springert early in the season was similar to what we saw in his down year in 2024: too many ground balls rolled over to the pull side. He has launched a couple towering pull-side dingers this past week, with one of them being his 300th career long ball, but he's been looking to use the whole field again in an effort to move away from those slow rollers to the left side of the infield. Springer already lets the ball travel more than almost every hitter in baseball, and this month, he's doubling down on that approach and shooting more hits the other way. This approach often leads to a decrease in power output, but his recent success indicates it might be what he has to do in order to avoid an abundance of weak contact.

 Louis Varland 

After finally reminding us that he was human last week, Louis Varland went right back to dominating in the first two games of the Boston series. On Wednesday night, he struck out the side on 10 pitches, one shy of an immaculate inning. The night before, Varland had to enter a three-run game for a four-out save after Tommy Nance struggled in the eighth, adding to the increasing concerns about his workload. Despite that, his stuff looked about as good as we've ever seen it the very next day. His fastball averaged 99.8 mph, and his slider was up a couple ticks in velocity to around 94 mph while adding some vertical drop. It feels like the Blue Jays have to turn to him every day, but that hasn't stopped his average fastball velocity from increasing each month of the season.

Through 40 innings this year, Varland is rocking a 0.90 ERA, 1.50 FIP, 1.99 xFIP, and 1.8 FanGraphs WAR, tied with Cade Smith for the highest reliever WAR in the AL. Among every single Blue Jays relief pitcher season in history (max. 100 IP), Tom Henke has the highest fWAR at 3.5, a mark he reached in 1986. In terms of the best ERA, it's B.J. Ryan, who had a 1.37 in 2006. Varland is on pace to match Henke's fWAR in a slightly smaller sample, and his ERA is still on the right side of 1.00. I'll keep saying it until it isn't true: Appreciate this while you can. The Jays have never had a closer this good, and it'll be a long time before the stars align like this again.

 Andrés Giménez 

Andrés Giménez's hot streak has lengthened out the lineup quite nicely (146 wRC+ in his last seven games). His ability to occasionally surprise everyone with an absolute missile off a lefty pitcher is delightful on the rare occasion it happens, and in Tuesday's series opener, he took a Payton Tolle cutter deep to Fenway's cavernous right-center field, going back-to-back with Davis Schneider for the first instance of back-to-back homers the Jays have had in 2026. On balls in play, Giménez's xwOBA against changeups and splitters is a whopping .547 so far in June.

A few things stand out from his bat tracking stats of late. Giménez is standing a tad farther back in the box, and his stance is both more open (12° open in June, compared to 2° open in 2026 overall) and more upright, with a smaller gap in between his feet in recent weeks. The visual comparison below shows that his front foot is slightly offset from his back foot, something we didn't see at the start of the year, as he's facing the pitcher more directly. When he first got to Toronto and immediately opened 2025 on a productive note, his stance was more open than it was in Cleveland. Hitting is a game of constant adjustments, so it makes sense this didn't last all year, but he's trying the same thing again right now, and it's working.

Andrés Giménez Batting Stance Comparison, April 2026 (left) vs June 2026 (right)

All stats entering June 18, 2026