Vladimir Guerrero Jr. Hits the Ground(er) Running

The Blue Jays and Tigers were rained out on Monday, but after just one spring training game, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is 1-for-2, for a tidy .500 batting average. It's hard to think of something less surprising than Guerrero getting off to a good start at the plate. Since his debut in 2019, no one in baseball has hit the ball hard as many times as Vladimir Guerrero Jr. That's not hyperbole; Statcast, which classifies any ball with an exit velocity over 95 mph as hard-hit, tells the tale very clearly. Guerrero's 1,313 hard-hit balls lead all players.

The bad news? Guerrero gets surprisingly little production from all that loud contact. Among players who have seen at least 2,000 pitches over that period, his .612 wOBA on hard-hit balls ranks 328th. There's a very simple reason for that, and I doubt it's a surprise to you: Over his career, Guerrero has hit 615 hard-hit groundballs. No other player is within 100 of that total. He led the league in both 2022 and 2020, and has never finished lower than third in any of the past five seasons.

Guerrero just doesn't launch the ball the way other sluggers do, so even though he hits the ball harder than just about anyone on earth, he doesn't make the most of it. He's still an excellent hitter because he's excellent at just about every other part of the craft, but that one missing piece can get frustrating. It sometimes seems like it should be a simple thing to fix, but it's not. Swings are complicated, and Guerrero is so preternaturally talented that it would be downright irresponsible to attempt to mess with his. All the same, there's no question as to whether it affects who Guerrero is on the field.

That's a graph that shows his wRC+ and groundball rate in every season of his career. With the exception of 2023, the pattern couldn't be more clear. When Guerrero's groundball rate is high, his offensive output is low (relatively speaking). That's just who he is. Coming into the 2025 season, we don't need to ask ourselves whether Guerrero will hit well; he always hits well. We need to ask ourselves whether he'll be one of the game's best hitters, and that depends to a great extent on his launch angle.

All of this is preamble for Guerrero's first spring training performance on Saturday. Would you care to take a guess as to what Guerrero did during his two trips to the plate? Here's the hit from his first at-bat, an absolute rocket that left his bat at 105.5 mph and drove in a run.

Yup, an absolute rocket that just barely made it past the glove of the diving first baseman. Classic Guerrero. And just for good measure, here's how his second at-bat ended. In case you're wondering, this was also a hard-hit ball, with an exit velocity of 96.5 mph.

Guerrero is already in midseason form: Two crushed baseballs, launch angles of 2 and -12 degrees, a groundout and a single. To be clear, two spring training at-bats don't mean anything at all. But they are allowed to trigger us just a little bit.

Before I go, I should mention one more thing. As you might be aware, Guerrero isn't the only culprit in this particular department. Bo Bichette has a higher career groundball rate than Guerrero. He led the league in hard-hit grounders in 2021 and finished in third in 2022. (Yes, that means that a Blue Jay has led the league in hard-hit groundballs three times, with six top-five finishes, in the last five seasons.) Remember when I told you Guerrero had a .612 wOBA on hard-hit grounders? Bichette was right behind him at .611. Every concern I've ascribed to Guerrero in the preceding paragraphs also applies to Bichette to some degree, and they also showed up on Saturday. Bichette came to the plate three times and ripped three hard-hit balls. He went 2-for-3 with a double (although the single was very much a gift from the official scorer). Although one was categorized as a line drive, none of them traveled as far as 150 feet, and all three had launch angles below 10 degrees. Here's the liner:

At the very least, it's encouraging that Guerrero and Bichette have come into spring training mashing from day one. But hopefully they remember what a fly ball looks like at some point.