Jesse Burrill

No one lifts the ball more than Daulton Varsho. No one squares it up less. The path to success may lie in the middle. The Toronto Blue Jays have mentioned on several occasions that “internal improvement” will go a long way to improve the 74-game win total they had in 2024. That statement is true for all 30 teams in baseball, and the Blue Jays are no exception. In fact, they had several players who underperformed their expectations. George Springer, Davis Schneider, Alejandro Kirk, Ernie Clement, Daulton Varsho, and Bo Bichette all made at least 300 plate appearances wile running a wRC+ below 100. If you include the 83 wRC+ that Andrés Giménez put up in Cleveland, that makes seven players; only the Chicago White Sox had more. That's not where you want to be, and it's simply not good enough for a team that says it has playoff aspirations. The good news is all seven of the aforementioned players are projected to be much better than they were last year, according to Steamer. Even if that doesn't come to pass, getting above-average production from at least five of those seven players will go a long way toward helping this team score more runs and ultimately compete for a Wild Card spot. Varsho might be the most interesting of the bunch. His elite defence has made him one of the best outfielders in baseball. In fact, his 9.7 fWAR over the past three seasons ranks 14th among all outfielders, ahead of players like Christian Yelich, Teoscar Hernández, and Seiya Suzuki. It's pretty good company to be in. Varsho's bat has held him back. Despite hitting 38 home runs over the past two seasons, he has a combined 92 wRC+, making him 8% worse than the average hitter. These numbers are fine, but they pale in comparison to the 27 HRs and 106 wRC+ he put up in his final season in Arizona. So what happened over the last few seasons? Is there hope that Varsho can take his offensive game to another level in 2025? To answer those questions, let's look back into the 2022 season and see what he did well. The first number that pops up is his 10.2% barrel rate, which was roughly three percentage points higher that year than any other year in his career. Barrels are the designation given to balls hit at an ideal combination of exit velocity and launch angle. In 2024, the typical barrel produced a .719 Batting Average and a 2.402 slugging percentage. Varsho's barrel rate dropped to 7.3% in 2023 and to 6.2% in 2024, which put him in the 31st percentile in baseball. Let's start with his batted ball profile: Varsho has seen his flyball and popup rate increase dramatically over the last few seasons, while his line drive rate, normally a fairly volatile stat, has bounced up and down. Overall, the combination of fly balls and line drives (the balls that can end up as barrels) has stayed roughly the same, but it's clear that, like so many players in today's game, he's trying to get the ball in the air more. However, Varsho's popup rate is very concerning. In 2024, it was 18.2%, the highest of his career and the highest of any qualified player by a huge margin. Moreover, when Varsho does hit a fly ball or a line drive, he's not hitting the ball as hard as he used to. In 2021 and 2022, when Varshio hit one of those air balls, he had a 93.8-mph exit velocity and 55.8% hard-hit rate. Since he joined the Blue Jays, those numbers are 91.9 mph and 47.3%. Varsho may be getting carried away with trying to lift the ball. Could a simple mechanical adjustment be the key to getting Varsho to square up the baseball more? Maybe! Thanks to Statcast's new bat tracking information, we know that he has solid bat speed. The problem is in his squared-up rate: On a per-swing basis, Varsho squares the ball up less than nearly every player in baseball. If you look at how often he squares it up when he makes contact, he's dead last. There's a pretty clear connection here. Esteban Rivera has written about Varsho's attack angle over at FanGraphs. Varsho has turned himself into a master of lifting the ball; his 24.4-degree launch angle was the highest among all qualified players in 2024. However, the extremely steep bat angle necessary to hit virtually everything in the air also means that Varsho's bat doesn't spend much time on plane with the ball. He's not making much contact, and he's among the worst players in the league at making solid contact. In order to succeed at the plate, Varsho will likely need to strike a better balance in his attack angle. That may be a big ask; hitting a round ball with a round bat is one of the hardest things to do in sports. New hitting coach David Popkins is coming from the Twins, who have for years been deeply committed to pulling the ball in the air, the exact thing that Varsho's swing is designed to accomplish. If Popkins can help Varsho strike that balance, barreling up the baseball just a little bit more, his offensive numbers could combine with his elite defence and above-average base running, to make the complete player we've been hoping for since Varsho's arrival in 2023. The Blue Jays don't even need Varsho to become elite at squaring up the ball. If he can just improve from worst in baseball to somewhere in the middle of the pack, then we should see both the batting average and the power numbers take a step forward this season. For a team expecting internal improvements, the star center fielder is a good place to start. View full article

FanGraphs' Steamer projections for the 2025 Blue Jays have released. What can we glean from the information? The Toronto Blue Jays off-season has been mostly uneventful so far. Between a trade for Andrés Giménez and the signing of Yimi Garcia, the team hasn’t made many impact moves so far. There have been numerous reports of the Jays being interested in players, but ultimately, they have come up short. There are still many moves to be made, and we fully expect the Jays to add somebody to this roster. But until that happens, the Jays' success in 2025 will come down to getting some real productive baseball from the players they already have on the roster. As things stand, the Blue Jays have a very intriguing group of 26 guys on the roster. There is a mix of older players who have had very good major league careers, young players who still may have untapped potential, and a little of everything in between. Now, the real question is, where will that performance come from? Is George Springer going to prove he’s still got some high-level baseball left in him? Will Daulton Varsho tap into the power that saw him hit 27 home runs in Arizona? What version of Bo Bichette will appear in 2025? The one that got down-ballot MVP votes in 2021-23, or the one that struggled to a 71 OPS+ in 2024? There is no way anyone can know for certain (predicting the future is hard), but we have our next best thing. Every year, several websites release projections that estimate how well (or poorly) players will perform based on factors like previous track records, aging trends, and pitch tracking data. They then devise a median projection of what they expect a player to do. Projections aren’t perfect. They have no way of knowing if a player is suddenly going to throw two mph harder or make a swing change to add some bat speed or if a player is dealing with some sort of injury (these games are played by humans, after all). Still, they give us some baseline of what to expect from some players. Steamer has come out with their projections for all MLB players, and a few Blue Jays ones caught my attention. We’ll go over three of my favourites here: Will Wagner Will Wagner joined the Blue Jays and immediately made a great first impression. In his rookie season, he hit .305/.337/.451 with 4 home runs in just 86 plate appearances, which was good enough for 0.7 fWAR in that limited amount of time before ending his season early due to a knee injury. Early reports say he should be good to go for spring training and the projection systems, as they’ve seen from Wagner. Here’s what Wagner did in 2024 vs. the projections for 2025. For the most part, the projections seem to buy into what Wagner did in his rookie season; the 117 wRC+ is projected to be 4th highest on the team, and getting on base at a .351 clip would be impressive (only Vladimir Guerrero Jr and Horwitz did that last year, minimum 100 PAs). Playing time is still to be determined, as we expect the Jays to add more to the roster, and with the Gimenez trade, that might limit the amount of at-bats Wagner sees at second base, where he played all but two of his games last season. He was significantly better vs. RHP (149 wRC+) vs LHP (57 wRC+). There is something to be said from taking data from such a small sample, as Davis Schneider's hot streak in 2023 as an example, but even if he’s just a LH platoon bat, there could be some real impact from Wagner, and the projections seem to agree. George Springer Part of the reason the Blue Jays offence struggled so much last year was because George Springer also struggled. The downward offensive performance has been the trend over the last few seasons for the 35-year-old. Here is his OPS+ over the last 3 seasons: 2022: 132 2023: 102 2024: 94 His quality of contact numbers has also decreased, seeing a decline in stats like average exit velocity, wOBA, and hard hit percentage. All while seeing an increase in strikeout percentage and having the highest ground ball rate of his career. It's not ideal for a guy who was second in the Blue Jays in at-bats in 2024. But there is still hope; Steamer is projecting things to bounce back somewhat in 2025. Most notably, he was in the power department, with a .411 slugging percentage, which is 40 points higher than where he finished in 2024 and is projected as the fourth highest on the team. The Blue Jays have said at points in 2024 that they have stats that believe Springer will bounce back. Still, it will be hard for a now 35-year-old with an elevated ground ball rate and decreasing exit velocities to bounce back, but if the Blue Jays can get anything close to this projection, the front office (and fans) should be thrilled. Bowden Francis There are a lot of question marks surrounding the Blue Jays' pitching staff in 2025. Chris Bassitt, Jose Berrios, and Kevin Gausman are all on the wrong side of 30, and with Yariel Rodriguez, Jake Bloss, and injuries to Ricky Tiedemann and Alek Manoah, there are a lot of question marks behind them. One player who was a pleasant surprise down the stretch was the performance of Bowden Francis, who, since joining the rotation on AUG 7th after Yusei Kikuchi was traded to Houston, was phenomenal. Nine starts with a 1.53 ERA, allowing opposing batters to just a .422 OPS against him and twice taking a no-hitter into the 9th inning. This season, one of the burning questions for the Blue Jays is who the real Bowden Francis is. Is this who he is, or is it more so the guy who pitched out of the pen and had a 5.68 ERA (with a FIP to match) that we saw in the first half of the season? Steamer takes its best guess and thinks that the full-season numbers we saw are more predictive than the player we saw in the second half. The most notable jump here is that they expect the ERA to be a full run higher (maybe expecting the superb quality of contact he induced last year to regress to the mean), with walk and strikeout numbers holding steady; it is also worth noting that no matter what happens this season, Bowden Francis is going to have a dramatic leap in innings pitched this year and no one knows how that will affect his performance. It's worth noting that Marco Estrada consistently outperformed his peripherals, and Francis is a candidate to do just that. One thing is for sure: the 2025 Blue Jays season is going to be one of answering a lot of questions. The looming free agency of Vlad Jr and Bichette is the biggest one. Still, there are a lot of question marks with some of the other key players on the roster, too, and although we have six months to follow these players and ride the roller coaster of a long season, getting a look at these projections can be a quick way of getting a feel of what could happen this season with just 78 days until Opening Day. View full article