Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s Return to Third Base Won’t Turn Toronto’s Season Around (2024)

Anyone who saw the lineup that the Blue Jays fielded on Sunday against the Pirates was treated to a relatively unfamiliar sight: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. starting at third base for the first time since his 2019 rookie season, and playing the position in a regular season game for the first time since ’22. Designed to squeeze an extra bat into the lineup, the move helped the Blue Jays to a victory. But while they may continue the experiment here and there, they have bigger problems to solve if they’re going to climb back into contention.

Starting Guerrero at third base had been an option for which the Blue Jays had been preparing for a few weeks. For the occasion, manager John Schneider gave Justin Turner the start at first base, with Daniel Vogelbach serving as the designated hitter. The latter went 2-for-4 on Sunday, and capped a three-run fifth-inning rally with a double off Pirates righty Quinn Priester, with Guerrero, who had singled in a run, scoring from first base to give Toronto a 4-3 lead. With Blue Jays starter Chris Bassitt and four relievers generating just nine ground balls while striking out 13, Guerrero didn’t have to make a play in the field until the seventh inning; he handled his two chances perfectly, the second of which featured an impressive spin move while he was shifted to where the shortstop would usually play:

Schneider did not get a similarly positive return when he used the same configuration on Tuesday night. Vogelbach went 0-for-3 and the Blue Jays fell behind 4-0 in the third; they were down 10-1 by the time Guerrero made his two assists, in the eighth and ninth innings.

You can’t win ’em all, and while the Blue Jays did string together four straight victories last week against the White Sox and Pirates, they haven’t been been winning enough. At 29-32, they’re last in the AL East, 14 games behind the Yankees, and four back in the wild card chase, albeit with four other teams between them and the Twins, the bubble team. Their Playoff Odds are just 16.9%, lower than all but four other AL teams, three of which (the Angels, A’s, and White Sox) are completely dead in the water. In other words, every AL team with a pulse except the Red Sox has a better chance of playing into October, and my gut says Boston should have better odds based on its pitching.

The Blue Jays are fortunate to be close to .500, as they haven’t played well on either side of the ball, ranking 12th in the AL in scoring at 3.89 runs per game and 11th in run prevention at 4.61 runs per game. Based on their projected winning percentages via Pythagenpat (.422) and BaseRuns (.423), they’re about three wins ahead of where they should be.

As for Guerrero, he came up as a third baseman, spending every defensive inning of his minor league career at the hot corner after being signed out of the Dominican Republic. The scouting reports weren’t great, as his plus arm was offset by a lack of first-step quickness and limited lateral mobility due to his size (6-foot-2, 245 pounds), but his bat was deemed special enough that he was nonetheless the consensus no. 1 prospect entering 2019, and projected to spend at least the early years of his major league career playing third.

Guerrero gave third base a go when the Blue Jays called him up in late April 2019, after a strained oblique kept him down in the minors long enough to prevent him from getting a full year of service time. The 20-year-old rookie played 96 games there as well as 24 at DH, and the results were… not great. In 824.1 innings, he was three runs below average according to DRS, 9.4 below average according to UZR, and a whopping 15 below average according to what’s now FRV (Statcast’s measure) thanks largely to his lateral range issues. When combined with his modest 106 wRC+ at the plate, those defensive shortcomings limited his value to 0.3 WAR, though using DRS, he finished with a more respectable 2.1 Baseball Reference WAR.

The Blue Jays moved Guerrero to first base during 2020 summer camp, and he’s been the regular there ever since. By all accounts he’s worked hard to learn the position, but the results have been nothing special; in 471 games totaling 4,099.1 innings — roughly the equivalent of three seasons — he’s accrued -6 DRS, -4.3 UZR, and -19 FRV in the field, with his -10 FRV last year the outlier; six of his eight other measures from 2021–23 were within three runs of average in either direction.

When it came to filling the void left by the free agent departure of Matt Chapman this past offseason, the Blue Jays didn’t exactly go cheap, in that they threw some money at free agents on short-term deals. Their moves still amounted to a downgrade that would require Schneider to mix and match, and all signs pointed toward mediocrity; the team ranked 23rd at third base in our preseason Positional Power Rankings, its lowest ranking at any position.

So far, Isiah Kiner-Falefa, whom they signed to a two-year, $15 million deal, has started 29 games there and another 21 at second base, with Turner, whom they inked to a one-year, $13 million deal, starting four games at third (a position he played for just seven games last year and 66 the year before) plus another seven at first and 36 at DH. Ernie Clement, a Quad-A utilityman, has started 23 times at third, with Cavan Biggio (twice) and Addison Barger (once) making cameos. While Kiner-Falefa has hit a respectable .268/.313/.391 (103 wRC+) overall, he’s the only one of the bunch who’s been league average. Turner has hit .225/.307/.354; Tuesday’s three-hit game carried him from 87 to 93 in terms of wRC+, but he’s hitting a cringeworthy .143/.226/.179 (23 wRC+) in 93 plate appearances since the start of May. Clement has hit just .231/.250/.346 (68 wRC+) overall, with a 31 wRC+ in 53 PA since the start of May.

In all, the team’s third basem*n have combined to hit .234/.267/.355 (77 wRC+) with solid defense (5 DRS, 0.1 UZR, 0 FRV) and a net 0.1 WAR. Forgoing that for shoehorning an extra bat in the lineup is a creative response to that problem, particularly in front of a pitching staff that has the majors’ sixth-lowest groundball rate (40.6%), with four of their regular starters in the 41–45% range. Defense is the one area where the Blue Jays have been exceptional. They’re first in the majors with 41 DRS, second with 17 FRV, and 10th in UZR at 6.1, so trading defense for offense makes sense conceptually, at least.

Though he had played just four innings at third (a pair of late-game cameos) in 2021 and ’22, Guerrero had continued to take groundballs there regularly during the offseason, and the Blue Jays gave him time to do so in recent weeks in preparation for Sunday’s experiment.

“I signed as a third baseman, so it is my favorite position,” Guerrero told reporters through an interpreter on Sunday. “But I’m the kind of person and player who thinks that if you can play both corners, first and third the right way, that will give your manager and your team more options — like today. Regardless of if third is my favorite position, I’ll be prepared.”

According to Schneider, this could be a recurring situation, but it doesn’t sound like it’s going to be a wholesale position change à la Miguel Cabrera circa 2012. Via Sportsnet’s Shi Davidi:

Schneider stressed that “it’s not a position change by any means, it just offers some flexibility,” and suggested he might use Guerrero there a couple times every week or 10 days, or so. That helped quantify the vision expressed by GM Ross Atkins on MLB Network Radio, when he said Guerrero “will get some starts there,” in a bid to “deploy a lineup that maybe creates a little more offence.”

Vogelbach came up big on Sunday, but he’s hardly tearing the cover off the ball. In fact, he’s basically replicating the lack of production from the team’s third basem*n, batting .203/.282/.328 (78 wRC+). Saturday and Sunday marked the first time this season he put together back-to-back games with multiple hits (he has just one other multi-hit game). He’s 0-for-7 since then, less anybody get the idea that he’s turned the corner.

But Vogelbach isn’t solely to blame for Toronto’s offensive woes. There’s plenty of that to go around, as key hitters such as George Springer (.210/.302/.317, 83 wRC+), Bo Bichette (.238/.287/.348, 82 wRC+), and Alejandro Kirk (.216/.291/.284, 69 wRC+) have drastically underperformed. All of them are at least trending positive, in that each has a wRC+ above 100 since May 15, but they’ve got a ways to go before they match the numbers on the back of their baseball cards. The heart of the matter is that just five of the team’s 13 position players —everyone with 71 PA or more — have managed a 100 wRC+ or better. Meanwhile, of the 17 pitchers with at least 10 innings under their belts, only three have a FIP- of 100 or lower, and just seven have an ERA- of 100 or lower; only Yusei Kikuchi (96 ERA-, 73 FIP- in 66.1 innings) and Yimi García (39 ERA-, 51 FIP- in 24 innings) have both. It’s grim.

As for Guerrero, he’s been a bright spot, if an enigmatic one, hitting .291/.383/.410 for a 133 wRC+. On the one hand, he’s showing more plate discipline than ever, setting career lows in swing rate both in the zone (67.4%) and outside it (21.6%); his overall 45.2% swing rate represents a drop of more than five points relative to last year. He’s walking a career-high 12.6% of the time. On the other hand, he’s homered just six times, and his .119 ISO is the lowest mark of his career by 43 points.

A closer look shows that Guerrero is actually hitting the ball very hard, with a career-best hard-hit rate and his highest average exit velocity and barrel rate since 2021. But he’s got little to show for it:

Guerrero’s 86-point gap between his SLG and xSLG is the 20th largest out of 263 qualifiers, and it’s an even bigger gap than last year, when he was pulling the ball with greater frequency overall (42.3% vs. 36.2% this year) and, particularly in the season’s first half, getting hosed by the newly raised fences at the Rogers Centre:

That blue-shaded row is Guerrero’s numbers when I checked in just after he won last year’s Home Run Derby. At that point, he had the largest SLG-xSLG differential in Statcast history, but the situation corrected itself somewhat. Warmer weather was probably a factor, and if so, I’d expect we see some positive regression as this season progresses. The bigger issue, I think, is that Guerrero is hitting groundballs at a career-high 53.2% clip, up from last year’s 46.2%, and his average launch angle is about half of what it was last year. Those balls don’t go over the fence at all, and there’s not as much to gain by hitting them slightly harder. (See today’s piece on Manny Machado for more on that topic.)

Still, Guerrero’s extra grounders — whether they’re the ones coming off his bat or the ones he’s fielding, either at third base or first base — are far from the Blue Jays’ biggest problem. His dabbling at third base is an interesting sideshow, but if they’re going to claim a wild card spot for the third straight season, the Jays need a whole bunch of players to play up to their capabilities.