On Tuesday, I looked at historical comps to Vladimir Guerrero jr.'s miserable 2026 season. The takeaway was that this kind of collapse is rare, occurring just about 1% of the time for players under 30 who don't miss major time due to injury, that a lot of players who fall off a cliff like that never fully recover, but that Vlad's youth, health, and the fact that the drop almost all came from power issues rather than walks or strikeouts means he has better than average odds of recovering. Today, I want to dig a little bit into what actually drove his 2026 fall off.
The first thing to look at is whether there's a significant shift in how he was pitched. The graph below shows the pitch types he's seen by season in his career. The big thing to note is that over time he's seeing somewhat fewer four-seamers and steadily more sinkers, with the two pitches almost equal in 2026. That makes sense, as Vlad's weakness at the plate has always been the ability to elevate the ball. In his career, he has a -3 degree launch angle against sinkers compared to 14 degrees against four-seamers. He still hits sinkers very hard, but he struggles to elevate them enough to do damage.
I don't think pitch mix is a huge contributor to his 2026 struggles, though. For one, he has a .873 career OPS against sinkers, so while he's not as good against them as four-seamers it isn't as if they eat him up. For another, He hit the sinkers he saw this year pretty well (.849 OPS) but fell off against four seamers (.873, compared to .964 in his career).
The shift also doesn't look to be related to where pitchers attacked him. He actually saw more fastballs and off-speed pitches in the heart of the zone this season, compared to the last two:
Instead, I think the issue lies with his timing. Vlad swings extremely hard, and that didn't change this season. His 76.3mph average bat speed was in the 92nd percentile among qualified hitters, and while it was just slightly slower than 2025 it was significantly harder than 2023 or 2024. He has a relatively flat swing, with a 29 degree tilt that's 3 degrees below mlb average. That number was up one degree from 2024 and 2025, but the difference isn't substantial. His swing also didn't get any longer. All in all, it doesn't look like he changed his swing meaningfully this year.
What did change was the type of contact he made. Vlad didn't swing and miss more this season. In fact, his 82% contact rate was a career best and in the 73rd percentile in MLB, which is impressive for a player who swings as hard as he does. That contact wasn't nearly as good, though. The panel below shows an assortment of swing metrics, comparing his 24-25 results to this year. His bat speed is about the same, with a few less average swings and slightly more extremely hard ones. His attack angle, which is the angle the barrel of the bat is traveling when it hits the ball, shows a significant shift, though. He hit a lot more balls on the downswing and fewer in positive territory, especially the 0-10 degree range. He is attack direction, which measures the horizonal direction of the barrel at contact, shows that he went up the middle and slightly the other way less often, and pulled the ball a bit more. Relatedly, his contact depth shifted forward, meaning he was meeting the ball out in front of the plate more often. All these signs point to him being a little in front of or behind the pitch more often, and meeting it at the ideal point less. The last plot shows the result. Squared-up fraction is the percentage of the maximum possible exit velocity (based on how fast the bat and ball are moving) that the batter achieves. Anything over 80% is considered squared up, meaning the batter got most of the possible impact on the ball. Vlad's squared up fraction dropped in 2026, and the share of balls he really nailed, with 90% or better contact quality, fell dramatically.
The result of all those changes can be seen in the heatmap below. The black shape represents roughly the combinations of launch angle and exit velocity that StatCast considers barrels, the type of batted ball that accounts for most extra base hits. The blue inside the barrel zone and the red areas just below and to the left of it show that a lot of barrels from previous seasons were either hit hard but too low, in the -10 to 10 degree area, or were at the right angle but just a little too soft.
There's also a fair bit of red above +40 degrees and below -20 degrees. Those are angles that basically never result in useful contact. It looks like he maid more really bad contact than in past seasons, in addition to less really good contact.
My takeaway from all of this is that Vlad spent the whole season just a little off. His bat speed shows that he didn't lose raw strength, and there's nothing to suggest that his mechanics changed dramatically. He was just missing by a little bit, consistently. It's surprising to have such a dramatic effect and not be able to isolate a dramatic cause, but there's really no huge smoking gun here. It makes me wonder whether his vision really was an issue, or whether one of his nagging injuries was altering his swing just slightly, not in a way that shows up clearly in the metrics but enough to keep him from ever quite locking in.
In terms of his prognosis, I think this has to be seen as good news. If he'd lost his eye, or his bat speed, or his ability to get the bat on the ball, we'd have reason to worry that his skills had eroded in a way that wasn't going to come back. I don't see evidence for that, though. On the other hand, there's no obvious fix, either. There's no obvious adjustment to undo, or tweak that will address a revealed weakness. He just has to get right. Whether the coaching staff can help him do that this winter is maybe the single most important question facing the Blue Jays' long term future right now.
