In 2021, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. put on a remarkable show, hitting .311/.401/.601 with 48 home runs. He finished second in MVP voting to Shohei Ohtani — perhaps the only drawback to having Ohtani in the league is he’s going to end up dwarfing about a decade of other great performances on the historical record — with a season that looks even better in context.
In the past 100 years, only 10 AL or NL players have posted full seasons with a .300/.400/.600 slash line at age 22 or younger. And this is not one of those things hitters tend to achieve before flaming out. Of those 10 players, five — Ted Williams, Jimmie Foxx, Mel Ott, Joe DiMaggio, and Eddie Mathews — are not only Hall of Famers but inner-circle Hall of Famers. Albert Pujols will be once he’s eligible. Alex Rodriguez would be if he’d stayed away from Biogenesis and/or not been so weird the entire sport had it out for him. That leaves three active players: Bryce Harper, Juan Soto (in the COVID-shortened 2020 season), and Vladito.
So that’s five Hall of Famers, three future Hall of Famers, plus one guy who would be in the Hall of Fame if performance were the only consideration. But what of the young Guerrero?
I was thinking about this recently, as Guerrero and the Blue Jays traded arbitration numbers. It’s the most expensive arbitration case left on the docket, as Guerrero filed for $19.9 million, with the Blue Jays coming in at a hair over $18 million. The discrepancy between the two is more than twice what Casey Mize — the former no. 1 overall pick whom the Tigers are taking to trial over the cost of a certified pre-owned 2019 Honda CR-V — is even asking for. The Blue Jays are conceding that Guerrero, who is still due another year of arbitration after this one, is worth what would be first-division starter money on the open market.
That’s not really what Guerrero produced last year. In 156 games, he hit only 26 home runs, with a batting line of .264/.345/.444 and a wRC+ of 118. Remember the 2019 Home Run Derby?
That guy had an ISO under .200 last year. TJ Friedl, the buntin’-est cowboy east of the Pecos River, did better. Guerrero’s full-season WAR, 1.0, is derived in part from defensive metrics that are so unkind to the young Guerrero I worry that they violate the terms of this website’s comment policy. But even the bat was underwhelming compared to the admittedly astronomical expectations Guerrero went in with.
So here we have — at the risk of startling the ghost of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hagel back into corporeality — two contradictory versions of Guerrero. On one hand, the supreme hitting talent, the combination of plus-plus hit tool and 80-grade raw power, who has shown that he can hit with Hall of Famers. This player would be two full seasons from reaching free agency in time for his age-27 season and, like Harper and Soto, ringing the bell for many hundreds of millions of dollars.
On the other hand: What if Josh Bell was short? A good player — absolutely a good hitter — but one who’d have trouble in free agency for the same reasons Rhys Hoskins is still without a home. A great designated hitter has huge value. A good DH? Eh, you can go without.
So what’s the problem? How is Guerrero suddenly merely a good hitter rather than a transcendent one?
The first thing to point out is obvious: For a guy who hits the ball as hard as he does, Guerrero is pretty earthbound. That means fewer hard-hit balls in the air, and by extension, fewer extra-base hits and home runs. We’ve known this about him forever, and while it’s a weakness, it isn’t a fatal one. If you can read this, you’re old enough to remember a time when Christian Yelich was hitting 40 home runs a year with a GB/FB ratio that made Tim Anderson look like Phil Plantier. For all the hype about launch angle over the past decade, there’s…
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