The alarming trend behind Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s 2026 season

Bullet point summary by AI

• Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is enduring a historic slump that defies traditional explanations this season.
• Vladdy’s chase rate has spiked dramatically, leading to weak contact instead of strikeouts but no solutions in sight.
• The Blue Jays playoff hopes now hang in the balance, with no clear path to recovery as the division race pulls away.

We have not been messing around with the 2026 Vladimir Guerrero Jr. power crisis. Two dedicated articles, both titled “what is wrong with Vladimir Guerrero Jr?” trying anything to figure out what’s up with this shocking season. But we still haven’t found the solution, so we’re going for three.

Guerrero Jr. has been experiencing a very public, very problematic slump in 2026 that has his slugging percentage all the way down to .357, a figure so low that had you built a model that projected it before 2026 you would have been shunned and banned from all future nerd conferences. 

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is chasing bad pitches

In my myriad efforts to explain this thing, here were a few ideas and what I think about them now: bad luck (nope, been too long), mechanical swing or approach changes (nope, cannot detect any significant ones), and finally, poor swing decisions. I floated that one last time, but found it unsatisfying due to a lack of evidence beyond chase rate. I’m much more convinced now.

First and foremost, just watch a Blue Jays game. Guerrero Jr. visually struggles to lay off bad pitches, and it feels like a downward spiral akin to that whirlpool monster in The Odyssey. Vladdy is trying so hard to find pitches to hit. Pitchers know this, and are refusing to comply. He’s just not in charge of any at bats. 

And if there’s one underlying number that has spiked out of control for Guerrero Jr. this year, it’s chase rate. Vladdy has been reaching for bad pitches at a significantly higher level than he did last year, and he’s also been consistent in his chasing. It’s not like Guerrero Jr. has never chased pitches before, but he’s steadily doing it in 2026.

But the thing I couldn’t square last time we discussed Vladdy was that his chase rate is not necessarily correlated with a decrease in production year over year. He has a similar chase rate in 2024 but hit .323 with 30 home runs and a .940 OPS. However, the stuff that makes up chase rate has changed enough year-over-year to merit concern.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. doesn’t know how pitchers are attacking him

A lot of this zone contact/swing numbers look a lot like Guerrero Jr. in 2022, but the difference is how drastic a shift they are since 2025. Sure, there are lots of hitters with wack plate discipline metrics, but the decline suggests the much deeper issue that Vladdy just doesn’t have a good sense of how pitchers are trying to attack him. He’s been unable to deal with whatever book is out on Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and simply does not have the answers. 

The most counterintuitive part of this is that he’s not striking out more. In fact, he’s still elite at not striking out. Chasing pitches hasn’t led to significantly more whiff or more Ks — it has just meant crappy contact and no pitches to crush. In a way, that’s even worse than striking out all the time, because it’s much harder to fix.

This wouldn’t really be a problem if the Toronto Blue Jays were doing fine with out him … but they aren’t. Coming off being one singular out away from winning the World Series in 2025, the Blue Jays are, for lack of a better word, screwed. The American League East took off and sprinted away from them, and even in the dodgy AL Wild Card race they’re still pretty much cooked. Of course, the Boston Red Sox turned around an even worse record than the Blue Jays have right now, but I’m also not in the business of projecting 15-game winning streaks.

You could argue that Guerrero Jr.’s season is not nearly as bad as folks on the internet are making it out to be, as obsessing over his paltry home run total of six (zero at home) obscures that he’s still moderately impactful offensively. But home runs are the most impactful, and the Blue Jays built their team around the assumption that Vladdy would be hitting them. It’s the rare marriage of a public and sabermetric disaster meaning basically the same thing: 2026 has been a nightmare for Guerrero Jr, and there might be no escape. 

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