‘In my mind, I’m the best in the world’: How Vlad Guerrero Jr. returned to superstardom
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Alden Gonzalez, ESPN Staff Writer
HIS CONFIDENCE BEAMED, even as his aura faded.
“In my mind,” Vladimir Guerrero Jr. said earlier this month, “I’m the best in the world.”
Guerrero firmly believes this now, while reemerging as one of the game’s best hitters. But he also believed it in 2022, when his numbers dipped in the wake of a breakthrough season. In 2023, when his production fell even further. At the end of this past April, when his batting average stood at just .229. And a month later, when he was stuck on five home runs through the Toronto Blue Jays‘ first 56 games.
“I never really lost sight of the type of ballplayer I am and the type of potential I have within me,” Guerrero said in Spanish. “It’s just a process you have to go through. Thankfully I was able to get through it.”
Guerrero has been incredible since the start of June and otherworldly since the All-Star break. His overall numbers — a .320/.395/.557 slash line, a 33-homer pace and 167 weighted runs created plus — nearly mirror what he attained in 2021, when only Shohei Ohtani prevented him from becoming the American League’s Most Valuable Player at 22 years old. If not for the transformative seasons of Aaron Judge and Bobby Witt Jr. this year, Guerrero, still just 25, might be in the thick of the MVP discussion once more.
And as the Blue Jays flail toward a lost season that has placed them at a crossroads, one certainty seems to have emerged: Guerrero needs to be the face of whatever comes next.
BLUE JAYS OUTFIELDER George Springer likes to call Guerrero a “one-percenter,” a term that applies specifically to the types of pitches he confronts.
One of the more recent examples occurred on Aug. 12 against Los Angeles Angels right-hander Davis Daniel. Daniel throws changeups to opposing right-handed hitters less than 3% of the time and didn’t throw any in that situation through the first two innings that night. Guerrero came up again with one out in the third inning and ran the count full. Daniel thought he’d surprise him by going away from his fastball-slider combination and unveiling a changeup. He placed it perfectly, low and in and on the very edge of the strike zone — and Guerrero hit it 113 mph for a double.
“If you watch the swing, if you watch the at-bat, there’s no way he’s looking for it,” Springer said. “It’s just something in his brain and in his swing that made him see it and hit it. For me that’s hard to explain. It’s something you can’t really coach. He just has it in him.”
Springer became Guerrero’s teammate three years ago and noticed the trait almost instantly. In his mind, it was a separator. From there, he watched Guerrero’s OPS dip from an AL-leading 1.002 in 2021 to .818 in 2022 to .788 in 2023. He was still good — still a yearly All-Star, still producing more than 15% above league average, still the cover athlete for a popular video game — but he was far enough removed from excellence to make one wonder if it was still attainable.
Like Guerrero himself, though, Springer remained bullish.
“I didn’t think,” he said when asked if he thought Guerrero could someday return to his 2021 levels. “I knew.”
Seeing him now, Springer believes Guerrero is “just beginning to scratch the surface of the player he’s gonna be.”
“I think it gets lost on a lot of people how young he actually is,” Springer said. “At 25 years old I was basically in my second season in the big leagues. He’s, in my opinion, a top-five player in this game, and he’s gonna be for a long time. I think once he kinda discovers that next level, he’s gonna be unbelievable.”
Guerrero believes he was too hard on himself last year and has since learned to “control what I can control and let the rest go.”
It’s a mindset rooted in discipline.
Guerrero went into the offseason focused on establishing a routine he wouldn’t waver from. He’d go to the gym every day, no matter how he was feeling. Food outside the regular season was cut off at 6 p.m., with no exceptions. Rather than fixate on the results, he drowned himself in the monotony of the work. It offered him security. And when things went wrong — when the results weren’t there early, when the outside world kept talking about how he might never be great again — Guerrero found comfort in the dependability of his process.
It kept him positive, and it only strengthened his confidence.
“Ultimately if you don’t believe in yourself, nobody’s gonna believe in you,” Guerrero said. “I’m the one who goes out there on the field to play. Nobody goes out there for me. If you put negativity in your mind, things aren’t going to turn out well, no matter what kind of talent you have. But if you stay positive and stay with the process, staying with it every day, the same routine, happy, things are going to change.”
JOHN SCHNEIDER, WHO is winding down his second season as the Blue Jays’ full-time manager, has coached Guerrero dating back to his days in the lower minor leagues. What he’s seeing now is someone with a clear understanding of the pitches he wants to do damage on. It’s evident through his hard-hit percentage, which sits at 55.6%, a career high that places him within the top 1% of his sport. Guerrero has never been more efficient.
“That’s kind of the next step of a great hitter,” Schneider said. “He can cover the entire zone, but I think he’s just really doing a good job right now of focusing on pitches that are really, really ones he can do damage on.”
A comparison of Guerrero’s tendencies between the season’s first two months and the ensuing 12 weeks reveal drastic inconsistencies. Since the start of June, he’s striking out less but also walking less. He’s displaying patience by letting pitches travel deeper to drive them into the opposite field, but impatience by seeing fewer pitches per plate appearance. He’s making more contact, but he’s swinging less often within the strike zone and more often outside of it. To Schneider, it all paints the picture of someone who’s secure, relaxed, willing to be unconventional for the sake of his own comfort. It’s evident in the movement of Guerrero’s hands.
Early in the year, Guerrero’s hands were upright and stiff as he began his pre-pitch load. Now they’re loose, fluid, shifting up and down in perfect sync with the toe-tap he utilizes before his swing. The kinetic chain, as hitters call it, is harmonious.
Guerrero’s launch angle is still comically low for a power hitter — 7.2 degrees, down from 10.5 degrees last year and ranked 129th among 136 qualified players — but it hasn’t mattered. He’s homering at a 7% rate since the start of June, tied with Juan Soto for sixth-highest in the majors in that stretch.
“It sounds really simple,” Schneider said, “but when you start thinking about getting the ball in the air, when you start thinking about hitting home runs, I think it can be a little bit more rigid. He hits the ball so damn hard, he doesn’t have to get it in the air. It’s just him realizing that what he does is enough.”
Guerrero is OPS’ing 1.081 since the end of May and 1.354 since the end of the All-Star break. He hit safely in 22 consecutive games from July 14 to Aug. 10, during which he slashed .494/.558/1.025 with 10 home runs. Right around then, he put together a 25-game stretch that is up there with some of the best in history, with 11 home runs and 12 doubles. He probably won’t match the 48 home runs and 111 RBIs he accumulated in 2021, but he’s on pace to set a career high with 43 doubles. His baserunning has been bad and his first-base defense has been, by some metrics, dreadful, but his offensive production still has him on pace for 5.4 FanGraphs wins above replacement.
Guerrero noticed around late April that his hands had become too stiff (Schneider believes it was the result of trying too hard to elevate pitches). He went about fixing it then, but it took weeks.
“Day by day, I kept working at it and I knew I was gonna get there again,” Guerrero said. “I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I also knew it wasn’t going to change from one day to the next. It’s a process. And within a week, two weeks, I was starting to get them where I needed them to be. In three weeks, they got there. After three weeks, it’s there. ‘Now that it’s there, let’s maintain it there.’ And that’s when things started going the way they should. It’s been like that for three months.”
GUERRERO’S RESURGENCE COULDN’T prevent the Blue Jays from floundering. After a full-throated pursuit of Ohtani this offseason, one in which they agreed to match the significantly backloaded $700 million contract he ultimately signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Blue Jays’ front office didn’t pivot to another impact player. By the All-Star break, the Blue Jays found themselves 44-52 with a minus-66 run-differential. Guerrero’s name — like Bo Bichette‘s, another superstar scheduled for free agency after the 2025 season — was suddenly bandied about in trade rumors, though rival executives sensed the asking price would be exorbitant.
Guerrero was never assured he wouldn’t be traded, but he never asked.
“I knew they weren’t going to,” Guerrero said. “I’m the type of person who feels like if a team has the thought of staying with you, has the thought of having you for many years, they would never think of trading you. If they have long-term plans with you, they’re gonna stick with you. There’s always gonna be rumors. They traded a bunch of my teammates, but you already knew they were going to. With me, that was never talked about.”
The Blue Jays engineered eight present-for-future trades before the July 30 deadline, most notably acquiring two high-end Houston Astros prospects — right-handed pitcher Jake Bloss and left-handed hitter Joey Loperfido — for starting pitcher Yusei Kikuchi. But only two of the players dealt, reliever Nate Pearson and utility man Isiah Kiner-Falefa, were controllable beyond this season. The team’s core remained intact.
On the seventh day of August, Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro held a rare media availability and pointed to those who didn’t move — namely Guerrero, Bichette and two of his core starting pitchers, Kevin Gausman and Chris Bassitt — as proof they will attempt to compete again next season.
“We haven’t said the word ‘rebuild’ once,” Schneider told ESPN a week later. “And that’s been pretty clear from everyone.”
The Blue Jays are guaranteed only one more year of Guerrero and Bichette, the once-heralded prospects who only a half-decade ago represented the start of a potential dynasty in Toronto. They’re expected to explore extensions with both this offseason but remain open-minded about potential trade opportunities. In all likelihood, though, both will be back in some form next season.
“I think because we’re so familiar with those guys,” Schneider said, “you wanna kinda owe it to them and you wanna kinda follow through with what our goal was.”
So they’ll bank on a Bichette bounceback, look to free agency to augment a lineup that could use significantly more punch, overhaul a bullpen that is suddenly in shambles and hope to squeeze at least one more shot from a group that might not have many more shots left.
What comes next could hinge entirely on whether they can lock up Guerrero, whose re-emergence has put him back on a path to great riches.
“I’ve always said it — I’d love to stay here,” Guerrero said. “But it’s a business. Let’s see what happens.”
Sports
‘I wasn’t trying to build anything in a lab’: How Jacob deGrom is learning to throw smarter, not harder
SURPRISE, Ariz. — When Jacob deGrom stepped on the mound for his first live batting practice this spring, a voice in his head told him: “All right, I want to strike everybody out.” That instinct had guided deGrom to unimaginable heights, with awards and money and acclaim. It is also who he can no longer be. So deGrom took a breath and reminded himself: “Let’s not do that.”
Nobody in the world has ever thrown a baseball like deGrom at his apex. His combination of fastball velocity, swing-and-miss stuff and pinpoint command led to one of the greatest 90-start stretches in baseball. From the beginning of 2018 to the middle of 2021, he was peak Pedro Martinez with a couple of extra mph — Nolan Ryan’s fastball, Steve Carlton’s slider, Greg Maddux’s precision.
Then his arm could not hold up anymore, and for more than three years, deGrom healed and got hurt, healed and needed Tommy John surgery in June 2023 to repair the ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow, then healed once more. That delivers him to this moment, in camp with the Texas Rangers, ready to conquer a 162-game season for the first time since 2019 — and reminding himself when to hold back.
The instinct to be all he can be never will go away. But instead, as his efforts at learning to throttle down manifest themselves daily and were particularly evident in those early live ABs, deGrom induced ground balls on early contact and ended his day with a flyout on the second pitch of the at-bat.
DeGrom had blown out his elbow once before, as a minor leaguer in October 2010, and this time he understands his mandate. He is now 36, and nobody has returned to have any sort of substantive career after a third Tommy John, so keeping his arm healthy as he comes back from his second is imperative. This is the last phase of deGrom’s career, and to maximize it, he must change. It does not need to be a wholesale reinvention. For deGrom, it is more an evolution, one to which he accustomed himself by watching video of his past self.
DeGrom at his best simply overwhelmed hitters. At-bats turned into lost causes. He was the best pitcher in the world in 2018, when he threw 217 innings of 1.70 ERA ball and struck out 269 with just 46 walks and 10 home runs allowed. The following year, he dedicated himself to being even more, winning his second Cy Young and proving he was no one-season fluke. DeGrom routinely blew away one hitter, then made the next look like he’d never seen a slider. He painted the plate with the meticulousness of a ceramic artist.
“I look at the best — ’18,” deGrom said of his first Cy Young season. “There were times where I hit 100 or close to it, but I think I sat around 96.”
He did. Ninety-six mph on the dot for his high-spin four-seam fastball. It jumped to 96.9 in 2019, 98.6 in 2020 and 99.2 in 2021. In the 11 games deGrom pitched toward the end of 2022, it was still 98.9 — and then 98.7 before he blew out again.
“I have to look at it like, hey, I can pitch at that velocity [from 2018],” deGrom said. “It is less stress on your body. You get out there and you’re throwing pitches at 100 miles an hour for however many pitches it is — it’s a lot of stress. It’s something that I’m going to look into — using it when I need it, backing off and just trusting that I can locate the ball.”
He had not yet adopted that attitude in 2022, when those 11 starts convinced deGrom to opt out of his contract with the New York Mets, who had drafted him in the ninth round in 2010. Immediately, the Texas Rangers began their pursuit. General manager Chris Young pitched for 13 years in the major leagues and knows how hard it is to be truly great. He grunted to hit 90 with his fastball. Someone who could sit 99 with 248 strikeouts against 19 walks in 156⅓ innings (as deGrom did in the combined pieces of his 2021 and 2022 seasons) and make it look easy is one of a kind. Injury risk be damned, Texas gave deGrom $185 million over five years.
He played the part in his first five starts for Texas. Then he left the sixth with elbow pain. Done for the year. Surgery on June 12 — 11 days after the birth of his third child, Nolan. He carried Nolan around with his left arm while his right was in a brace that would click a degree or two more every day to eventually reteach deGrom to straighten his arm.
He taught himself how to throw again, too, under the watchful eyes of Texas’ training staff and Keith Meister, the noted Tommy John surgeon who is also the Rangers’ team doctor. They wanted to build back the deGrom who scythed lineups — but this time, with decision-making processes guided by proper arm care.
Part of that showed in deGrom’s September cameo last year. His fastball averaged 97.3 mph, and he still managed to look like himself: 1.69 ERA, 14 strikeouts against one walk with one home run allowed in 10⅔ innings. Rather than rush back, deGrom put himself in a position to tackle the offseason. Those innings were enough to psychologically move past the rehabilitative stage and reenter achievement mode. He trained with the same intensity he did in past seasons. The stuff would still be there. While peers were spending the winter immersed in pitch design, deGrom was seeking the version of himself that could marry his inherent deGromness with the sturdiness he embodied the first six years of his career.
“I wasn’t trying to build anything in a lab,” deGrom said. “My arm got a little long a few years ago, so trying to shorten up the arm path a little bit and sync up my mechanics really well is what I’ve been trying to do.”
Rather than jump out in the first start of the spring to prove that heartiness, deGrom took his time. It is a long season. He wants to be there in the end. His goal for this year is straightforward: “Make as many starts as I can.” If that means throwing live at-bats a little longer than his teammates, that’s what he’ll do. Ultimately, deGrom is the one who defines his comfort, and he went so long without it that its priority is notable.
So if that means shorter starts early in the season, it won’t surprise anyone. There is no official innings limit on deGrom. The Rangers, though, are going to monitor his usage, and he doesn’t plan to use those limited outings to amp up his velocity. This is about being smart and considering more than raw pitch counts or innings totals.
“I think it’s going to be a monitor of stressful innings versus not,” deGrom said. “You have those games where you go five innings, you have 75 pitches, but you’ve got runners all over the place, so those are stressful. Whereas you cruise and you end up throwing 100 pitches and you had one or two runners. It’s like, OK, those don’t seem to be as stressful. So I think it’s monitoring all of that and just playing it by ear how the season goes.”
That approach carried into deGrom’s spring debut Saturday against the Kansas City Royals. He averaged 97 mph on his fastball, topping out at 98. His slider remained near its previous levels at 90. He flipped in a pair of curveballs for strikes, too, just as a reminder that he’s liable to buckle your knees at any given moment. On 31 pitches, deGrom threw 21 strikes, didn’t allow a baserunner and punched out three, including reigning MVP runner-up Bobby Witt Jr. on a vicious 91.5-mph slider.
On his last batter of the day, deGrom started with a slider well off the plate inducing a swing-and-miss from Tyler Gentry, then followed with a low-and-not-quite-as-outside slider Gentry spit on. When a curveball that was well off the plate was called a strike, deGrom saw an opportunity. This is the art of pitching — of weighing the count, what a hitter has seen, how to take advantage of an umpire’s zone. He dotted a 97.3-mph fastball on the exact horizontal plane as the curveball and elevated it to the top of the strike zone, a nasty bit of sorcery that only a handful of pitchers on the planet can execute at deGrom’s level. Gentry stared at it, plate umpire Pete Talkington punched him out and deGrom strode off the mound, beta test complete.
“It’s always a thing of trusting your stuff,” deGrom said. “It’s one of the hardest things to do in this game, and part of it’s the fear of failure. You throw a pitch at 93 when you could have thrown it at 98 and it’s a homer, you’re like, ‘Why did I do that?’ So that’s the part that gets tough. You still have to go out there and trust your stuff, know that you can locate and change speeds, and still get outs not full tilt the whole time.”
Day by day, deGrom inches closer to that. He’ll get a little extra time, with the likelihood the Rangers will hold him back until the season’s fifth game, just to build in rest before the grind of a new season. He’s ready. It has been too long since he has been on the field regularly, contributing, searching for the best version of himself. It might look a little different. And if it does, that’s a good thing.
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