It’s no secret that a big part of the Blue Jays’ disappointing 2026 was the result of a disastrous season by superstar first baseman Vladimir Guerrero jr. Vlad’s offensive production cratered, from an average wRC+ of 139 from 2023-2025 to 95 this past season. If the team’s going to get back into contention in 2027 and beyond, it’s going to have to start with a bounce back from Guerrero. I wanted to try to figure out what went wrong and how likely it is to be fixed for next year. Today, I’m going to look for some historically comparable collapses and see what we can learn from them. Later this week I’ll dive deeper into the stats to try to figure out what exactly went wrong.
Usually when a player’s performance falls off dramatically, the culprit is either age or injury. Neither really fits here, though. Vlad was definitely banged up this season, missing time with finger, elbow, back, and hamstring injuries plus a concussion. He also got laser eye surgery after the season. Still, he played 144 games and took 609 PA, and no one of the injuries really coincides with a huge drop off in production. Plus, he put up the best base running and defensive metrics of his career. He was clearly moving well everywhere but in the batter’s box. The nicks and dents could explain some struggles, but nothing of this magnitude. As for age, at 27 he should just be reaching his peak, not falling from it.
To find comparable stretches, I looked for period of four consecutive seasons where a batter qualified for the batting title each time (so presumably excluding catastrophic injuries) and was 30 or younger in the final season (mostly avoiding age related decline). In the integration era, there have been 1,852 such runs (excluding ones that end in a season shortened due to strike or plague). As the graph below shows, most players perform about the same in year 4 compared to the average of years 1-3. Only 11 players had declines in wRC+ as extreme as Vlad’s -45 points. Already we can see that we’re in strange waters.
I found 18 other players who experienced a drop of 40-50 points of wRC+, within 5 points of Vlad’s. Here’s what those seasons looked like:
The median is in blue, Vlad is in orange. You can see that he’s been a more volatile player than his comps even before this season, posting both the best and the worst seasons relative to average in the baseline three year period. The overall pattern is similar, though: players were mostly bouncing around in a range of plus or minus 20 points before falling off a cliff in year four.
So what happened to these guys? The next graph breaks the fall down into the impacts of power (measured as change in ISO), strikeouts, walks, batting average on balls in play (BABIP) and variance not explained by those other factors. It’s based on a regression model predicting changes in wRC+ based on the four stats mentioned before.
Most players got worse across the board. To fall off this badly you can’t just have one thing go wrong. Still, there are definite groups. Vlad’s performance was driven mostly by a power outage, while his BABIP and walks fell only slightly and he actually cut his strikeout rate a little. BABIP and ‘other’ are the things that have to the most to do with luck or outside circumstances, and they don’t seem to have been a huge factor here. That puts him closer to the likes of Travis Hafner and Albert Belle and farther from Dave May or Delino DeShields. In fact, the decline in ISO accounts for 69% of his wRC+ decline, the largest among the comps.
So this kind of decline has happened before, and to some excellent players, but it’s still rare. What can history tell us about Vlad’s likely perfromance going forward? The graph below extends the previous wRC+ chart through years 5-9.
It’s not enormously comforting. the group did bounce back, on average, but not to pre-dip norms. The median player recovered about 10-15 points of their initial 45 point drop for the next three seasons before beginning to decline due to age. For Jays fans, that’s a scary set of comps. It suggests that Vlad should be able to get back to being a decent hitter, but maybe only a decent one rather than the superstar that his $500 million contract demands.
There are some reasons for a little more optimism, though. The players in the sample who were 28 or younger in year 4 were about twice as likely to bounce back to within 10 points of wRC+ of their previous performance than those who were 29 or 30. Vlad is among the youngest players in the group. Those whose fall off was driven more then 50% by a power outage had a better than 50% chance of getting back, while those whose dip was driven by strikeouts, walks or BABIP had a less than 20% chance. Finally, some of the players who never returned to their previous level showed other signs of physical decline. Andre Dawson, for example, saw his steal attempts cut in half while moving from centre field to right, suggesting that while he didn’t actually miss time the knee troubles that would dog the back half of his career were already hurting him. There are a few other non-recoverers with similar clear signs of decline. As mentioned above, Vlad’s athleticism (never the core of his game) looked as good as it ever has. The injuries that bothered him this year were mostly from hit by pitches and other freak events, and there’s no reason to worry that his body is giving out. There appears to be a real risk that Vlad won’t be the same player he used to be, based on the history of players with similar issues, but the demographic factors look like they’re all in his favour.