A year ago Vladdy was the best hitter on the planet for about a month and a half straight, carrying the Jays to their first World Series appearance since ’93 and putting up the highest OPS in a single postseason in MLB history. This year, he’s a $500 million first baseman with four home runs. He’s hitting under .200 for the month of June. The eye test matches the numbers: he looks lost up there, taking pitches down the middle, and swinging out of the zone. He’s late on almost very pitch, and is hitting grounders instead of crushing deep fly balls.
I’m not sure what’s wrong with Vladdy, but Keegan Matheson is right:
What strikes me most isn’t really about Vladdy individually. It’s what his slump has exposed about this team.
Last year’s Blue Jays were scrappy. They were the lowest strikeout team in baseball. They put the ball in play. That team found a way. Five wins in a row, then a tough loss, then they’d claw another one back. It never felt like one guy was required to be great for them to win.
Okamoto has been better than anticipated. He’s hit 19 HR before the All Star break. But when your best player isn’t producing, instead of the next guy stepping up, everybody starts pressing, and you get exactly what we’re watching: five losses in a row and a team that’s nine games back in the division with the calendar about to flip to July.
This isn’t a death-by-a-thousand-cuts problem, although some games have felt like that. If Vladdy heats up, even a little, the lineup remembers how to breathe and the Jays look like a contender again. If he doesn’t, no amount of bullpen heroics or Okamoto magic is going to be enough to gloss over it.
I want to believe in the breakout. He’s done it before. He looked awful heading into the playoff run last year and then became the best hitter on the planet for the entire postseason. But “he’s done it before” is starting to feel like the thing you say to yourself on a loop, and at some point the calendar stops being patient with you.
Right now, this team is not the team that fought its way to a World Series last fall. It’s a team waiting on one guy to remember how to hit, hoping that’s still in there somewhere.