Above you will find the complete list of players to hit 40 home runs in one season as a member of the Toronto Blue Jays. There are 10 names on that list. On Monday morning there were only nine.
Vladimir Guerrero Jr hit his 40th home run of the season in New York on Labour Day, riding a hanging Jameson Taillon curveball out to right field. It wasn’t the most majestic home run Guerrero Jr launched this season but it is certainly one he’ll remember for a long time.
You look back on that list and you’ll see a few 26-year olds, a couple guys to do it at 27 and then 22-year old. The game is very different now but, by that same token, so is Vlad Jr. He is, as the kids say, built different.
The first inning home run was one of three hits for Guerrero during the Jays’ 8-0 drubbing of the Yankees. It was a standard Vlad Jr affair, wherein he produced the game’s hardest hit ball and it wasn’t even the one that went over the fence. After a rough stretch, he’s back on track when his team needs him most.
If it was a mechanical tweak, variance or the discovery of a new reserve of physical strength on which to draw, the end product is pretty clear: the ball is going over the fence again. That’s all it takes, really, to turn a slump around when you make as much good contact as Vlad Jr does. The kind of good, consistent, devastating contact that has produced one of the best seasons in club history. A season we’ll hopefully remember not as the high point of a player’s career1, but as the starting point to an incredible run for one of the game’s great hitters.
If we were to get a little greedy, it would be a hope that Vlad Jr’s 2021 season shares something with Jose Bautista & Josh Donaldson’s 2015 and Edwin Encarnacion’s 2016 season, as opposed to the “brilliantly toiling in obscurity” peaks of Carlos Delgado or Shawn Green2.
Achieving that type of success is beyond the control of just Vlad Jr, though his performance can/will go a long way to support those efforts, especially as he adds to his tally of balls that went a long way.
that would be okay, it should be said
two kings fr fr
Too bright to live, too bright to die
Fr fr!