![]() ![]() This year he’s pulling 36.1% of his batted balls at home and 43.3% on the road, compared to 43.6% at home and 35.6% on the road last year and 39.7% at home and 40.2% on the road in 2021. The issue may be his Guerrero’s pull-rate splits. Even given that he’s not hitting his fly balls as hard at home as on the road, producing a 15-foot difference in distance, that still doesn’t account for how lopsided his split is. What is going on with that exchange rate? Guerrero is falling over 500 points short in the slugging department on both splits, but where he’s slugging only. In looking at his numbers, a few things stand out. I’ll get to that below, but what everyone is wondering is what’s happened to his offense. A good - or not-so-good, actually - part of that decline in value is Guerrero’s defense, which has gone downhill quickly. 274/.339/.480 with 32 homers, a 132 wRC+, and 2.8 WAR last year, and arrived at the All-Star break batting. When you’re 22 years old and the son of a Hall of Famer, a season like that sends expectations into the stratosphere, so it’s come as something of a disappointment that Guerrero’s follow-up seasons have not been up to that standard. ![]() His home run total led the league, as did his on-base percentage, a small consolation for finishing “only” third in batting average likewise, he led in total bases and slugging percentage and was second in WAR, a pretty good offset for finishing “only” fifth in RBIs. We’re now two years removed from that breakout campaign, when at age 22, Vladito made a run at the Triple Crown, falling short but still hitting an impressive. 323/.408/.515 for a 165 wRC+, the highest of any first baseman in either league by 10 points (NL starter Freddie Freeman is second at 155) and the second-highest of any qualified hitter behind only Shohei Ohtani.ĭiaz’s 165 wRC+ is reminiscent of the league-leading 166 Guerrero put up during his 2021 season. Yandy Díaz was voted to start for the AL, and it’s tough to complain when he’s hitting. Guerrero will serve as a reserve for Tuesday night’s All-Star Game after starting at first base in each of the past two seasons. Arozarena ran out of both gas and time as his final fly balls fell short he finished with 23 homers to make Guerrero the champion, the second-youngest in history by a day (1993 winner Juan Gonzalez was younger). Crucially, Arozarena only had the standard 30 seconds of extra time because he hadn’t gotten the distance bonus, unlocked when a player hit two homers with projected distances of at least 440 feet - something Guerrero managed in all three rounds. He hit 25 in the finals, a record for the shorter round (two minutes instead of three), then had to wait out Arozarena, who finished regulation with 20. He beat Betts handily, 26–11, then walked off against Rodríguez, needing just one homer in bonus time to win, 21–20. With Blue Jays manager John Schneider serving as his pitcher, Guerrero - one of just three contestants who had participated in a previous Derby, along with Alonso and Rodríguez - needed until his fifth swing to get on the board, but once he did, with a 453-footer, he found his groove. In victory, he joined his father, who won in 2007, as the first father-son duo to win the Derby. Guerrero did start his night by steamrolling Mookie Betts, then narrowly eked out wins over both Rodríguez and Arozarena to take home the championship that eluded him in 2019, when he was runner-up to Pete Alonso. ![]() Nor did he cruise into the finals by a lopsided score the way Randy Arozarena did in knocking off the top-seeded Luis Robert Jr. But the 24-year-old slugger didn’t put up an astronomical total of dingers the way hometown favorite Julio Rodríguez did in the first round (breaking Guerrero’s own 2019 record of 40 homers, at that). wasn’t exactly the forgotten man at the 2023 Home Run Derby at T-Mobile Park this scribe was hardly alone in predicting he’d win. ![]()
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