It is a little early to be looking at underlying data for positives to take away but after the way these 1o games have gone I needed to look for my own sanity and figured I would put the positives out into the world to hopefully will the Jays bats into scoring some runs.

Below I have listed the first four Blue Jays hitters in this series looking at underlying data for positives, I will be looking at Blue Jays hitters in order of plate appearances from the most to the fewest.

some were a lot easier to find a positive for than others…..

George Springer 150/261/325 – 72 WRC+

Not a good sign that by starting with the leader in PAs also lead to one of the harder bats to find much positive underlying data, due to Springer’s age my immediate concern was bat speed as last season’s major bounce back also came along with a fairly large jump in bat speed increasing from an average of 71.9 during the 2024 season to 73.7 during the 2025 season.

The good news is Springer is still showing the improved bat speed averaging 73.4 so far this season but his main issue has been in squaring up the ball when he hits it ending up with far too many lazy flyballs and infield pop ups. Generally this could be good news for Springer as batted ball spray angles is an extremely noisy stat over a small sample so it is very possible even likely that this will improve and with him still showing the higher bat speed from last season once he gets his spray angle more in line the positive offensive numbers should follow.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. 265/419/353 – 126 WRC+

I had already mentioned this in a comment yesterday but Guerrero has already looked to come out of his early season singles fest over the past few games in fact since April 1st he is tied for 2nd in MLB with 4 barrels and out of players with at least 20 PAs over that time he is 4th in Barrel%.

Unfortunately for Guerrero and the Jays he does not have a lot to show for it yet, this season the league as a whole is hitting 648/639/2,131 on balls in play classified as a Barrel.

Guerrero however is hitting 200/200/800 on his 5 barrels with a BABIP of 000, Guerrero’s only Barrel this season that didn’t find a glove was his HR against the White Sox.

With Guerrero barreling the ball a lot more often over the next week he is likely very close to an extended stretch where those balls fall in or land on the other side of the fence.

Kazuma Okamoto 263/349/421 -125 WRC+

Okamoto is 10 games into his MLB career so on the surface a 125 WRC+ is a pretty nice start!

Unfortunately it has come with an unsustainably high K rate of 41.9%….

Okamoto does deserve some time to get acclimated to MLB and the MLB ball as the pitchers in MLB are much stronger than average compared to the NPB and the baseball has some differences which affects the movement on pitches.

The good news is while is whiff rate is elevated based on his history I would expect this to come down as he gets more comfortable against MLB pitching and he could also cut down on the Ks by being more aggressive on in zone pitches.

Over in Japan it was probably much easier to get away with a low in zone swing rate because the pitchers there didn’t have the pitches to put Okamoto away but in MLB where the pitchers have better stuff he will likely need to adjust his approach a bit to be more aggressive on in zone pitches.

Currently Okamoto has a Called Strike% of 23.1% which last season would have ranked 143rd of 145 qualified batters, Okamoto’s contact quality in his brief MLB career has been well above average to elite so I believe once he gets the approach locked in and more experience he should be more than fine as an MLB hitter.

Ernie Clement 293/293/366 – 88 WRC+

Clement has actually been pretty close to what I would expect from him, he has been swinging often and putting the ball in play a ton without doing much damage which comes with major fluctuations in outcomes depending on his BABIP.

The good news is he has already hit a ball harder than any ball he did last season and his hard hit% is 4.8% higher than it has ever been in his career, if he keeps swinging it and making contact like he always has and can keep up the slightly higher hard hit rate he should be right back around the mid to high 90s for his WRC+ sooner than later.