The Athletic has live coverage of Mariners vs. Blue Jays from Game 7 of the American League Championship Series.
TORONTO — I can almost guarantee that when Vladimir Guerrero Jr. signed his 14-year, $500 million extension with the Toronto Blue Jays, executives from virtually every team in baseball snickered. Rolled their eyes. Said something to the effect of “the Blue Jays will regret that deal.”
Teams are beholden to their computer models, forever calculating players’ values based on projected future performance. It’s understandable. Good businesses are careful with their investments. Contracts as long as Guerrero’s are not without risk. But here’s the thing: While some of the return Guerrero provides is unquantifiable, his impact — on his team, his city and an entire country — is undeniable.
Guerrero, 26, hit his sixth homer of the postseason Sunday night to help the Jays force Game 7 of the American League Championship Series with a 6-2 victory over the Seattle Mariners. He is now tied with Jose Bautista and Joe Carter for the most postseason homers in franchise history. And he has done it in a single, magical October.
Shohei Ohtani is the best player in the game, maybe the best player in baseball history. He just delivered perhaps the greatest single-game performance ever in the Los Angeles Dodgers’ NLCS clincher. This postseason, Ohtani is batting .220 with a .967 OPS. Guerrero is at .462 and 1.532.
His contract, as crazy as it sounds, helped make much of this possible. The Jays’ first AL East title since 2015. Their four-game blitz of the New York Yankees in the Division Series. Their chance to return to the World Series for the first time since they won back-to-back titles in 1992 and ‘93.
Once Guerrero agreed to his deal in early April, any talk of him departing as a free agent at the end of the season stopped. The players saw management was committed to winning, not just for the present, but also the future. The entire team, including Guerrero, could relax. The fan base could, too.
“It freed a lot of people up because not only did it take the pressure off the daily narrative, but it shows everyone what our intentions are every single year — to be competitive and try to win it,” manager John Schneider said in August on the Starkville podcast. “You don’t lock up a player like Vlad for 14 years if you’re not trying to do that.”
Or, as Jays pitcher Chris Bassitt put it, “It stabilizes everything. It stabilizes your entire future as a franchise.”
How do you place a value on that? A value on this type of postseason run? A value to Guerrero playing his entire career in Toronto and possibly becoming the first lifetime Blue Jay to enter the Hall of Fame?
Jays general manager Ross Atkins said, “It’s hard to quantify. It’s definitely a positive to have extended him, for the organization, for him, for the environment.”
Yes, Guerrero is unlikely to be as productive in his late 30s as he is in his late 20s. He is 6-foot-2, 250 pounds, and one day no longer will be as nimble at first base. Nor will he run the bases with the same abandon he has in this postseason, diving headfirst into home plate to score from second in Game 3 of the DS, taking third on a wild pitch Sunday night and racing home on a throwing error by Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh.
Still . . .
“The way he hits, he’s always going to hit,” Bassitt said. “It may get to the point where he’s not a first baseman. But he’s still going to be able to hit. His swing is that good. His approach is that good. He’s going to hit for a long time. And that’s not going to change.”
To think, Guerrero entered the postseason without a home run in his last 89 regular-season at-bats. Was he simply off with his timing? Did he miss the cleanup hitter behind him, shortstop Bo Bichette, who has been out since Sept. 6 with a sprained left knee? Or, as Guerrero suggested early in the DS, did he just need the rest the Jays earned with their first-round bye?
“It could have been a lot of different things,” Bichette said. “Maybe he just didn’t feel good. Maybe he was looking forward to this moment too much. But he’s a gamer. He rises to the occasion.”
Guerrero had not done that previously in the postseason, batting a combined .136 with no homers and a .422 OPS. But his entire experience consisted of only 22 at-bats, spread over three two-game defeats in the wild-card round. Not enough of a sample to pass judgment.
And now?
Guerrero has nine hits in his last 15 at-bats. One of his outs was a 116-mph forceout. Of his six homers, two have come on changeups, one on a four-seam fastball, one on a slider, one on a sinker and one on a curve. He is hitting every pitch in every location, raising the question of how the Mariners will deal with him in Game 7.
“Honestly, the second half of last season, it felt like he hit a double or home run every single time he was up there,” said Blue Jays third baseman Ernie Clement, referring to Guerrero’s .376 batting average and 1.127 OPS after the 2024 All-Star break. “That was a couple of months of him just being unconscious. But I think this is a whole ‘nother level.”
Mariners center fielder Julio Rodríguez, who signed out of the Dominican Republic in 2017, two years after Guerrero, echoed that sentiment.
“I’ve known Vladdy since his tryout days; I used to watch him hit bombs and all that,” Rodríguez said. “I just feel like he’s really locked in. He’s a tremendous player and he’s definitely put it together this postseason. He’s just doing it.”
Guerrero’s extension kicks in next season. It will pay him an average of $35.7 million per year. According to Fangraphs’ dollars metric, which estimates 1 WAR at about $8 million, he exceeded that value only in 2021 ($50.6) million and ‘24 ($42.2 million). This season, Guerrero finished at $31.1 million. But some in the industry believe the value of 1 WAR is greater than $8 million. And the estimate is for regular-season production only.
It’s easy to be a prisoner of the moment, and get caught up in Guerrero making like former stars Barry Bonds, Carlos Beltrán and David Ortiz did in their own spectacular Octobers. But this moment, and all it encompasses, is why a franchise player’s value often transcends his on-field production.
A win Monday night, and the Jays will generate additional revenue from reaching the World Series. If they win the Series, they will make even more money. Yet even that is only a partial measure. Teams create lasting memories in seasons like this. And gain fans for life.
Vlad Jr. is making it all happen, as only a superstar can. Find a formula for that.
-The Athletic’s Tyler Kepner contributed to this story
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