New stat paints Toronto Blue Jays star Guerrero as MLB's worst baserunner
Picture this: you’re at the Rogers Centre watching a midsummer Toronto Blue Jays game and enjoying the experience with your friends. With one out in the ninth inning of a close game, someone on Toronto grounds into a double play to end the ball game, and you hear the words “Come on, Guerrero, run a little harder next time!” ring out from behind you.
It’s maybe the oldest cliche in baseball to blame a player’s effort while running the basepaths as to why their team isn’t winning any given game.
But as per a new MLB metric titled Baserunning Run Value put out on the Statcast portion of their site, it appears that those hypothetical fans yelling at Vladimir Guerrero Jr. might actually be onto something.
The new stat calculates each player’s “total baserunning impact” by combining stolen bases and extra bases taken into one all-encompassing number, as explained by Statcast’s David Adler.
Unfortunately for Guerrero Jr., he’s dead last in the league, with -6 runs added over the course of the 2024 season. (Hat tip to Reddit user That_Monty for pointing it out.)
In layman’s terms, that roughly means that Guerrero’s baserunning cost the Blue Jays six chances to score last season: four times while attempting to take an extra base and twice while trying to steal bases (he had two stolen bases this year while being caught twice).
On the other end of the spectrum, Arizona’s Corbin Carroll leads the MLB with 12 runs added on the basepaths, while the LA Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani and Kansas City’s Maikel Garcia tie at eight runs apiece.
For the Jays, George Springer led the team with three runs added on the basepaths (and the only player with two or more), while most players on the team either hovered between -1 to +1: a relatively negligible impact in both directions. Alejandro Kirk and Justin Turner both had -3 runs on the basepaths, while the recently departed Spencer Horwitz had -4.
Essentially, while most players didn’t really have an impact on the Jays’ offence via their baserunning over the course of 162 games, Guerrero’s choices and poor baserunning were statistically noticeable relative to his teammates and the rest of the league.
It’s not hard to find high-profile examples of Guerrero Jr. having a less-than-stellar go on the basepaths.
In late September 2022, with the Jays fighting for their playoff lives, Guerrero Jr. was called out by then-Jays interim manager John Schneider for an “inexcusable” effort on the basepaths in a loss against the New York Yankees. In the fifth inning of Game 2 of the 2023 Wild Card series against the Minnesota Twins, Guerrero Jr. was picked off by pitcher Sonny Gray in Toronto’s most recent playoff game.
The good news for Guerrero Jr. is that he’s pretty good at plenty of other things on a baseball diamond, having won a Gold Glove in 2022 and a Silver Slugger Award in 2021 and 2024. But if he’s still looking for ways to improve his game, we have one pretty clear suggestion that he could take to expand upon this offseason.
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