SEATTLE – Six ground balls do not make a national crisis, unless you happen to be the recently minted franchise player of Canada’s only Major League Baseball team staring at the eighth level of Dante’s version of Hell, which is to say not quite as low as it gets but just about there. In Dante’s nine levels of Hell, the penultimate level is Fraud. In the American League Championship Series, it is a near-must win in Game 3, having lost the first two games at home.
The Toronto Blue Jays were descending fast, marked most absurdly by going 1-for-42 in the third through ninth innings of the opening two games. Almost as troubling was how their bedrock hitting star, Vlad Guerrero Jr., after terrorizing the Yankees in the ALDS, suddenly had devolved into a ground ball out machine. Guerrero was 0-for-7, including six groundouts.
“Vlad can hit anybody’s fastball,” said Blue Jays bench coach Don Mattingly. “Anybody’s. He’s a great hitter with power, not the other way around. But sometimes, like when the crowd is really loud and the moment gets big, you can see by his body language he wants to do so well he gets out front a little bit. That’s when the pull-side grounders happen.”
Hell apparently hath no fury like the best hitting team in baseball and its $500 million slugger getting shut down at home. The Blue Jays got back into the series with a 13–4 bombardment of the Mariners Wednesday. All Guerrero did was become just the second player in postseason history to get on base in all five plate appearances while racking up three extra-base hits and nine total bases with his team trailing in the series. The other was Babe Ruth in Game 4 of the 1926 World Series with the Yankees trailing St. Louis, two games to one.
Blue Jays make ’em fly—fast
Game 3 was seismic. Toronto walloped Seattle pitches with percussive loudness never seen in the postseason, at least in this decade of recording how hard baseballs get hit. The Jays smashed 11 hits at 100 mph or more, breaking the record of 10 by the 2018 Red Sox and 2020 Dodgers.
Guerrero accounted for four of those hits at more than 102 mph, joining Kerry Carpenter (2025 ALDS Game 5) as the only players to smash four hits so hard in a postseason game. The tally of Guerrero’s night of whistling baseballs throughout T-Mobile Park read like someone fiddling with the FM radio dial looking for a decent tune: 102.8 (single), 104.9 (double), 106.4 (home run), 108.0 (double).
It was a whiplash of a turnaround in this series. It was not, however, any surprise to David Popkins, the Toronto hitting coach who, after getting dumped by the Twins last October, helped transform the Blue Jays from 19th in batting average last year to first this year, as well as from 23rd in runs to fourth.
“I felt good about today,” Popkins said about the Game 3 matchup. “The guys have been resilient all year. Our back was against the wall and that’s when this team plays really well. I always like to compare hitting to fighting. And when guys get a little paralyzed in the ring, sometimes the only thing to do is put your head down and start throwing some haymakers.”
Toronto takes control of the zone
The inside story of how the Jays and Vlad turned it around begins with how Mariners pitchers, who take pride in throwing strikes and controlling counts, shoved with impunity against Toronto in Games 1 and 2. Seattle flooded the strike zone with 57% of their pitches, well above the MLB average of 50.7%. Popkins knew the attack rate would remain high in Game 3 with Seattle starting George Kirby, a fastball-pumping sharpshooter who broke the record for the best strikeout-to-walk rate through a pitcher’s first four seasons that had stood for .
Popkins took inventory of those first two games and came up with a plan to counterpunch. It would mean being even more aggressive on the offensive side than the Mariners had been on the pitching side.
“We talked about trying to scare them out of the zone,” Popkins said.
All 18 hits for Toronto came three or fewer pitches into an at-bat, an amazing display of dictating a game. Mission accomplished.
“Yeah,” Popkins said. “They’ve been attacking us in the zone, trying to induce weak contact. So, they want to fill it up. … The counter to that is to punish 'em when they do that. So that was the goal tonight.
“We were just ready to do damage on something. We knew they were going to fill it up. They do a good job attacking the zone and they were getting really comfortable with filling it up on the halves [of the plate] and not nibbling. We had to make sure that they are a little more careful next time and attack one of the edges and it’ll get us into better counts in the future.
“But yeah, we were just looking to put things in play early and today we were looking to do some damage on something.”
Guerrero’s secret adjustment
Guerrero needed to make his own adjustment. Guerrero has the flattest swing in the game. He comes at the baseball with an attack angle of just 1°. The major league average is 10°, right in the middle of the ideal window espoused by Ted Williams (between 5° and 15°). In ALCS Games 1 and 2 it was down to -6° for his seven outs. He was swinging down on the baseball. Baseball’s second-best hitter against fastballs in the zone (.370; only Aaron Judge was better) went 0-for-4 against 14 heaters in the zone in the first two games.
Moreover, Guerrero’s contact point on his outs was five inches deeper than his regular season average, mostly because the Mariners were getting him out on pitches away. Here are the pitch locations for his seven outs:
Before Game 3, Popkins and Guerrero had to find a way to get the ball off the ground. I asked Popkins if Guerrero made an adjustment.
“Yeah, yeah,” Popkins said. “He made an adjustment, not necessarily with his swing at all. His swing was the same, just kind of some of the stuff he was exposing to himself before the game to give him a little bit … you know, [make it] a little bit easier for him to elevate the ball. And he was able to do that.”
“So, it was a swing adjustment?” I asked him.
“No, it wasn’t,” Popkins said. “It .. you know … the swing is adjusted by that, but he wasn’t thinking about his swing there. It was more so just what he was exposed to before the game. I’ll keep that private. But yeah, it was a good adjustment that he made and it worked today.”
Guerrero’s four hits all came on pitches middle/down and in the zone (two fastballs and two curveballs).
“It feels great, obviously,” Guerrero said about his night, “but for me, it’s just about winning. I’m very happy that we won the game. I never think about myself. I think about the whole thing, and we just win the game, and I’m very happy for it.”
Seattle still searching for penultimate ALCS win
The Mariners, especially after Julio Rodriguez sent the place into a frenzy with a two-run first inning homer, missed an opportunity to get within one game of their first pennant for the first time in franchise history. They have played five ALCS games in franchise history while two wins from the World Series. They have lost them all.
Seattle still leads the series, two games to one, but the ALCS has a whole new look with Guerrero untethered from that two-game groundball festival that caused such national angst. Back in 1992, before World Series Game 2, with the Blue Jays one game down to the Braves, a Marine Corps color guard accidently displayed the Canadian flag upside down, an international symbol of distress. After much uproar and bruised national pride, the Blue Jays restored order by winning that night with a ninth-inning rally. They took the series in six games.
Guerrero’s ground balls may have been an international sign of distress in baseball protocol. But at least for one night, the crisis has passed. And Treachery, the ninth level of Hell, has been averted.
