Stepping Back, Lourdes Gurriel Jr. Has Found What Works
Lourdes Gurriel Jr. had the game of his life last weekend. Six hits, five RBI, and a fifth-inning dugout cocktail.
It was the exclamation point on Toronto's whooping of the Red Sox in Boston, but also the defining heat flair of the latest Gurriel hot streak.
The Blue Jays left fielder has been the American League's best bat this month, hitting .405 in July, looking much like the unstoppable force he became late last season. The cold starts and surging hot streaks have defined Gurriel's MLB career so far, but with some small tweaks and an ever-improving approach, this version of Gurriel may be here to stay.
A year ago, Gurriel was in a funk. He hit .235 in July last season, with a .683 OPS and five extra-base hits. But it was also around that time he made a season-defining tweak. Halfway through the year, Gurriel took a step back. No, not some figurative self-assessment of his performance, he literally moved back in the batter's box.
Swing decisions have long been Gurriel's biggest obstacle to success. He hits the ball hard and sprays it across the field, but the chase rates in his first four MLB seasons were some of the league's worst.
Standing a few more inches off the plate (shown below) made the strike-to-ball slider away a little less enticing, too far off to be worth a waive. With fewer chasing whiffs, Gurriel puts himself in better counts, so he sees more pitches in the zone, and those are the pitches he's never had an issue with.
"It felt like something clicked," Gurriel said.
In the final two months of 2021, Gurriel was unstoppable. He hit .323 with a .982 OPS and was Toronto's best hitter before a Randal Grichuk cleat halted his heater. He entered 2022 looking to build off the late-season success, and the first few weeks showed signs of continuation—a .289/.330/.434 slash in April. But then, the hits stopped dropping.
Gurriel's batting average bottomed out at .221 on May 21 this year. To Blue Jays assistant hitting coach Hunter Mense, Gurriel looked the same as the last few months of 2021, maybe even a bit better. It was the same approach, the same set-up in the box, and the chases were way down—but the results just weren't coming.
"You felt like if it just keeps continuing this way, he keeps doing these things, eventually these numbers are gonna start to come," Mense said.
So, when Mense looked up at the Comerica Park scoreboard in Detroit a few weeks later and saw a .268 batting average, he wasn't surprised. He was just surprised how fast the correction happened.
The late-2021 success roared back with Gurriel's latest hot streak. He currently sits with a career-high in batting average and OBP. In the last 20 games, the 28-year-old is hitting over .500 and on pace to finish the season with the most walks of his career. It's everything that went right in August and September with an even further refined approach. His chase rate is at an all-time low (30.2%), he's seeing more pitches in the zone than ever before, and he's slamming the hittable ones he needs to.
The one tradeoff for Gurriel's high average this season has been a drop in pop. The Blue Jay outfielder's current focus is on good contact, playing into his own strengths in every at-bat. Staying inside the ball has always been one of Gurriel's strengths—it runs in the family, he says—so spraying to all fields is natural. Standing further back from the plate could be harder for a pull-happy hitter, but not for Gurriel. His opposite-field percentage has climbed in 2022 and the batting average soared alongside it. It's fine to have five homers when you're hitting .313 and rarely swinging at bad pitches.
"He's accepting a backside single as an okay result," Mense said. "And there's 100% validity in that being okay."
Backing off the plate wasn't some silver bullet savior for Gurriel, but a part of his constantly improving approach. The raw hitting talent has always been undeniable with Toronto's left fielder, with fast hands and a pre-pitch setup that constantly puts him in a position to hit. But, in his first two seasons, Gurriel had a 39% chase rate that stymied his upside.
Training swing decisions is one of the most difficult things in baseball, a good eye is often a skill you either have or you don’t. But with Gurriel, it’s been the defining improvement of his MLB career. He’s often in the cage hours before a game, working with Mense and Toronto's other hitting coaches to practice his swing choices off a machine or rehearse and refine his mechanics.
But there's only so much you can do outside of real at-bats. When the Chris Sale slider comes slashing across the zone or the Jacob deGrom fastball is dotted in the upper corner, your eye tells if you're swinging. And then after the plate appearance, Gurriel checks where the pitch actually was, and if it lined up with what his eyes told him. If not, adjust and improve.
For some, the adjustment never comes—your eyes keep lying to you and the chases never die. But for Gurriel, with a little help from some mechanical tweaks, he's seeing the ball better than ever before.
"I think it gives everybody hope that it is something that can be learned," Mense said, "something that can be trained or at least talked about and gotten better with. Because [Gurriel] has seen exponential growth."
Mitch Bannon is a baseball reporter for Sports Illustrated covering the Toronto Blue Jays and their minor league affiliates.Twitter: @MitchBannon