After two straight disappointing campaigns following his monster 2021 season, Vladimir Guerrero is something of an enigma entering the 2024 campaign and should be discounted accordingly in 2024 fantasy drafts.
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In 2021, it seemed that Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. had arrived. The then-22 year-old had broken out in a big way in his third major-league season. The abbreviated 2020 campaign had afforded him minimal opportunity to build on his ho-hum rookie campaign, and so 2021 was in some ways a litmus test for the heralded youngster. And he passed with flying colors, logging a .301 average to go with 48 homers, 111 RBI, and 123 runs scored across 698 plate appearances, with a superb wRC+ of 166. Guerrero had posted a career-best 42% hard-hit rate while commanding the dish well, with a 12% walk rate against a 16% strikeout rate. His contact rate was, curiously, down to 74% from 76% in 2020, but he had taken big steps forward in quality of contact, as he paired that hard-hit rate with a career-best 19% liner rate and 37% flyball rate; his groundball rate had been 50% or higher in his first two big-league seasons, which is not ideal for a slugger with below-average wheels.
Guerrero was understandably a very hot commodity in fantasy in 2022, one year after he finished second to Shohei Ohtani in the AL MVP race. But he was merely very good rather than great that season as he recorded a .274 average to go with 32 dingers, 97 RBI, and 90 runs scored across 706 PA, with a wRC+ of 133. His contact rate came in at a career-high 78%, but Guerrero’s quality of contact declined as his hard-hit rate dipped to a still above-average 38% while his liner rate declined to 17% and his flyball rate tumbled to under 31%, leaving him with a less-than-ideal 52% groundball rate. Some of the issue could likely be attributed to a lapse in his discipline at the dish, as his chase rate climbed to an above-average 34% in 2022 after it came in at 28% the year prior. He made lots of contact on those pitches outside of the zone (up to 65% in 2022 from 56% in 2021), which often results in lower-quality contact. A decline in his walk rate to 8% suggests that he did indeed prove less patient at the dish, as does a 3% uptick in his swing rate from 47% to 50%.
Despite the disappointing campaign for a guy who had vaulted into the top 10 in ADP during the 2022 fantasy draft season thanks to his incredible 2021, Guerrero remained a first-round pick in 2023, even if he slipped toward the back end of that upper tier of players. There was, after all, ample reason for optimism about Guerrero rebounding as he was just 24 and only a season removed from MVP-worthy production.
But he was somehow even worse in 2023. Across 582 PA, he logged a career-low .264 average to go with 26 homers – his lowest total since 2020 – 94 RBI, and 78 runs scored, with a wRC+ of 118, his lowest since 2020. Although WAR isn’t a fantasy stat, it’s telling that his WAR tumbled from a peak of 6.3 in 2021 to 2.8 in 2022 to just 1 in 2023. His walk rate came in at an above-average 10% while his strikeout rate dipped to a career-low 15%. Guerrero’s contact rate finished at a career-high 79%. He chased a little less often in 2023 than he had in 2022, with a pretty league-average 32.5% o-swing%. But a year after he posted a career-high 50% swing rate, he proved a touch more aggressive at the dish with a 51% swing rate. However, his quality of contact slipped further as his hard-hit rate came in at barely average at 36%. Guerrero’s liner rate actually climbed slightly from where it was in 2022 to over 18% while his flyball rate jumped to just north of 35%; a 46% groundball rate isn’t ideal for a slugger, but it was the second lowest of Guerrero’s career. What gives?
Well, for one, Guerrero’s hard-hit rate on flyballs wasn’t great at 37%. 22% of his flyballs were soft-hit and the remaining 41% were in the medium contact range. That helps to account for a dip in average and power output. Also, despite the shift being banned, he was pretty easy to play from a grounder standpoint as Guerrero pulled nearly 56% of his worm-burners and hit another 32% of them to the middle of the field. While his average exit velocity of 92mph is nice on the surface, it was down from a career-high of 95 in 2021 and 93 in 2022. The barrel rate of 11% was barely in the “good” range, which is disappointing given his career-high average launch angle of 10.5.
Concerningly, some of Guerrero’s key peripherals sagged during the second half of the season rather than improved. While his walk rate climbed from 8% before the All-Star break to 12% after even as his strikeout rate dipped from 16% to 13%, his hard-hit rate declined from 39% to 34% while his liner rate fell from almost 20% to under 17%. His flyball rate did climb from 33% to 38%, but that doesn’t pair well with a slumping hard-hit rate.
Overall, we can’t simply write Guerrero off as he enters what should be his prime. But two straight seasons of declining quality of contact following his incredible 2021 campaign are concerning. There’s a very real possibility that Guerrero is truly a .275-30 type hitter rather than a .300-45 guy. Even so, some of the numbers from 2023 – such as a career-low .277 BABIP – suggest that there may have simply been some poor luck at play. Depending on his price tag in 2024 fantasy drafts, he could be worth taking. But one can’t advise automatically drafting him in the first round. Early expert drafts have him slipping into the third round, and that’s a spot where he should be absolutely considered given his pedigree and potential, which he has admittedly shown once before over a full MLB season.
Photo credit: All-Pro Reels from District of Columbia, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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