The Blue Jays make a ton of contact. They put the ball in play. It’s what they do. No team had a lower strikeout rate this season. No team has a lower strikeout rate this postseason. They scored the fourth-most runs in the regular season, and so far have the most in the postseason. It’s a good offense.
Of course, they made a ton of contact last year, too, striking out just barely more than this year’s club and essentially tying for fifth-lowest strikeout rate in the Majors. But all that contact led nowhere, as they ended up outscoring only seven non-contending clubs.
The emphasis on contact is valuable if somewhat overstated, because it’s easy to skip past how they did also just mash nine homers in four Division Series games against the Yankees while slugging .601, which is merely the third-highest slugging percentage any team has ever put up in any series (setting aside one-gamers) in postseason history. It wasn’t just the big boys, either – even light-hitting Ernie Clement got into the action with a two-run blast off Max Fried to get the Jays on the board in Game 2. It’s not just contact, it’s valuable contact.
But also, yes, they make a ton of contact, too, as they’ve done all season long, and it’s the combination of those two things that’s been the story thus far. After all, the most impactful moment of the ALDS, at least as far as Win Probability goes, wasn’t any of those nine homers. It was the two-run Game 4 single that Nathan Lukes roped over shortstop off a high Devin Williams fastball, extending a 2-1 lead to 4-1. It wasn’t the kind of big blast you’ll remember forever. It was, at 96.4 mph, not weak contact, either.
We’ll get back to the quality of that contact, because that’s going to be important, but let’s stick with the “they just put the ball in play” part for a moment, because it is indeed true – perhaps more than you think.
The Jays, in the Division Series, struck out just 15% of the time. That’s easily the best of any team in the DS and below the average of 23%, though no team struck out more than the Dodgers did, and they’re still alive, too. Yet it isn’t the lowest of any DS in history or really anywhere near it, simply because strikeout rates today are considerably higher than they were years ago. (You may have noticed that the average four-seam fastball or sinker this October is 95.7 mph.)
Given that, the only way you can really look at the historical context of strikeout rate is to compare it to the average for that year, which gives you a nice moving baseline. Now we’re going to get somewhere. Dating back to 1913, when this data is first available, the current Jays postseason run features the second-best strikeout rate, compared to the average of that season. The way to read this: The Blue Jays struck out 66% as much as the average postseason team this year.
Lowest era-adjusted postseason strikeout rate (100 is average, lower is better)
It’s worth noting that we’re comparing “one series” to “entire postseasons” there, so on a per-series basis, the Jays striking out this little in the ALDS was the seventh-best individual series of all time. It’s also worth noting that the 2006 Twins, who made the most era-adjusted contact of any postseason ever, scored seven runs in three games while being swept by the A’s.
But for the Jays, this follows up on exactly the same thing that happened over the course of the regular season. Toronto struck out 18% of the time, lowest in baseball, and ever-so-slightly better than the Royals. Again: That’s not a number that works throughout time, because the 1998 Blue Jays struck out at an identical rate … and that was the sixth-highest that year.
So we’ll do the same thing, compare the team’s strikeout rate to the league average for that year, and here’s what we find: The 2025 Jays were tied for the seventh-lowest (year-adjusted) team strikeout rate of any team in modern baseball history.
Lowest era-adjusted regular season strikeout rate (100 is average, lower is better)
So yes, they put the ball in play, and given the historical context here, it’s even more impressive than you might think. The data backs up the eye test. But contact alone doesn’t win playoff games, despite the myth that seems to persist; if it did, then San Diego and Cleveland might have advanced further. That’s why you keep seeing versions of this stat floating around — because it’s meaningful. (Figures here since 2015, postseason only.)
Teams that do both? That’s a .900 win percentage. It’s possible to lose a game where you hit more homers and strike out fewer times, but it’s really hard, and any combination of anything you can do that will have you winning nine of 10 times you’ll take in a heartbeat.
“We’re going to put the ball in play,” said manager John Schneider to MLB.com’s Keegan Matheson during the ALDS. “We’ve done that over the course of the year. I think the home runs are a by-product of a really good approach against specific pitchers that you’re really focused on at this time of year.”
So, about that “really good approach.” Can we find anything from the Division Series that may be applicable during the ALCS or, perhaps, the World Series?
What the Jays did in the ALDS against the Yankees
For one thing, the Jays were happy to swing at strikes. Lots of them. More than seven out of every 10 pitches in the zone – 71.1%, to be exact – resulted in swings. That’s easily the most of any DS team this year, and it’s the sixth highest of the 152 DS teams on record. That, by itself, is not inherently good or bad; the regular season team that did this the most was the Rockies, who had MLB’s worst record, and the team that did it the least was the Brewers, who had MLB’s best record.
But it does go exactly to what Clement told Sportsnet was their strategy over the summer.
“We’re OK going 0-1 instead of being 0-for-1,” he said in July. “If you get fooled, swing through it and then battle your tail off the rest of the at-bat. But it goes back to the intent. We’re not letting them get us out on a pitcher’s pitch in the first couple pitches. If I get out on a fastball down the middle on the first pitch, I’m OK with that. That’s my intent. But if I ground out on a pitch that’s two balls off the plate outside, that’s not doing anybody any good.”
They also chased a lot, so we can’t go overboard on the plate discipline aspect of it here; Lukes alone had four hits on pitches outside of the strike zone. But clearly there was a plan, and the outcome was an 82% contact rate that was the third highest in the last 10 years of Divisional Series – as well as the lowest walk rate, just 5%, of any of the eight DS teams.
There is, inherently, some amount of good fortune in there, because their .347 Batting Average on Balls In Play – which excludes homers and strikeouts – was the highest in a DS since 2021. That’s especially seen on swings outside the zone, where Toronto hit an improbable .364 with 16 hits. That is, to some extent, a skill they have, because they had the best batting average on out-of-zone swings in the regular season, too. Thing is: Even that was just .189. It’s hard to live on out-of-the-zone contact.
There’s something also to be said for the fact that despite all the talk about velocity this October, they’re essentially tied for the slowest fastballs seen. That matters, too; the Yankees didn’t make it hard enough on them.
But not as much as what we’re about to share, we think.
Last year, as the team had the fifth-fewest homers in the game, they also had what was essentially tied for the slowest bat speed in the game, a truly incredible fact given that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. annually rates as among the quickest bats in the Majors. This April, as they got off to a long-forgotten slow offensive start, outscoring only four of what would be baseball’s weakest offenses, it was more of the same, but worse: MLB’s slowest average bat speed.
Put another way: Their average bat speed in the postseason, 72.6 mph, is exactly as fast as the best teams (Yankees & Red Sox) had in April – the month where Toronto was in dead last. Their fast-swing rate of 37% in October is nearly double what it was in April (20%), and it would have led the Majors in every month of the regular season except one.
It is, partially, about personnel. The fast-swinging Addison Barger (93rd percentile in bat speed) gained playing time, as did Daulton Varsho (92nd), who missed much of the first half due to injury. But it’s mostly about existing players swinging harder, as batters such as Alejandro Kirk, George Springer, Davis Schneider, Lukes and even Myles Straw have all gained bat speed late in the season and into October. It’s too many different players to just be a coincidence, even if a four-game series against the Yankees might just tell you more about swinging at the right pitches than anything.
“Let them swing and swing with intent, work through the middle of the field and whatever happens after that, happens,” Popkins had said to Sportsnet in July.
Nearly a decade ago, Jays pitcher Shane Bieber, then a Cleveland prospect, found himself at something of the forefront of a pitching revolution, where after decades of trying to teach hard-throwers to pitch, it became clear that you could teach natural pitchers to throw hard.
Hitting coaches have spent a century trying to teach hard swingers to make contact. What if we’re starting to see the same progression, just on the other side? Can you teach contact guys to swing just a little harder? After the good-contact 2024 Jays went nowhere, the 2025 Blue Jays might be trying to show us you can.
