Lovable Guerrero Jr. the star of the show
Charismatic Blue Jays slugger lights up all-star game with his skill and personality
There's no stage in baseball too big for Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
So early in his career, earlier than most of us believed possible, he has become the ultimate personality in a sport that too often doesn't have enough of it.
It's one thing to hit the way he does, bigger and better and stronger and more consistent than anyone in baseball. It's another to light up the sky every night with that broad, wide, welcoming smile. And it's another to dance and laugh and be the show — the only player on the field each game that you can't stop staring at.
This has never really happened before in Toronto baseball, even as Guerrero plays outside the city. This kind of individual electricity. This kind of natural charisma. He seems to be part child, part teenager, part sporting savant. All wrapped up in a slugger of magnificent skills.
In just his third major-league season and at the age of 22, Guerrero has become baseball's most modern and compelling figure. And as he was playing his way to becoming the youngest player to win the MVP at an all-star game, he was being so very Vladdy-like.
He went to the mound, smiling, always smiling, and hugged Max Scherzer after his first-inning line drive almost clocked the starting pitcher between the eyes. Who does that? Even in an all-star game?
“I'm alive,” Scherzer said after being removed after pitching one inning.
“And I didn't get hit by a ball. That's the success story.”
The moment, though, was playful and innocent and thoughtful — and all of that oozes as Guerrero grows as a hitter, a man, a figure who instinctively feels, in this his first mammoth season, how much he matters.
That he's the show in the show. Guerrero was simply being himself in the all-star dugout during Tuesday night's game. He was hanging with his Blue Jays teammates, Bo Bichette, Teoscar Hernandez and Marcus Semien. The Big Four. He was Facetiming with Lourdes Gurriel Jr. He was being fake interviewed in Spanish by Hernandez. He was being a kid and taking it all in and still hitting a home run, knocking in another run, almost decapitating the great Scherzer, hugging Bichette after his homer: He was non-stop.
“I can't wait to get back to hear what Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and George Springer have to say about this,” Guerrero, speaking through interpreter Hector Lebron, said post-game. “Before I left I made a promise to them that I was going to win the MVP and they said, `You better win the MVP. If not, don't come back.'”
After the game, he also paid tribute to his hall of fame father, and by hitting a home run, became just one of three fatherson combinations in history to hit round-trippers in the all-star game. The other two you might have heard of: Bobby and Barry Bonds, and the Ken Griffeys, Jr. and Sr.
“It means a lot. It means the world to me,” Guerrero said through his interpreter, talking about his famous father. “I just want to thank my dad. I just want to say thank you to him and `Dad, this is for you.” And on the glove he used at the all-star game, he had a photo of himself as a child in uniform at the all-star game, alongside his dad. He needed that with him in Denver. That's so much a part of who he is — and publicly, he couldn't be more different than his publicity averse father.
What a fortunate time this is for baseball, with all its problems, with all its issues, to have new wave stars like Guerrero, like the incomparable Shohei Ohtani, like the complete Fernando Tatis Jr. They don't have to do interviews in English, although Tatis is quite comfortable at that. Their language is baseball. Their body language. They don't need to change to become popular.
Guerrero speaks nightly at the plate, at first base, in the dugout, non-stop at times, with language and body language, and the latter of those is so easily and comfortably read.
As baseball is about to begin its unofficial second half, Guerrero leads the sport in batting average, RBIS, on-base percentage and OPS. When he isn't first, like in home runs or total bases or slugging percentage or WAR, he ranks second, and that's only because Ohtani is currently ahead of him.
In almost any other season, Guerrero's numbers would make him an MVP certainty. But this isn't any other season with Ohtani doing what no one — including Babe Ruth — has ever done before.
But being the second choice this year, if it ends up that way, is certainly special for a Blue Jay on the rise with a team that should be on the rise. Many of the Blue Jays sluggers of the past have been rather villainous around the American League. George Bell was disliked. Jose Bautista was more than disliked. Josh Donaldson is still disliked.
But you don't boo Guerrero. You can't. You want to hug him. You want to be part of his world and his enthusiasm and his style.
He's the lovable superstar. The big cuddly kid you want to hang with. The friend who makes every day just a little more fun than yesterday.