COMMENTARY: Stunning playoff stats put Vladdy Jr. in same league as Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig
Everybody knows that Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., is, as he would say in his native language, en fuego.
The Toronto Blue Jays first baseman is, in baseball parlance, mashing. He is raking.
But, how much is he mashing and raking? How much fuego are we talking about?
Baseball has a statistic, OPS, that combines a player’s ability to get on base and hit for power.
It’s a catch-all stat for a batter’s production at the plate.
The best postseason OPS in major league history belongs to New York Yankees immortals Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who are tied at 1.214.
Vladdy Junior’s OPS this postseason: 1.337.
He has more home runs (8) than he has strikeouts (5), a fact that seems impossible but is, in fact, true. He’s the first player in MLB history with 25 hits, eight home runs and 15 RBI in a single playoff year.
It is, simply, one of the all-time great postseasons in the history of baseball.
The Toronto Blue Jays have a 3-2 lead in the World Series for a host of reasons, but the performance of their 26-year-old next-gen superstar is at the top of the list. He won the ALCS MVP in the last round against the Seattle Mariners.
And now he’s doing it all over again.
The craziest thing about this offensive explosion is that it is coming at the end of Guerrero’s seventh year in the big leagues.
It might seem strange to say it now, but the power surge is something of an outlier.
Did he discover something with his swing? Did he just need the rest that came with a week off after Toronto clinched a first-round playoff bye? Is he swept up in the narrative of leading a team that is collectively playing a little out of its mind?
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He’s had some good seasons, and a couple of great ones, but he’s also had a lot of long stretches where he hasn’t looked anything like the kid who was once the hottest hitting prospect in baseball, the baby-faced teenager with the Hall of Fame father who had a freakishly powerful bat.
It’s not that Guerrero had a poor year — his OPS of .848 was ninth in the AL — but it had to make the Blue Jays executives who signed him to a 14-year, US$500-million contract extension in April just a little bit nervous. Had they paid Ferrari prices for what was more like a high-end sedan?
Those questions have been blown away by furious playoff hack after furious hack, like the one that resulted in a laser of a first-inning home run in Game 5 on Wednesday night.
Guerrero is delivering the kind of devastating offensive performance of which Blue Jays fans — and executives — have long dreamed, only he’s doing it on baseball’s biggest stage, and against the toughest pitchers in the sport.
If nothing else, his timing is impeccable.
The funny thing about this run is that it’s probably less surprising to casual baseball fans who don’t closely follow the Blue Jays. Guerrero has long carried a high profile.
There is his famous lineage, but also the joyful way he plays the game, all big smiles and childhood recklessness, the kind of player who will leap into a diving slide to home plate simply because it’s fun.
There’s also his knack for big moments. As a teenager in the minor leagues, he hit a walk-off homer in a spring-training game at Olympic Stadium in Montreal, where he was born during his father’s time with the Expos.
As a 20-year-old, he placed second in the Home Run Derby during All-Star Weekend, where he hit a record-breaking 29 homers in the first round. (He would win the event four years later.)
Two years later, he smashed 48 home runs and led the American League in OPS, seemingly having arrived as one of the premier power hitters in the sport.
But his development was not linear.
He hit 32 home runs the following year, and 26 the year after that. He was still an elite hitter with exceptional contact skills, but that prodigious power was no longer on frequent display.
Theories abounded as to what had happened.
Had he sacrificed some of his natural power to be a better all-around player? Did his efforts to lose weight rob him of some of that juice?
He could still absolutely murder a baseball, but he didn’t hit them in the air as often. Over 156 games in the 2025 regular season, Guerrero hit 23 home runs, tied for 34th in the American League in that category.
One point of comparison: Andy Pages, the ninth hitter in the Dodgers lineup before he was benched in the World Series for lack of production, hit 27 home runs this season.
And now, this. Kaboom. Vladdy in Full. He hit a home run in his first at-bat of the playoffs, at home against the Yankees.
It would turn out to be an incredible statement of intent.
He still takes walks, still gets on base, but that power that once made his minor-league coaches speak of him in hushed tones has come roaring back.
Throw a mistake to Guerrero now, and he will send it to the moon.
The kid who has been the Jays’ next big thing for the better part of a decade is at the peak of his powers.
There are no second thoughts about that contract anymore.
There’s just anticipation about what Guerrero might do at the Rogers Centre on Friday night, the next time he’s at the plate.
Police in Waterloo charged a teenage girl in connection with the collision that sent four youths to hospital earlier this month.
Waterloo Regional Police Service said on Oct. 6, emergency services were called in to a single-vehicle collision in North Dumfries Township, just outside of Cambridge.
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Police said the driver, a 15-year-old girl from Cambridge, lost control of the vehicle and hit a hydro pole.
The driver and three passengers, all under the age of 16, were taken to hospital with serious injuries.
Three of the youths have since been discharged, and one youth remains in a hospital outside their region.
On Thursday, police charged the 15-year-old driver with three counts of dangerous driving causing bodily harm, driving without a licence, speeding and two counts of stunt driving.
© 2025 The Canadian Press
The minister in charge of a series of financially-focused audits into Ontario’s child welfare system says the probes were delayed when some agencies asked for more time, but is promising they’re weeks away from release.
Minister of Children, Community and Social Services Michael Parsa told Global News the audits, which were initially due to be published in the spring, had been pushed back at the request of children’s aid societies.
“Some societies needed a bit more time to be able to provide that information and we happily allowed that to happen because the intent is to find ways to improve the system and support for the children and youth in care,” he said.
“We went into this with an open mind and we said the intent is, as I said, to look at ways to improve services, supports for the children and youth that are receiving care in the province. That open mind has allowed us to be able to have a third party come in and look at the way those services are being rendered, and provide some feedback as to how else we can improve.”
The investigations of 37 children’s aid organizations in the province were announced last fall after a push for efficiencies in the sector by Premier Doug Ford.
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The suggestion of audits was first raised by the premier during the summer of 2024 at a news conference, with details following months later.
Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles suggested that the announcement had sent staff scrambling and could be part of the reason for the delay.
“I think just like everything else this government does, they make an announcement, they don’t think about it, they have no plan, they have no strategy,” she said. “And then everybody scrambles and the work doesn’t get done or it gets done badly. That’s not how you run a government.”
Unveiling the audit plan last October, government officials focused on financial indicators like salaries, real estate portfolios and deficits.
At the time, they pointed out that, over the past decade, there has been a 49-per cent decrease in open protection cases, a 30-per cent decrease in children in care and a 51-per cent decrease in investigations that get transferred to ongoing service.
It’s not yet clear what the audits will show, although the government has promised to make their findings public.
Parsa said he was open to making changes if the audits recommend them.
“Feedback that we get back from a third party will allow us to be able to review every information from every side,” he said. “Again, the intent will never change: if there is a decision that needs to be made to better protect children and youth in care, we will take that.”
The minister said he hoped to make the results public in “weeks” rather than months.
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
The man who stole the “Roaring Lion” portrait of Winston Churchill from the Château Laurier in Ottawa in January 2022 lost his appeal of his sentence on Thursday.
Jeffrey Wood, who pleaded guilty to stealing the iconic portrait earlier this year, was sentenced to two years less a day in jail.
The Ontario Court of Appeal dismissed his sentence appeal in a two-to-one ruling.
Lawrence Greenspon, Wood’s lawyer, said he is seeking leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada in the coming weeks, based on reasons put forward by the dissenting judge.
Greenspon said Wood turned himself into jail Thursday morning, as required, though he will be seeking bail pending the leave to appeal application.
Renowned photographer Yousuf Karsh took the celebrated portrait in 1941 in the Speaker’s office just after Churchill delivered a rousing wartime address to Canadian members of Parliament.
Karsh lived in the hotel, and operated a studio out of it, for almost two decades. He donated the Churchill portrait and six others to the hotel in 1998, when he moved out.
Police said the portrait was stolen from the hotel sometime between Christmas Day 2021 and Jan. 6, 2022, and replaced with a fake.
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The swap was only discovered months later, in August, when a hotel worker noticed the frame was not hung properly.
The portrait was returned to the hotel after a lengthy international investigation determined it was bought at an auction in London by an Italian man who was not aware it was stolen.
Greenspon said the “appropriate” sentence would have been house arrest or a conditional sentence order.
The text of the decision from the Court of Appeal for Ontario said the sentencing judge identified several aggravating factors, including that the crimes concerned an object of “historical and cultural significance” and that Wood had replaced the stolen print with his forged copy, trafficked the stolen artwork and caused “irreparable damage” to the print.
The decision said the sentencing judge also acknowledged mitigating factors, including that Wood had no criminal record and that he had pleaded guilty.
“The sentencing judge concluded that, absent mitigating factors, a penitentiary sentence in the range of three years would have been justified,” the decision said. “However, after taking into account the relevant mitigating factors, he imposed a sentence of two years less a day.”
© 2025 The Canadian Press
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