The Blue Jays have spent much of 2026 trying to find their footing after coming up just short of a World Series title a year ago, and Sunday brought one of the season’s most surprising turns.
Against the Baltimore Orioles, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. finally did the one thing Toronto fans had been waiting all year to see: he left the yard at Rogers Centre. It was his first home run at home this season, and it came in the 150th game of the year.
“He's done it. Vladimir Guerrero Jr., in the 150th game of the season, has his 1st home run at Rogers Centre.
He watched every second of it before he took a step. #Blue Jays,” Keegan Matheson of MLB.com wrote after the swing.
Before Sunday’s game, Guerrero’s season had been far quieter than anyone around Toronto expected. In 134 games entering the matchup, he had a 1.0 bWAR, eight home runs, a .259 batting average and a .683 OPS. That OPS was the lowest of his career, and it stood out even more because he had never finished a season below a .772 OPS before this year.
The home split was the strangest part of all. Guerrero had played 67 games at Rogers Centre without a home run, while he had eight homers in 67 road games coming into Sunday.
That kind of drought would have put him in a bleak corner of MLB history if it had dragged all the way through the season. Instead, he erased the problem on Sept. 13, and with it came relief for a stretch that had become one of the season’s most puzzling storylines.
Had he not broken through on Sunday, Guerrero would have had only six games left to do it, with three against the Detroit Tigers and three against the Cincinnati Reds to finish the schedule.
None of that is the concern anymore. Guerrero finally got the home run at home, and he did it with a mammoth blast that brought an end to one of the strangest streaks in baseball this season.
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