Toronto Blue Jays: Outfielder Lourdes Gurriel Jr. cannot be stopped

The Toronto Blue Jays started their west coast road trip last night in Oakland, dropping the first game of the series 5-1. Alek Manoah showed a rare side of being human and allowed two home runs and four earned runs in the contest while the Blue Jays’ bats just could not get going against A’s pitcher Cole Irvin.

While the Jays may have started the road trip with a loss, there is one player who is playing extremely well and has been since the month turned over into June.

Lourdes Gurriel Jr. started off the season slow, owning a .655 OPS through 44 games from April to the end of May, with just two home runs and 18 RBI on the year. Featuring towards the middle to the bottom half of the lineup for most of the year, Gurriel Jr. was batting at a .240 clip through the first two months and had also struck out 29 times.

Once the calendar flipped over, Gurriel Jr. turned it up a notch, and since then, the Cuban-born infielder converted outfielder has been pretty much unstoppable in the batter’s box. He owns a .374/.417/.551 slash line since June 1st and has also added three home runs and 16 RBI on the year, almost surpassing his totals from the first two months of the year. His .969 OPS has been one of the best on the team as of late and has 13 multi-hit games through the same time span, three of which were three-hit games.

Since the start of June, Blue Jays outfielder Lourdes Gurriel Jr. has been unstoppable in the batter’s box, seeing his stats rise after a slow start to the year.

Gurriel Jr. is also riding an eight-game hitting streak right now and while he hasn’t walked that much on the year (26th percentile), he has now raised his batting average to .295 on the year, 53 points higher than what it was when he entered the month of June. Funny enough, Gurriel Jr. is not necessarily barreling the ball at the plate (18th percentile) but he is getting hard contact (80th percentile). Compared to the rest of the Blue Jays squad, the righty-batter ranks second in batting average, third in OBP (.350), fourth in OPS (.783), and sixth in RBI (34).

With the Blue Jays needing all the wins they can get in a tight Wild Card race, Lourdes Gurriel Jr. is playing well and hopefully keeps it up as the squad looks to try and win the series against the Athletics later today.