“Life moves pretty fast,” well-known baseball fan and amateur philosopher Ferris Bueller once observed, “If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” So it is with baseball trends. Not even a year ago — in November 2025 — The Athletic’s Mitch Bannon proclaimed that the Toronto Blue Jays had made “contact hitting cool again.” It made perfect sense at the time. Toronto had just pushed the mighty Los Angeles Dodgers to the brink in a heart-pounding World Series, ultimately losing 5-4 in the 11th inning of Game 7, and the team’s offense led the way. In 2025, the Blue Jays led the AL in both batting average and contact rate and, in the process, transformed “themselves from 74-win also-rans to American League champions.” In his conversations with executives around MLB, Bannon speculated that the Blue Jays’ success might beget a trend:
In an era when pitching is arguably better than ever, St. Louis Cardinals general manager Chaim Bloom said that teams that consistently make contact stand out more. When pitching plans are often built around exploiting swing-and-miss tendencies, Atlanta Braves GM Alex Anthopoulos said that contact teams can frustrate pitchers more than any other. Philadelphia Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski noted that the talk of success in Milwaukee and Toronto — even if the reason wasn’t entirely revolutionary — may have an impact on team building across the league. “I find that it’s sort of a copycat league,” Dombrowski said. “If it works, people follow it.”
Fast forward a year. The Blue Jays have slogged through a difficult 2026, culminating in a last-place finish in the AL East. While the team’s pitching was generally good (3.92 ERA, good for ninth in MLB), Toronto’s hitters were abysmal. The Blue Jays were in MLB in runs and home runs, and they were 25th in OBP and 26th in slugging percentage, good for 27th in OPS. The poster child for the team’s struggles has been 2025 postseason hero Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who recently ignited controversy when he suggested that his $500 million contract with the club was about the past, not the future. In discussing the past, however, Vlad Jr. would doubtless prefer to forget 2026. While somewhat unlucky in 2026 (.280 xBA, with an excellent 13.3 K%), Vlad’s final slash line of .260/.332/.356 is nevertheless stupefying. How could a veteran player, who’s just entering his prime (he will turn 28 years old in March), lose over 150 points of OPS in a calendar year?
Perhaps too much blame, however, is being directed at the Blue Jays’ franchise player. After all, Vlad Jr.’s miserable 2026 mirrored the offense around him. While the Blue Jays wanted more than nine home runs out of their superstar slugger, this is an organization that prioritizes contact — something that Vlad Jr. was quite good at in 2026, as were the rest of his teammates. Indeed, Toronto had the second-fewest strikeouts in MLB (1,149, just four more than the Tampa Bay Rays) and finished tied for eighth in MLB in team batting average (.247). Those numbers were not quite as good as they were in 2025 (though the 2025 Blue Jays also had the second-fewest strikeouts in MLB), but they were clearly in line with the club’s hitting philosophy. So, what gives? In 2025, the Blue Jays were veritable geniuses, bragging about contact rates while the rest of the league was chasing homers. Today, the Blue Jays are being cited as a “perfect test case” of an offensive philosophy gone wrong: “As much as we all say that we want small ball to be a viable source of offense, it’s just really hard to do that in today’s day and age. Power wins, and unfortunately the Blue Jays didn’t have it.”
The confusion here, I would submit, lies in the difference between contact and good contact. After all, the ability to avoid strikeouts and to put the ball in play remains one of baseball’s most talked-about hitting skills, particularly when teams evaluate young players. But is contact inherently valuable? Should teams, in other words, make it a cornerstone of their offensive philosophy? In order to address these questions, we have to ask how much impact a hitter sacrifices in exchange for putting the ball in play or, put differently, the point at which the safety of a contact-oriented profile begins to tax offensive upside.
The place to begin is with the premise itself. Put simply, while the 2025 Blue Jays unquestionably made a great deal of contact, they did not succeed simply because they made contact. On the contrary, the effectiveness of contact hinges on whether or not it serves as a delivery system for power. Consider the following table:
| Metric | Toronto 2025 | Toronto 2026 | MLB 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strikeout rate | 17.8% | 19.0% | 22.1% |
| Batting average | .265 | .247 | .244 |
| Slugging percentage | .427 | .381 | .400 |
| Average exit velocity | 89.3 mph | 87.5 mph | 88.8 mph |
| Hard-hit rate | 41.2% | 34.0% | 38.6% |
| Barrel rate | 8.2% | 5.8% | 7.7% |
| Expected slugging (xSLG) | .429 | .366 | .394 |
| Expected wOBA on contact | .366 | .330 | .362 |
| Whiff rate | 21.6% | 22.2% | 25.1% |
| Zone-contact rate | 84.8% | 85.5% | 83.9% |
Relative to the 2026 MLB averages shown above, Toronto’s 2025 club was better in batting average, slugging percentage, average exit velocity, hard-hit rate, barrel rate, xSLG, and xwOBAcon, while the 2026 version surpassed the league only in batting average. But this downturn came despite the fact that, in 2026, the Blue Jays continued to avoid whiffs at an excellent clip and actually improved their zone-contact rate.
There is, then, a kind of contact tax. According to Baseball Savant’s 2026 league totals, MLB hitters saw 714,483 pitches across 183,849 plate appearances and swung at 47.7% of those pitches. That works out to approximately 1.85 swings per plate appearance. In theory, a hitter doesn’t need to swing in order to create value (consider a four-pitch walk, for example), but swinging is (and always will be) baseball’s primary mechanism for converting opportunities into runs. For that reason, and since the average hitter swings fewer than twice per plate appearance, every swing represents a scarce opportunity to produce damage. A weakly struck ball may not only produce an out; it may spend one of those opportunities on a pitch that the hitter could not drive. When a hitter — or an entire lineup — avoids strikeouts by attacking pitches that cannot be hit hard, the apparent virtue of contact obscures its opportunity cost. The opposite of a strikeout, after all, is not necessarily a hit. Sometimes it is an out — one that ends the plate appearance before the hitter can draw a walk or find a pitch worth driving.
In a sense, none of this is surprising. In his now-classic book, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” (2003), Michael Lewis discusses the Oakland Athletics‘ hitting philosophy under general manager Billy Beane, particularly in the early 2000s. While many assume (largely due to the hit 2011 movie “Moneyball”) that Beane didn’t care if A’s hitters struck out, his position was far more nuanced than that. In truth, the A’s tolerated strikeouts because of what the franchise actually valued — namely, driving up pitch counts and eliciting walks. As Lewis explains, “There had been a lie at the heart of the system to train A’s minor league hitters.
To persuade young men to be patient, to work the count, to draw walks, to wait for the pitcher to make a mistake that they could drive out of the park, the A’s hitting coaches had to drill into hitters’ heads the idea that there was nothing especially bad about striking out.” On this line of thinking, then, the ideal hitter does not avoid strikeouts simply by prioritizing contact. Rather, “what you wanted was for a hitter neither to strike out, nor to adjust his approach to the task at hand simply to avoid striking out.” This was, in fact, the hard part: keeping strikeouts relatively low, while also making pitchers work, waiting for good pitches to hit, and, if need be, taking a walk.
Thus the binary of contact versus power is simplistic to the point of being unhelpful. If a team were to give too much priority to contact, you would get something very much like the 2026 Blue Jays, who finished last in the AL East (79-83). On the other hand, if a team were to give too much priority to power, you would get something very much like the 2026 Cincinnati Reds, who finished last in the NL Central (75-87), despite finishing fourth in MLB in home runs (213). Of course, the Reds also had the second-most strikeouts in all of MLB (1,544), trailing only the hapless Los Angeles Angels. Excellent offensive clubs find the productive middle ground. This was true of the 2025 Blue Jays, and it’s true (to one degree or another) of arguably the three best teams in MLB’s postseason.
As usual, the Dodgers hit extremely well in 2026, finishing third in MLB in OBP (.338) and second in slugging percentage (.424), while striking out the fourth-fewest times in baseball (1,267). More surprising were the Milwaukee Brewers and the Rays. Sure, the media has praised both teams for resurrecting small ball — an ironic take, given that the Blue Jays supposedly did the same thing in 2025 — but the reality is that the Brewers, at least, clearly resembled the Dodgers in their ability to draw walks and to hit the ball hard. Milwaukee had the second-most walks (668) in MLB, led all of baseball in OBP (.341), and were tied for eighth in slugging percentage (.403). The Brewers weren’t getting by on cheapies either: the team finished seventh in MLB in hard-hit rate (40.3) and were tied for fourth in average exit velocity (89.4). Undergirding this profile was Milwaukee’s exceptional selectivity: the Brewers posted MLB’s lowest chase rate (26.9%) and lowest overall swing rate (44.1%). They were patient, but when they swung, they made other teams pay.
The Rays present a profile closer to small ball, though they certainly ticked a number of key offensive boxes, tying for fifth in MLB in OBP (.326) and seventh in OPS (.728). Still, what drove the Rays’ offense was a propensity to get hits (1,405, second in MLB) and to steal bases (164, tied for second in MLB). In fact, the team was below average at drawing bases on balls (514, tied for 21st in MLB). Yet, while some are championing the Rays’ small-ball renaissance, a safer bet is that the team is due for a Blue Jays-esque regression in 2027. After all, Tampa Bay’s .258 batting average (tied with Milwaukee for the best in MLB) is significantly better than its .244 xBA, just as its .402 slugging percentage is significantly better than its .371 xSLG. Bolstered by their top-notch pitching staff (tied for first in MLB with a 1.14 WHIP), the Rays will doubtless be a good team next season, but their underlying offensive numbers suggest that returning to the World Series will require either better contact quality or another season of substantial overperformance.
In the end, the lesson of the 2025 and 2026 Blue Jays is neither that contact is unimportant nor that strikeouts are harmless. No, the lesson is this: contact is but a means to an end, and its value depends on what it produces. Thus, weak contact imposes its own tax, ending opportunities that might otherwise produce a walk or a pitch worth driving. That is why the best offenses do not choose between contact and power. They combine sufficient contact with selectivity, on-base ability, and batted-ball impact. Strikeouts are costly; avoiding them at the expense of OBP and slugging percentage can be costlier still. So, offenses don’t need to resurrect small ball any more than they need to chase launch and swing for the fences. Save the hot takes for social media. The proof is in the numbers.
