Why Anthony Santander’s slow start shouldn’t raise alarm bells

The 2025 Toronto Blue Jays were never designed to be a power-hitting juggernaut, but the 13 home runs the team has managed through 25 games still falls short of any reasonable expectation.

It’s not difficult to find the culprits for this shortfall, as the Blue Jays’ top three hitters — Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette and Anthony Santander — have cleared the wall just three times in a combined 332 plate appearances.

Although Santander leads the pack with two home runs, he’s still slugging just .295, and his lack of early thump has been most damaging to the team. Guerrero and Bichette aren’t meeting expectations yet, but they are both still hitting at above-average clips overall. Meanwhile, Santander has a 65 wRC+, and 62.3 per cent of his plate appearances have come at DH.

If he’s not hitting, he’s not contributing. Considering he smashed 105 home runs in the previous three years with a relatively modest .317 OBP, hitting well for him almost always means consistently putting the ball over the fence. 

That’s not happening right now, but whether that should be a real concern is up for interpretation. Santander came to the Blue Jays with a reputation as a slow starter, and in his career, he’s slashed just .208/.288/.358 in 561 plate appearances in March and April. His power production has been particularly weak out of the gate, as his 14 home runs in March/April are six fewer than any other month. Santander has hit twice as many in June (28) and more than tripled the total in August (44).

With that context, the biggest question of what’s going on with Santander is whether it fits his usual pattern. So far this season, the slugger’s strikeout rate (24.5 per cent) is noticeably higher than last year (19.4 per cent), and his walk rate is slightly higher (9.4 per cent vs. 8.7 per cent). While he could stand to cut down on the whiffs a bit, the real issue is the lack of power with an ISO (.105) that ranks 130th among 167 qualified hitters. To put that number in context, only six qualified hitters produced a worse ISO than .105 last season.

That is similar to the story of Santander’s career as his BB/K of 0.38 in March/April is almost identical to his career number (0.35), but his ISO (.149) is way down from his overall standard (.219).

To get a better sense of how 2025 fits, let’s take a look at how Santander’s first 24 games (F24) went, and how he turned it around in the rest of the season (RoS) in each of the last four years, which are also his only years playing 100 or more games.

While there aren’t many consistent trends in this data, Santander’s power has improved as the season has continued in every recent year. The Blue Jays are hoping that will happen sooner rather than later, but it’s not sensible to panic about the club’s $92.5 million investment.

At the same time, it’s worth acknowledging that we’re witnessing one of Santander’s worst power outages in recent memory. From 2022 to 2024, he only slugged under .300 in a 24-game span twice — most recently in early 2023.

Santander has hit two or fewer home runs in a similar span a few times, but it’s far from a common occurrence.

There is precedent for everything that’s going on right now. It’s coming at an unfortunate time for a Blue Jays offence in need of power, but as it stands, there’s very little reason to believe Santander won’t come around. 

All seven of FanGraphs’ projection systems have the 30-year-old producing a 121 wRC+ or better — a number that exceeds his career average and closely matches what he did in 2022 (122) and 2023 (119). There is even one system (The Bat) which believes Santander will slash .248/.320/.497 from here on out, good for a 136 wRC+, a number he’s never managed in a full season.

There’s no way to know precisely when Santander will come out of a funk that’s inconvenient for a team desperately short on the power he was acquired to provide. But when he does, it should go a long way towards changing the shape of the Blue Jays offence.

Last season, Santander hit 40 home runs from May 1 on, 21.1 per cent of his team’s total. Replicating that kind of success will be a tall order, but he should do more than his share to make Toronto feel a little less punchless.

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