Whenever hits a home run, there’s something unique about his trip around the bases. It happens as he’s preparing to round third, and it’s known as the “Vladdy shuffle.”

There’s a specific rhythm to it. It helps that Vlad is a good dancer -- the cadence of the shuffle gives it the desired effect: a final flourish as he prepares to travel the final 90 feet of his latest home run trot.

Unfortunately for Guerrero and the Blue Jays, there weren’t many Vladdy shuffles in 2026. In fact, the six-time All-Star had the poorest offensive season of his career, finishing with a .260/.332/.356 slash line and just nine homers in 609 plate appearances. It wasn't until mid-September that he hit his first home run of the season at Rogers Centre.

Guerrero’s sharp decline was a major reason Toronto followed up a pennant-winning 2025 campaign that brought the Blue Jays two outs from a World Series title and led to aspirations of a return to the Fall Classic in '26, with a last-place finish in the American League East.

Of all the questions the Blue Jays face this offseason, this one is perhaps the biggest, because it seems that as Vlad goes, so go the Jays collectively: Will the club’s $500 million face of the franchise rebound?

Here’s a look at why there’s reason to believe Guerrero will get his groove back:

More time to dance

Guerrero lost his rhythm offensively last season. He got off to a red-hot start -- albeit without his signature power -- over the first month. At the end of April, he had produced a .354/.438/.469 slash line. The power outage (two homers in that span) was certainly eyebrow-raising, but hey, it was only one month into the season.

Then, things got … out of sync. And for Guerrero, whose mechanics at the plate involve meticulous timing with a toe tap and delicate weight transfer, that can spell disaster.

Ask another great slugging first baseman of recent vintage -- Joey Votto. Votto posted on social media in August that he felt one of Guerrero's issues this past season was that "his forward move is delaying his barrel from snapping in place."

In other words, Guerrero tended to drift forward more in 2026, rather than keeping his weight stacked on his back leg until precisely the right moment for transferring his weight forward and using his lead foot to create force with the ground. It often resulted in balls pounded into the ground.

In dance, drifting or swaying is something you do on purpose. At the plate, not so much.

“[Guerrero]'s such a dynamic athlete and hitter that it’s a really complex problem,” Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins said. “Everyone in here can probably emulate his rhythm and tempo, that toe tap and how he creates that momentum. It’s a really impressive thing to watch.

“As he lost a little bit of that rhythm and timing pretty early in the season, it started to impact his confidence. Once it impacted his confidence, the in-game adjustments and in-season adjustments became very difficult.”

Therein lies the problem when you’re out of whack at the plate during the season: it’s difficult to make adjustments on the fly. There’s always another game tomorrow. Now that it’s the offseason, Guerrero finally has time to breathe. In terms of rhythm at the plate, he can finally “dance” uninterrupted again.

Back in June, with Guerrero mired in what would become the single worst month of his career (.498 OPS), he said that he felt he was going to get hot soon. But what he said also underscored the difficulty of making in-season adjustments -- all you can do is all you can do.

“I’ve been feeling good and I’ve been hitting the ball hard,” Guerrero said. “There’s nothing I can do, I just try to go out there and put a good swing on the ball. I’ve been hitting the ball hard lately, but this is baseball. I’m going to keep working hard and keep doing this.”

Seeing is believing

Following his disappointing 2026 campaign, Guerrero decided to undergo laser eye surgery to sharpen his eyesight, having the procedure performed at the Laser Eye Center of Miami shortly after the end of the regular season.

Other MLB players have also undergone the procedure during their careers, including Guerrero’s former teammate, Bo Bichette.

Prior to the surgery, Guerrero would wear contact lenses during games. Will the laser surgery help? Well, it probably can’t hurt.

The sound of a barrel is music to the ears

As our own Mike Petriello pointed out just prior to the All-Star break, Guerrero’s inexplicable power outage wasn’t due to inordinate bad luck, but rather the fact that he wasn’t barreling the ball nearly as often (his career-low 6.9% barrel rate last season was not much more than half of what it was in 2025 -- 12.2%) and his hard-hit rate was down significantly (from 50.7% in 2025, to 44.3% in ’26). When Guerrero did hit the ball hard, it was frequently on the ground.

When the rhythm and timing of a mechanical sequence at the plate are off, all of that can certainly happen.

Will an offseason to recalibrate and sharper vision at the plate lead to more barrels?

And then there's the macro question: Who is Vladimir Guerrero Jr. at the plate? Is he the 2021 Vlad, who smashed 48 homers and finished runner-up in AL MVP voting? The same Vlad who terrorized opposing pitching during the 2025 postseason, when he slugged .795 with eight homers? Or is he last season’s Vlad, who slugged .356?

Often, the answer to a question like that is: neither; somewhere in between. But it’s unlikely that 2026 Guerrero is the one we see going forward.

It wasn’t all bad

The missing power is the thing. And Guerrero has work to do. But his 2026 campaign did have some silver linings:

His strikeout rate remained elite:

Throughout his career, Guerrero has steadily lowered his strikeout rate. It was good to begin with -- he struck out in 16.4% of his plate appearances over his first four Major League seasons -- but over the past three years, it’s been below 14%. Last season, it was 13.3%, the lowest of his career and ranked among the top 8% of batters.

(Although it should be noted here that he chased a lot more than he usually does, with a career-high 30.6% chase rate in 2026.)

Guerrero’s 20.1% whiff rate during the 2026 campaign was the lowest of his career and ranked in the 76th percentile.

The problem wasn’t contact.

He still has one of the game’s fastest bats:

Guerrero’s average bat speed of 76.3 mph ranked in the 92nd percentile among qualified batters last season, and it was fairly close to what it was during the prior year (76.7).

The problem wasn’t swing speed.

Getting back on the dance floor

It will be fascinating to see how Guerrero performs the next time we see him in the batter’s box during a game.

If the rhythm and flow to his plate mechanics are back, Vladdy will be back, too.

After all, he’s too good for his subpar production to continue indefinitely. And he’ll tell you that, as he did reporters in June.

“Things are going to go my way,” Guerrero said. "At one point, the baseball is going to be good to me.”