It’s because Rodón has faced Guerrero 21 times in their respective careers, and exactly zero of those times have ended in a strikeout. Guerrero has 10 hits, four walks and a .588/.667/.941 line against the Yankees lefty, with only four swing-and-misses among the 78 pitches that he’s seen. It’s been hard enough just to get to two strikes in this matchup, really, with just 19 percent of the pitches coming in a two-strike count, compared to Rodón’s 31 percent rate this season.
While most of that damage has come at Rogers Centre, where 15 of those plate appearances took place, it’s worth at least pointing out that the two have faced off in six plate appearances at Yankee Stadium, and Guerrero has reached based all six times — two walks and four hits, including a home run.
Rodón is the only pitcher that Guerrero has faced more than 16 times without a strikeout. Guerrero is the only batter Rodón has faced at least 15 times without a strikeout. This is unusual, for both sides.
That, more than the wild slash line, is the most interesting part here. You don’t hit .588 against any pitcher without a little good batted ball luck, and that’s no different here. Guerrero’s expected batting average against Rodón is .392, which is both A) excellent and B) not .588. Sometimes, you break a bat on a 65 mph blooper to right and get a double out of it.
But not striking out even one time, well, it’s hard to ‘good luck’ your way into that.
Now, pitcher-vs-batter stats are seldom predictive, we need to take great pains to explain. That’s because it’s almost impossible for a pitcher to see a single batter enough times for it to approach anything meaningful, and in the rare cases that does happen, it usually takes so many years that the version of the players you see today is not the same as who they were when they began. What has happened is not what will happen, in other words.
That said, what has happened is that one of the best power lefties of his generation has been unable to get even a single strikeout against a power batter who isn’t exactly allergic to whiffing. While Guerrero does run a generally better-than-average strikeout rate, he’s also whiffed at least 90 times in all five of his full seasons. It can be done, and others have done it; Lance Lynn, for example, got seven strikeouts in his own 21 times facing the younger Guerrero.
So: How has Rodón approached him — and why isn’t it working? Let’s drop a few facts to look out for when these two meet up in Game 3.
Vlad’s bat gets very, very fast against Rodón.
We don’t have metrics for “sees the ball well out of this pitcher’s hand” — not yet, anyway. We’re going to try to back into something here.
This season, Guerrero saw at least 20 pitches from 25 different pitchers, including some of the top aces in the game, like Jacob deGrom, Garrett Crochet and Cristopher Sánchez. His bat speed against them ranged from 73.5 mph on the low end to 80.2 mph on the top end, and while that can be influenced a little by the speed of the pitch coming in, it can also mean that the batter is more confident in what he’s getting, or that he’s doing a better job of swinging at pitches in the zone as opposed to flailing outside, or some combination of all of it.
Of those 25 pitchers, look at the top three who saw the highest bat speed against from Guerrero.
Now, realize what he did against those three pitchers.
Seymour didn’t strike Guerrero out this year, and in fact didn’t even manage to get a single swing-and-miss in five plate appearances.
Littell, who faced Guerrero both with the Rays and later as a member of the Reds, has seen Guerrero in 12 plate appearances the past three seasons. The outcomes: zero strikeouts. One single swing and miss.
The third fastest? Rodón, at 79 mph, and again: no strikeouts. Against those three, that’s 38 career plate appearances, a .500/.605/.800 line against, and zero strikeouts.
This all matters, because it matters how fast the bat is going. When Guerrero gets his bat going at 79 mph or above this season, including in the playoffs, he’s hit a monstrous .363 with a .708 slugging percentage. When he has his bat going slower than that, it’s been a .289 average with a .412 slugging percentage.
It’s not a foolproof method. Baltimore’s Dean Kremer didn’t get fast swings, and Guerrero has quite well pounded him over the years (1.328 OPS against). But even for a player known for one of baseball’s fastest bats, getting off his A-swing seems to have a real effect. Whether it’s because of pitch shape or simply picking up the ball well, Guerrero is getting his best swings off against Rodón.
Rodón usually gets whiffs to righties on his slider and his changeup. But Vlad doesn’t chase them.
While he’s long been known for his power fastball, Rodón’s two best swing-and-miss pitches to righties this year are his slider (38 percent whiff rate in 2025) and changeup (35 percent). In his career against Guerrero, he’s thrown 30 of those two pitch types, inducing 13 swings, and exactly one miss — a foul tip on a somewhat hanging first-pitch slider back in 2024. Not that it mattered — Guerrero ended up singling home two runs on a hard-hit grounder up the middle off a fastball.
What’s happened here is that most of those pitches haven’t been in the zone — just 40 percent have been — and Guerrero has refused to expand against them, swinging only twice at 18 opportunities against these out-of-the-zone pitches. (One became a foul, and one a weak flyout to center.) That’s an 11 percent chase rate, and this is a pitcher who usually gets a 33 percent chase rate by righties against those pitch types. Again: It sure seems like Guerrero is seeing it out of the hand just fine.
Watch for: If Rodón decides to challenge again on the first pitch.
While Rodón is somewhat less of a two-pitch pitcher than he used to be — he’s mixing in sinkers and changeups more than ever now — he’s only started off Guerrero with four-seamers and a changeup this year. None were in the zone. Guerrero offered at none. Good start.
That’s a distinct change from previous years, when Rodón would start Guerrero off with all sorts of stuff in and around the zone. What’s happened, then, is that Guerrero has been ahead 1-0 each of the six times they’ve faced this year. That’s an advantageous place to be in, which forces Rodón into the zone and eventually allows Guerrero to be more selective about where he swings.
It makes sense to have changed an approach, because what Rodón was working with before wasn’t working. Then again, this new way didn’t really work, either.
Rodón, it should again be said, is one of the best lefties in the game. Just because he hasn’t had success against Guerrero yet doesn’t mean he can’t easily dominate him in Game 3, it’s important to remember. But until he actually does do it, he hasn’t. One single strikeout would be a very good place to start.
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