Addison Barger's push for power earns him a spot on Blue Jays' 40-man roster

TORONTO – Over their past two seasons together at low-A Dunedin, advanced-A Vancouver, double-A New Hampshire and, most recently, the Salt Rivers Rafters in the Arizona Fall League, Addison Barger and Zac Britton would say a phrase to each other before their games.

It’s, well, the NSFW version of, “Fuzz it.”

“Because that’s the attitude you’ve got to have out there,” explains Barger, the slugging shortstop prospect the Toronto Blue Jays added to their 40-man roster last week. “I tell myself, you know what? I'm just playing for fun, who cares what I do, how I do. I'm just here to have fun. And that usually relaxes me and keeps me mentally stable, as weird as it sounds.” 

The attitude has certainly worked well for the 23-year-old, who’s bulked up since being selected out of Tampa’s C. Leon King High School in the sixth round of the 2018 draft, transforming himself from an all-around, high-contact hitter into a left-handed power bat.

In 124 total games at Vancouver, New Hampshire and triple-A Buffalo this past season, Barger slugged .555 with 26 homers, 33 doubles and two triples before going deep twice more in a relatively quiet 16 AFL games.

While there was certainly a lot to like about his numbers, to Barger “my ability to bounce back and stay consistent was what I was most happy about.”

“I could have a couple bad games, maybe a bad week, and then be mentally stable enough to go out the next week and do something, win player of the week or have a really good week,” he continues. “You're going to have times when you struggle, but you've got to stay afloat, keep your mentality straight, you can't get too down. I was able to do that pretty well.”

Pretty well enough that he’s now ranked as the club’s No. 5 prospect by Baseball America and is part of the infield depth mix with the Blue Jays, alongside Otto Lopez and Vinny Capra, who was non-tendered Friday but re-signed Sunday to a minor-league deal. Britton, Barger’s pre-game mantra partner, is a catcher/outfielder whose development also bears watching.

Intriguingly, Barger is also one of three left-handed bats added to the 40-man roster in the last two weeks, along with outfielder Nathan Lukes and first baseman/outfielder Spencer Horwitz, as the Blue Jays build some balance beneath whoever they end up adding to the big-league club.

No matter what those moves are and how they pan out, they’re still going to need some help to emerge from the system over the next couple of years, both to support the roster and create some of the financial efficiency necessary to extend members of the current core.

That certainly leaves open a pathway for Barger, who has plus-arm-strength, enough ability to stick at short or slide over to other infield spots and, most importantly of all, that left-handed power swing.

It wasn’t always that way for him, as he was a sixth-round pick more because of his all-around game rather than projections that he’d one day hit homers.

Often the smallest player on the field growing up – “My junior year I was 5-4, 100 pounds and even when I got drafted I was 150 pounds,” he says – Barger decided that “he wanted to be physical, wanted to get bigger” and capitalized on the cancelled 2020 season’s downtime.

When he took the field again in 2021, he said he weighed in at 210 pounds and had become “a completely different hitter.”

“Coming out of high school, I was more a guy that would just try to put the ball in play. There's no problem with walking, obviously, but I would be kind of looking for walks,” he says. “I decided I want to be a power hitter, I wanted to be an aggressive hitter and I worked really hard to try to become that and it's working for me.”

The strength and weight gain didn’t come by chance, but instead was a product of his own planning and sessions with trainer Jason Riley, whom he’s worked with since he was 14. Barger “took a lot of time to actually research biomechanics” independent of the Blue Jays because “a lot of guys do what they're told and maybe it works for them, maybe not,” and he wasn’t going to leave things to chance.

“I feel like as players, we need to take initiative and figure out what works best for us,” he says. “Some things work different for other guys, but if you're only concern is not getting injured, you're probably not going to be working that hard.”

So, he spent “a lot of time in the gym” and did “a lot of eating,” all while continuing to work out in the backyard batting cage and infield at his family’s Tampa home. By taking groundballs as he filled out, Barger maintained his co-ordination and athleticism ranging for balls to his left and right, while at the plate, he adjusted to the benefits of newfound strength.

“The ball just jumps off the bat differently,” he says. “You feel like you don't have to swing real hard to hit the ball hard. It was definitely weird going from a smaller guy having to swing real hard to hit anything and then now that you have the size and strength, like wow, you can let it come to you.”

The difference showed that season in which he played 91 games at Dunedin and five more at Vancouver, hitting a combined 18 homers, 22 doubles and two triples. Still, the production came at a price as he struck out 129 times in 393 plate appearances, a worrying 32.8 per cent clip, that could have been a danger sign as he moved up the system.

Instead, he ate into that number as he climbed the ladder, dropping his strike out rate to 24.9 per cent while maintaining a walk rate of nine per cent while also pushing his batting average up from .244 to .308.

Part of that improvement was catching up for the lost time of 2020 as his approach remains “jumping on the pitch you like early on in the count and crushing it.”

And Barger isn’t resting on that, either, having already returned to the gym to rebuild the size and strength lost over a long year and programmed a couple of pitch shapes that gave him a tough time this season into the iPitch machine he bought last off-season.

“I’ll hammer that down a lot,” he says.

All of which will set Barger up for his first big-league camp next spring, and a period of opportunity to follow.