Aledmys Diaz hacking his way to explosive second half

At a point in the season when the Toronto Blue Jays are looking to identify who on the roster might have a future with the club, Aledmys Diaz is showing them something.

Since the All-Star Break, Diaz hasn’t just been the best Blue Jay, he’s been one of the best players in baseball. In the season’s unofficial second half he’s hit .345/.361/.724, a performance good for 0.9 WAR. It’s a sample of just 16 games, but it’s eye-popping stuff.

What makes the hot streak particularly interesting is how he’s making it happen. Modern hitters are often lauded for taking pitchers deep into counts, holding up on pitches outside the zone, and taking more than their fair share of walks – even if it means the occasional strikeout. That’s the Mike Trout profile.

Diaz is doing it a little differently, specifically, he’s swinging at everything. To be more precise, he’s swinging at 63.7 percent of things, the highest number in the major leagues. We’ve been conditioned to think of that as a bad thing – and to be fair it often is – but there’s no doubt it’s working for Diaz right now.

All season, the shortstop has been at his best when he’s cutting it loose the most and the relationship between his swing rate and OPS has been highly correlated.

The theoretical negative of swinging so much is chasing at pitching out of the strike zone and racking up the K’s. However, during Diaz’s hot streak he’s struck out just 4.9 percent of the time, even his season-long rate of 12.2 percent is one of the best in the major leagues. That’s because to strike out, you need to get to strike two.

That hasn’t happened for the 28-year-old much because he makes things happen early in the count. His 46.3 percent first-pitch swing rate is on the season second in the majors to the famous first-pitch hacker Carlos Gomez. His 3.27 pitches seen per plate appearance is dead last.

Ambushing pitchers has always been important to Diaz’s success, especially when it comes to power. So far he’s hit 38 home runs at the major league level. The most common count he’s gone deep on is 0-0, which he’s done eight times. Tied for second is 1-0 and 0-1, with seven round-trippers apiece. That means almost 60 percent of his home runs have come on the first two pitches of an at-bat.

Diaz’s approach, especially the more recent exaggerated version, wouldn’t work for everyone. However, it’s allowed him to put together a season where he’s been above-average at the dish by wRC+, which is pretty impressive for a shortstop. With Troy Tulowitzki’s future – both in the short and long-term – up in the air, it’s certainly giving the Blue Jays something to think about, at least until the arrival Bo Bichette.

When the club acquired Diaz they were looking for a solid insurance policy for Tulowitzki. He’s already shown them he might have a touch more to offer than that. He’s not going to keep hitting at the rate he has the last few weeks, but if his aggression continues to drive a power surge he certainly gets a lot more interesting.

For a Blue Jays squad a little short on interesting at the moment, that would be a welcome sight indeed.

More Blue Jays coverage from Yahoo Canada Sports: