Former Blue Jay Rowdy Tellez to play his first series in Toronto since being traded in 2021

Things are going to be getting Rowdy in Toronto this week.

The Toronto Blue Jays will kick off a three-game series with the Milwaukee Brewers on Tuesday and it’ll mark the first time that Rowdy Tellez will suit up as an opponent at the Rogers Centre.

Tellez was selected by the Blue Jays in the 30th round of the 2013 draft out of high school. He worked his way up the system over the next few years and had an incredible big-league debut run with the Blue Jays late in the 2018 season. He appeared in 23 games and went 22-for-70 with four home runs and 14 RBIs.

Rowdy smacked the first-ever pitch he saw in the Major Leagues for a double and became the first player since 2017 to record seven doubles in his first seven games.

Tellez appeared in 111 games for the Blue Jays in 2019 and slashed a .227/.293/.449 line with 21 homers. He followed that up with a huge stretch during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season in which he slashed a .283/.346/.540 line with eight home runs over 35 games.

The hope was that Tellez could be the big left-handed bat in the middle of Toronto’s lineup but he struggled early in the 2021 season. He had only one home run and an OPS of .489 at the end of April and was sent down to Triple-A Buffalo to sort himself out. He came back up a couple of weeks later and performed better at the plate but wasn’t able to find the same success as he did the previous season.

With Vladimir Guerrero Jr. entrenched at first base and Rowdy struggling to produce from the designated hitter spot, the Blue Jays traded him to the Brewers for Trevor Richards and Bowden Francis. Tellez rebounded offensively in Milwaukee while Richards was a much-needed addition to Toronto’s disastrous bullpen.

Through 257 games with the Brewers, Tellez has slashed a .235/.318/.474 line with 54 home runs and 99 RBIs. This season, he owns a .856 OPS and is tied with Yandy Diaz, Shohei Ohtani, and Mike Trout with 12 home runs.

Tellez has faced the Blue Jays once in Milwaukee since the trade but this will be his first time going up against his former club in Toronto as a member of the Brewers. Since the Blue Jays were playing in Dunedin and Buffalo during the 2020 season and the first half of 2021, it’ll also be Rowdy’s first time playing a real game at the Rogers Centre since all the way back in 2019.