Vladimir Guerrero Jr. was the biggest deal at the Toronto Blue Jays minor-league complex this spring. His games were the easiest to find on the four busy fields—they had the most people in the aluminum bleachers or pressed up against the backstop. His batting practice was something else, too, especially when he’d slow down an entire session to watch one of his home-run balls clear the fence. Yep: He pimped BP.

He’s a little less leggy than his dad—a little pudgier, a different sort of torso. And on one particular day at spring training, when he was buzz-sawed by some good New York Yankees minor-league pitching, he still apparently hadn’t met a pitch he didn’t think he could hit. That part makes you smile. Vladimir Guerrero Sr. was a modest man of few words, little adornment and 449 home runs, known for hitting pitches the way tennis players return serves. “Since I was a little kid, I played with a lot of people watching me,” Guerrero Jr. says matter-of-factly. “Sometimes—sometimes—I feel pressure. But sometimes you just notice a lot of people looking at you.”

Of course people are looking at him. They want to see if and how he’s like his father, the legendary Vlady, the potential Hall of Famer who batted over .300 from 1997–2008, who never struck out more than 100 times in a season, all the while swinging at nearly half the pitches he saw that were not strikes. The man Cal Ripken Jr. called the “best bad-ball hitter” he’d ever seen.