Toronto Blue Jays Season Outlook
I recently saw a pre-season power rankings list from The Athletic, in which the Toronto Blue Jays were listed eighteenth out of thirty. Imagine telling someone this three years ago when this team was the up-and-coming perennial contender in the making, with the superstar talents of Bo Bichette and Vladamir Guerrero Jr. Well, here we are now.
This season is supposed to be a very high-pressure one for the Blue Jays. The two superstar talents mentioned above are both in contract years, and the Jays will have to shovel out some serious coin to keep them, especially Guerrero Jr., who reportedly rejected a $500 million offer. I wish I was in a position to do that.
After finishing last in the division in a miserable year last season and failing to do anything in the playoffs, the Jays need to make a serious playoff push. Unfortunately, the Jays are also ranked dead last in their division on The Athletic’s list; the Tampa Bay Rays is the next lowest at fourteenth. The American League (B)East also continues to be an annoyance for Jays fans. So the Jays need to do well enough to make the playoffs, make a dent once there, and preferably sign both Bichette and Guerrero Jr. This is all while shaving off the disappointment they have been up to this point, and with all the noise that comes with the threat of their two best players potentially leaving the team for nothing after this season—yeah, sounds easy enough.
Despite everything I just listed out, it seems most Jays fans are just checked out for what should be an extremely pressurized season. There are many reasons for this sentiment. First, the Jays just got left at the altar three times by huge free agents—Shohei Ohtani, Juan Soto, and Roki Sasaki—who all decided to go elsewhere. But what hurts most is the Jays were in the running to land the players until the very end of the season.
Second, the ‘superstar’ players in contract years have not exactly been consistent over their time in Toronto. Bichette was consistent and showed promise until last year when he was awful and has now suffered injuries two years in a row. Guerrero Jr., despite apparently wanting more than half a billion dollars, has shown he can be two wildly different players. He has had two seasons, including last season, where he was the best first baseman in baseball and a Most Valuable Player candidate, and then four seasons of mid-level performance—at times worse than replacement level.
Lastly, the Jays just got obliterated last season and made minimal changes going into this one. They traded for Andrés Giménez and signed Anthony Santander and Max Scherzer, so they might be a better team than last year. That is probably still not enough to challenge for the division though, and so will probably finish last or somewhere around there again. Jays fans should be outraged, but instead, a lot of us are just checked out. Why? I would say it is simply consistent failure that has desensitized us to what is going on.
When this group first made the playoffs in 2020, it was so exciting. We did not even win a game that year in the postseason—but man, it was looking good. But it was the same result every year we made the playoffs after that. Sure, the first time in 2022, especially with the blown lead to Seattle, fans got angry. But by 2025, you just kind of expect it now. Outside of short bursts where they looked like everything they were hyped to be, our star players have never produced like expected. Bichette or Guerrero having another down year has not become an outlier case—it has become the norm.
Free agents burning us again and again has culminated in our own home-grown star asking for an exorbitant amount of money. The contract Vladimir Guerrero Jr. reportedly rejected would have been the third richest in baseball history behind Ohtani and Soto, but Guerrero is nowhere near the Ohtani and Soto—$500 million is already way more than he is arguably worth, and yet he wants more than that? At this point, free agents not wanting to be here even when offered huge money is just the expectation. I look online and people seem to not even want to sign Guerrero Jr. anymore.
This team went from hopeful, young, exciting, and a genuine threat to sorrowful, bad, and, worst of all, uninteresting in the span of a few years. We should have been the talk of baseball. Instead, we are almost a joke. Ohtani’s plane and Sasaki’s Blue Jays as finalists will forever live on as memes.
This season should feel like a pressure-filled make-or-break one for the Blue Jays. By all accounts, it is. It just does not feel that way to Jays fans like myself, and, to be honest, I cannot really blame them.