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Toronto Blue Jays
The Blue Jays have made the playoffs in three of the last five seasons, and in that time have the tenth-best record in baseball.
The Blue Jays have not won a playoff game in eight years.
You can frame the Blue Jays, coming off a last-place finish with the worst bullpen in baseball, any way you like. What you can’t do is deny that the 2025 season feels like end of a cycle for them, one way or another. Those playoff runs, one in the pandemic season, all produced quick first-round exits. A failed attempt to sign Shohei Ohtani last winter left a pall over the offseason, one that wasn’t lifted when the Jays then declined to sign anyone else of note. (Justin Turner produced 0.4 bWAR and was traded at the deadline.) The core of homegrown players took big steps backward, with only Vladimir Guerrero Jr. meeting expectations. The Jays ended up with middling starting pitching, middling offense, and a bullpen collapse that turned them into deadline sellers.
This has become an old team, whose pitchers had the fifth-highest weighted age last year, the hitters the 12th-highest. Guerrero is a free agent at the end of ’25, as are Bo Bichette and Chris Bassitt. Kevin Gausman, George Springer, Daulton Varsho, and Alejandro Kirk are free agents after 2026. Kiley McDaniel pegged the Jays as a bottom-ten farm system in midsummer, so if the Jays can’t win now, it may be a while before they can win again. It’s really now or never.
If you want optimism, take it from a few things. One, the Jays’ third-order record was 78-84, not terrible. Two, a bullpen is the easiest thing to fix on the fly. The team’s top three relievers by talent, Jordan Romano, Chad Green, and Erik Swanson, were never fully healthy last year. They combined for just 105 innings of a 4.37 ERA and a FIP well over 5.00. I would not be surprised to see the Jays get 175 innings of 3.50 ball from that group next year. The A’s, just to pick the most recent example, had the worst bullpen in baseball in ’23, and the ninth-best in ’24.
The focus has to be on the offense, which lost six points of wRC+ from 2023. Brandon Belt’s 138 wRC+ was simply never replaced, nor was Matt Chapman’s 110 mark. Bo Bichette went from being a superstar to a replacement-level player. The Jays hit 156 home runs, their fewest since 2008, and slugged .389, their lowest mark since 1997. You can’t just blame changes to Rogers Centre, either; the Jays hit their fewest number of road homers since 2008 and had their lowest road slugging since 2005. They just didn’t hit.
The Jays’ projected 2025 lineup features a lot of wishcasting for guys like Spencer Horwitz, Will Wagner, and Nathan Lukes. All three had good numbers in ’25, but all three are older prospects without substantial pedigrees. Building a lineup that’s one-third wishcasts is two-thirds crazy. The Jays are probably headed into a rebuild, anyway, and with the power of Rogers Communications behind them have plenty of access to cash. Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins might be well-served to upend the market by dangling short-term, high-AAV contracts for Alex Bregman, Max Fried, Tyler O’Neill, and Gleyber Torres to make the 2025-26 teams the best they can be, try to put one or two more playoff teams on the field, and perhaps even make the team one Guerrero will commit to past 2025.
