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Breaking: Jays’ Ongoing Struggles Expose Front Office and Core Players’ Fate Hangs in the Balance
It’s unsurprising that the Toronto Blue Jays turned to the home run jacket to preserve their season. Given their other options, they may as well try an injection of vibes.
It was time to send Vladimir Guerrero Jr. into the basement with a sledgehammer to crack open the vault containing the famed blazer. For one day, at least, it worked.
The Jays scored nine runs – a week’s worth of offense for this squad – against the struggling Chicago White Sox. Bo Bichette hit only his third home homer of the season. The Jays won their first series since April. Although it was against the White Sox, the games still counted.
There is little question that the Jays were prepared to smash glass in the event of an emergency. Even after Wednesday night’s outburst, they remained four games under.500, bottom in the AL East, and had scored the second-fewest runs in the American League (behind only the White Sox, who had no intention of competing this season).
The return of the home run jacket is especially timely given Toronto’s perplexing loss of pop this season. Guerrero, Bichette, and George Springer, the Jays’ most consistent power hitters, have combined for 10 home runs thus far. Teoscar Hernandez, a former teammate, has already hit 11 for the Dodgers this season.
The frantic sense of a season that is only two months old, combined with a shockingly mediocre offensive performance, has spurred local speculation about the hitherto unthinkable: moving Bo or Vlad. Or, gasp, both? There is even some cold logic behind such a strategy.
Both players are nearing their final years of control – shoutout to Ross Atkins! – and will be free agents after the 2025 season unless they sign contract extensions. Their trade value is likely lower than a Jays fan (or executive) would expect, but trading them now would net much more than doing so during their walk year.
If Toronto’s wet-noodle bats continue to underperform, obtaining some sort of return for those guys would be better roster management than losing them for.
Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro and general manager Atkins only have to gaze down the street in the direction of Scotiabank Arena to see examples of the risk of inaction.
The Raptors waited too long to break up a flawed roster and ended up dealing Pascal Siakam and OG Anunoby without much leverage. The Maple Leafs didn’t break up their core despite years of playoff failure and are now stuck trying to move guys who have no-movement clauses.
Trading Vlad and/or Bo might make sense, then, for the long-term health of the roster. But it would also be madness.
Those two players have been the prized assets of the Jays’ system from the moment Shapiro and Atkins arrived in Toronto. Even as they awkwardly oversaw the decline of the roster that their predecessors built – the 2015-16 playoff teams that rekindled widespread Jays fandom in Toronto – the front-office tandem slowly assembled what was supposed to be a World Series contender with those two homegrown, second-generation baseball All-Stars at its core. It’s literally the Jays’ marketing slogan this season: To The Core.
If you trade those guys for picks and prospects, what’s left to sell people on watching the team? Danny Jansen, when he’s healthy? The rusted-out husk of Springer? There have been some positives, admittedly, but they would be a challenge for the sales department. Blue Jays Baseball: The Pitching Is Pretty Good, Actually. Daulton Varsho: Now With More Walks!
Even if Blue Jays fans would coolly rationalize the asset-maximization strategy of trading their two favorite stars – which they absolutely would not – they really wouldn’t accept the tactic from this particular front office.
Shapiro and Atkins are in their ninth season and haven’t won a playoff game since the team they inherited did it in 2016. They moved on from that team’s stars, oversaw three grim rebuilding years, and built toward their long-promised window of contention – which is now wide-open, even if the Jays have flown straight into the frame.
If there are other examples of a management team doing all that, and then being allowed to hit the reset button and start the process all over again, they do not come to mind. Actually, one does: Jerry Jones, but he also owns his team.
Letting Shapiro and Atkins jettison the core and shut their window seems like a recipe for fan backlash right at the moment when the Rogers Centre is full of expensive and newly refurbished seats.
Which is why that same front office, more than anyone, has to be hoping that the home run jacket works its magic. Vibes, sorcery, serendipity, whatever it takes.
Hope is not a strategy, as the saying goes. But it might be the best one for the Blue Jays right now.
