Nearly halfway through the 2026 MLB season, this year’s Toronto Blue Jays are having difficulty following the act of the 2025 edition.
Living up to expectations following a World Series run is always a tough bit of business, but a 37-38 record is no one’s idea of a good start for this club — even coming off a sweep of the Boston Red Sox. The 2026 Blue Jays have flipped last year’s script in several ways, including succeeding in some places where that team struggled.
One of the most improbable aspects of last year’s success is that the Blue Jays went 74-88 in 2024, struck out on their biggest off-season moves, and still took off. Max Scherzer and Jeff Hoffman pitched a combined 153 innings with a 0.0 fWAR during the regular season with a 4.82 ERA. Anthony Santander and Andrés Giménez had 0.1 fWAR to show for their 590 trips to the dish, hitting .197/.280/.306. It didn’t matter because of internal growth elsewhere on the roster.
This season, the trend has been the exact opposite. As much as the season hasn’t gone as planned, the early returns for the off-season are strong. On the pitching side, Ponce got an unfortunate injury right away, and Scherzer has been ineffective, but the top starting and relief signings — Dylan Cease and Tyler Rogers — have exceeded projections (in this case by ZiPS).
On the position player side, the two major additions, Kazuma Okamoto and Jesús Sánchez, have hovered more around expectations. Still, the Blue Jays are likely happy with both players, who are contributing above-average offence to a lineup that needs that boost. Okamoto’s emergence as a pure power threat is particularly handy for a team that has lacked pop, and his defence has been better than advertised.
Collectively, this quartet has produced 5.0 fWAR, good for 28.7 per cent of the Blue Jays' team total. In most cases, when new additions hit the ground running on a team that just made the World Series, that’s a recipe for an excellent start.
That hasn’t been the case for the Blue Jays because those additions have been integrated into a group with key players taking notable steps back — led by the duo of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and George Springer:
While the team's two biggest bats have disappointed, they’ve received almost nothing from other potential middle-of-the-lineup threats in Addison Barger and Alejandro Kirk due to injury. That pair produced 6.9 fWAR last year and has given the team just 0.1 in 2026, hitting .140/.254/.246 in 67 trips to the plate.
On a more macro level, players who did not appear for the 2025 Blue Jays have generally outplayed those who have:
HITTERS
PITCHERS
Where all of that leaves the Blue Jays is up to interpretation. Outside of Scherzer, the team’s off-season crop is promising, and all under team control through at least next season. Even Ponce seemed on track to make an impact before a freak injury sent him to the 60-day IL. That’s encouraging for the team in the immediate and medium term. It doesn’t seem like there’s a notable swing-and-miss in the bunch, like Santander could turn out to be. If you believe that Toronto’s core players are significantly better than they’ve shown so far in 2026, there’s reason to be pretty optimistic about what this group can do.
Another way of looking at the situation is that even with the newest Blue Jays (and a stellar rookie class) thriving in Toronto, this team has still failed to impress. Cease is now a foundational player, and he’s performed well, but no one else fits that description — perhaps outside of Louis Varland, depending on how you value relievers. That’s not an existential concern just yet, but it’s worth flagging.
It should come as a surprise to no one that recreating some of 2025’s magic will require the players who drove that success to hit their stride. The good news for the Blue Jays is that the rest of the team looks ready to support that group if they find their way.
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