TORONTO – A year ago, as Mark Shapiro stood in front of the home dugout at Rogers Centre to face media post-trade-deadline, the Toronto Blue Jays were in utter disarray. They’d just made eight deals during a whirlwind five-day sell off, were buried at the bottom of the AL East and faced with the imminent shutting of their competitive window. Everything from their long-term direction to who should lead them was, understandably, in doubt, which made Shapiro saying that “stability and continuity and making adjustments are where I'm focused right now” a difficult message to sell under the circumstances.
Yet Tuesday afternoon, as he made the same walk from the clubhouse to the dugout railing for another round of questioning, the club president and CEO’s approach certainly seems to have been vindicated. A winter’s worth of work on how to better utilize the roster and help players reach their potential has taken the Blue Jays from worst to first. The farm system has improved drastically. The $500-million, 14-year extension for Vladimir Guerrero Jr. locked in both a cornerstone and a direction.
It's a 2015-esque type of turnaround for Shapiro, who like then-president Paul Beeston and then-GM Alex Anthopoulos, is on an expiring contract. The primary areas of growth behind the current turnaround?
“We've just established our brand of baseball,” said Shapiro.
Based on how 2025 has played out — the Blue Jays are 70-50 after a 5-1, series-opening win over the Chicago Cubs — it’s hard to argue, and the financial resources to sustain and augment the roster as needed this winter and beyond are there to keep it going. So, the key question for team owner Rogers Communications Inc., which also owns Sportsnet, is whether this year’s reboot is enough to earn Shapiro a third term running the club.
Shapiro acknowledged that he’s discussed his future with Edward Rogers, the company’s executive chair, and Tony Staffieri, Rogers’ CEO, and added that “it's not appropriate for me to comment beyond the fact that … I want to remain here and I can also say that both Edward and Tony have been reciprocal in that desire.”
Still, given how astute and experienced an executive Shapiro is, there’s little chance he would have used the term reciprocal if there was much doubt about his future. And it’s logical to think ownership would choose to stay the course with him, even if the president’s role with the Toronto Maple Leafs, previously held by Brendan Shanahan, was eliminated and the Toronto Raptors turned over their leadership by parting with Masai Ujiri this summer.
On a corporate level, Shapiro is seen more on par with Keith Pelley, the president and CEO of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, than the presidents of the Leafs and Raptors, which would have meant any change with him would have cut deeper.
But the degree of trust Shapiro has from ownership is reflective in the Blue Jays’ stadium renovations and payroll spending, which FanGraphs’ RosterResource currently projects at $282.3 million, a shade above the third Competitive Balance Tax threshold of $281 million.
Such calculations are fluid, but with Shane Bieber due a $4 million buyout if he declines his $16 million player option for next season, it may well be difficult for them to duck under that line. Exceeding it would trigger penalties of 20 per cent on all overages above $241 million, a 12 per cent surcharge on overages above $261 million and a 42.5 per cent surcharge on overages above $281 million, plus the loss of 10 places on the first pick in next year’s draft.
Shapiro said it was too early to know where they’ll land but added the increasingly prohibitive penalties the Blue Jays pay as their payroll has climbed “wasn't a factor in any decisions that we made, or will make.”
“Every decision, we'll weigh the opportunity that's at hand, the chance to grab the brass ring, with the consequences and costs that come with it,” he added later. “There is a residue of winning that makes it more of a challenge to sustain winning going forward. But we want to make it as hard as possible, because that means we pick later in the draft. The better our record, the later we pick. That's OK. We want to be in a position to have those type of tough decisions. And that's just one more of many.”
That’s significant not just for this season but in terms of keeping the Blue Jays competitive in the years ahead, too.
While Guerrero’s extension resolved one major threat to the club’s window, Bo Bichette’s pending free agency is a major issue that lies ahead. Also eligible for free agency are starters Chris Bassitt, Max Scherzer and perhaps Bieber, plus deadline adds Seranthony Dominguez and Ty France.
So, retaining or replacing at least two-thirds of the rotation while figuring out a path forward with or without Bichette won’t be easy or cheap, likely requiring that spending remains at current levels.
Given all that, Shapiro said “the desire to win, the consistent questions from Tony and from Edward of what can we do to support and help, and the decisions they've made to continue to push payroll higher,” allow for sustainability there.
As such, all the instability, all those bigger-picture questions from a year ago, appear to be far more set right now, driven by a brand of baseball that Shapiro described as “rooted and founded in the toughness and the cohesiveness of our players.”
“That has translated into the types of at-bats that we're having against good pitching, against all types of pitching,” he continued. “Tough to strike out. Playing good defence, which has been a trademark over the last few years, not just this year. Really putting the pressure on the other team. That identity is married to the culture and the values that our players bring to the field every day. We've got great players, but our results have not been driven by individual players. It's really been driven by collective efforts, and it's taken a while to kind of form that as a team identity, but we've seen it through the toughest times this year when we bounced back, like Sunday, and throughout the year when we've hit rough patches or lost players that were important and key for periods of time.”
That didn’t happen in 2024, where in the wreckage of a lost season, Shapiro preached the benefits of stability and continuity and adjustments. Now, that is being rewarded with a team atop the AL East and perhaps another term for the president and CEO who stewarded the reset.
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