Know Thy Enemy: Toronto Blue Jays

Miami Marlins v Toronto Blue Jays — Photo by Mark Blinch/Getty Images

Our annual preview of the Red Sox’s foes begins north of the border.

It’s that time of year again, baby: time to learn who’s asses we’ve gotta kick.

Famed Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu once said, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” I’m not sure what he specifically would’ve said about the result of 162-plus battles, but I’d like to think it would’ve been a similar sentiment.

Over the course of the winter, we here at OTM have tried—and will continue to try—to keep you fine folks in the loop on that latter part of Tzu’s quote: knowing yourself, or in our case the Boston Red Sox. For the new crowd, though, we also like to dive into the former half of those words of wisdom: knowing the enemy.

As we move closer and closer to Opening Day, let’s begin our preview of American League foes with a trip to Canada: the future 51st state, depending on who you ask.

What’s This Team’s Deal?

In spite of all of the movement in-and-out of the division among the Red Sox and the Yankees; in spite of the continued youth movement—and continued disappointment in October—going on in Birdland; and in spite of the *gestures vaguely* everything going on with the Rays organization at this moment in time, I think you could make the argument that the Toronto Blue Jays are the most fascinating AL East team going into the 2025 season.

This is a club that had just recently gone through the motions of their own youth movement, one that started at the conclusion of the Joey Bats/Josh Donaldson Era of the mid 2010’s. Guys like first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and shortstop Bo Bichette rose up through the farm system and became the faces of the team in that time. Acquisitions of veterans such as outfielder George Springer and starting pitcher Kevin Gausman were made in the early 2020’s in an attempt to push the Jays towards the front of the line in the AL.

In general, those efforts kinda worked—at least in the regular season. Toronto won 90-plus games in the two years following the COVID-shortened season (they came in fourth place in the 2021 AL East race despite posting 91 wins) and also qualified for October baseball in 2023. Nothing bad happened to them in any of those postseason games, and everyone lived happily ever after.

In spite of past successes and the fact that a bona fide All-Star and one of the most popular players in the game was on the roster, 2024 marked a huge downturn for the Torontonians. Their fatal flaws were exposed by their American colleagues, and the group took L after L after L after L last year. But I’m getting sidetracked, enough about Drake and OVO.

The Blue Jays fell from 89 victories in 2023 to just 74 in 2024. That year-to-year drop was worse than their fall from 89 wins to 76 between 2016 and 2017, which you could point to as the genesis of this whole rebuild project. It was the Blue Jays’ worse single year downturn since 2004, when they won just 67 games compared to the 86 games they won the year prior. Injuries (Bichette, outfielder Dalton Varsho, and reliever Jordan Romano were all put on the shelf at various times in 2024), bullpen woes (their collective bullpen ERA of 4.82 was the second-worst in the league), and a whole bunch of nothing on offense outside of Vladdy Jr.’s stellar campaign (just two other Toronto hitters who played in more than 90 games last year had an OPS+ north of 100, and neither of them are with the team to begin 2025) doomed the Blue Jays.

That leads us back to the questioned poised from the jump: what, exactly, is this team’s deal?

I’m sitting here writing this on Monday, February 17. It’s President’s Day here in the States, but in Canada it’s Vladdy Extension Deadline Day (I’m not sure if Canadians get work off for that). All Blue Jays players have to report to Spring Training by Tuesday, and Guerrero—who’s about to enter the final year of his contract with Toronto—has made it clear that he won’t be negotiating an extension once he gets the training program in Dunedin underway. Bichette could also walk once 2025 is in the books. The Blue Jays have some enticing youngsters who could make waves this season, but they also have aging veterans whose productivity going forward is questionable.

In short: this team’s deal is that they’re at a crossroads.

Franchise cornerstones could be gone by the time we write the 2026 edition of this article, but those cornerstones could rebound (or, in Guerrero’s case, continue their hot streak) in the new year. Could they get right back into the mix in the uber-competitive AL East? Are they staring down the prospect of, to loosely quote Bono, dreaming it all up again?

How Good Are They?

I can’t say for sure, and that’s what makes them fascinating. I lean more towards “not really, all that good” but there could be a lot of variance here.

Vladdy’s certainly good, let’s just get that out of the way first. He smashed 30 homers and had 199 hits en route to posting a .323/.396/.544 line in 2024. Just about everything you’d like to see under the hood was elite: hard hit rate, barrel rate, strikeout rate, xwOBA, you name it. He’s quite good at hitting spherical objects with a club.

The rest of the offense’s quality leaves…let’s call it “room for interpretation,” to be charitable. Bichette was basically a career .300 hitter (it was .299, I’ll round up) before his 2024 season was derailed by injuries. I think he’ll need to bounce back if this team has any aspirations of playing baseball deep into the fall.

Springer has historically been a very solid hitter at the top of the lineup, but his OPS (.907, .814, .732, .674) and OPS+ (141, 132, 102, 92) have both fallen in each year since signing with Toronto in early 2021, with his quality of contact metrics signaling a similar drop-off. Entering his age-35 season, can he turn it around?

Switch-hitting outfielder Anthony Santander enters the fold this year after he signed a five-year, $92.5 million contract with Toronto this winter. His 44 homers last year were impressive, and while that output might not be sustainable, he makes the lineup just a bit deeper. The team could really use that, especially if they’re going also to rely on the likes of young Will Wagner (the son of soon-to-be-HOFer Billy Wagner, continuing Toronto’s tradition of acquiring the children of ex-MLB players) and catcher Alejandro Kirk (who’s failed to hit 100 OPS+ in the past two seasons since his 2022 season where he logged a 127 OPS+ en route to an All-Star selection). FanGraphs is projecting those latter two guys to register wRC+ marks north of 110, so that’s something to be hopeful about if you’re a Blue Jays fan. I wouldn’t expect the same from the newly-acquired infielder Andres Gimenez, but he does provide a very steady glove on defense.

Kevin Gausman projects to be atop the rotation once again in 2025. While his 3.83 ERA last year certainly wasn’t bad per se, it was his worst since 2019. He struck out fewer batters on a rate basis in 2024 compared to year’s past, his hard hit rate has ticked up in the last pair of seasons, and his expected ERA in 2024 (4.71) was almost a full run higher than his actual ERA. Maybe he’s a guy who can survive and out-perform his expected numbers—I think he does have that potential, given his track record and given the fact that his 21.4% K-rate seems to be an outlier up to this point. If he misses more bats and strikes more guys out, he should be fine, even if he does surrender some loud contact on occasion. He’s as good a bet as anyone to provide considerable volume on the mound, too.

Jose Berrios continues to be one of the weirdest pitchers in MLB. Since 2019, he hasn’t had an expected ERA better than 4.06, and yet his actual ERA in that time has only gone north of an even 4.00 once. His 3.60 ERA last year compared to his 4.74 expected ERA is once again proof that this game makes no sense. He doesn’t strike out enough guys and he’s given up a damn near 50% hard hit rate in two of his last three seasons. I have no idea how he continues to walk this tight rope, which is exactly why he’s probably going to be fine in 2025.

Chris Bassitt returns to the rotation and is also joined by future Hall of Famer Max Scherzer, forming the Unction part of the pitching staff.

Bassitt can do a fine job of eating innings, but similar to Berrios, those quality of contact numbers are not encouraging. Scherzer’s got some question marks entering his one-year deal with the team (notably: can he stay healthy and can he limit some of the hard contact himself?), but at least he’s still generating some swing-and-miss stuff. Bassitt’s typically impressive walk rate jumped up to 9.2% in 2024, while his 40.9% ground ball rate was the lowest of his career. If he can keep the walks in check, maybe Bassitt can bounce back.

28-year-old Bowden Francis is the wild card in the rotation. In his 140.2 innings pitched in the bigs, Francis has a sub-1.00 WHIP thanks in large part to the fact that he rarely issues free passes; his 5.4% walk rate was in the 89th percentile last season. He already does a fine job of limiting hard contact, and he can really elevate this rotation if he is able to effectively deploy that curveball of his; the run value of his curve fell from 5 in 2023 to -8 in 2024. If he can generate some more movement on that breaking pitch, he’d suddenly have three solid offerings between that, his fastball, and his splitter.

Jeff Hoffman and Yimi Garcia have been brought in (or brought back, in Yimi’s instance) to bolster the relief pitching. As mentioned earlier, Toronto is gonna need ‘em. Hoffman has been excellent in the past two years while Garcia got the WHIP below 1.00 in 2024, but is that enough to improve the back end of the pitching staff?

Most Likable Player: Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

Easy call here. It’s so awesome that a new generation of fans gets to enjoy a right-handed hitting titan named Vladdy. As a baseball fan in general, he’s a blast to watch. Who doesn’t like to watch an absolute mountain of a man hit taters?

Least Likable Player: Also Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

To answer the question that I just poised: me, I don’t like to watch an absolute mountain of a man hit taters if it’s against the Red Sox. Vladdy Jr. has been known to do that, unfortunately. In his 87 career games against Boston, he’s slashing .294/.370/.522 with 17 homers and 75 RBI. Maybe Craig Breslow offers him a contract next weekend just so he doesn’t get the opportunity to slug against the Red Sox?

Schedule Against the Red Sox

Boston players will need to have their passports ready for an early season set in Toronto running from April 29 through May 1. The Sox head back to the Rogers Centre from September 23 through 25 for the second-to-last series of the season. Meanwhile, the Blue Jays pay visits to Fenway Park between April 7 and 10 as well as from June 27 through 29. It remains to be seen if any of those games will be delayed due to lighting and resumed weeks later.

Season Prediction

2025 marks a pivotal year for the Toronto Blue Jays—a season that could dictate the organization’s direction for years to come.

Can they perform at a high level? Sure, I’d say it’s certainly within the realm of feasible outcomes. But if that’s going to happen, they need a lot to go right. Vladdy’s gotta continue his hot streak during his contract year. Bichette needs to bounce back in a contract year of his own. Other parts of the lineup have to step up. The rotation needs to collectively out-perform their consistently-iffy peripherals. The bullpen, outside of their new acquisitions, needs to tighten up.

It’s possible that it comes together for them—baseball’s a weird sport—but what are the odds of that happening? Not so fat, I’d say. Mix that together with the fact that the AL East could once again be more like the AL Beast in 2025, and I don’t see an obvious path to 270 for Toronto (wrong country’s electoral system, I know).

I wouldn’t say the Blue Jays are a bad team—I just don’t think 2025 is their year. Someone’s gotta finish last in the division; I think it’s going to be them.

PREDICTION: 77-85, 5TH IN THE AMERICAN LEAGUE EAST