Do the Toronto Blue Jays Have Any Potential Left?

Toronto was supposed to be baseball's next big thing. What happened?

Bo Bichette of the Toronto Blue Jays returns to the dugout after striking out during a game against the Minnesota Twins at Rogers Centre on May 10, 2024. (Vaughn Ridley/Getty Images)

Against the backdrop of Covid-era weirdness and a truncated, 60-game schedule, the 2020 MLB season was also a breakout party for several young teams who were poised to dominate the next decade of the sport.

We had the San Diego Padres, who went from a 70-92 record to 37-23 behind an MVP-caliber season from their best player, 21-year-old Fernando Tatis Jr. There were also the Chicago White Sox, whose own mega-talented young core of Eloy Jimenez, Luis Robert Jr., Yoan Moncada and Lucas Giolito propelled them from 72-89 to 35-25.

But in the eyes of many observers, the greatest potential of the bunch might have belonged to the Toronto Blue Jays.

Despite going 67-95 in 2019, Toronto had MLB’s second-youngest roster and what Baseball America considered the third-best farm system in the game, with seven members of the Top 100 prospects list. The next year, many of those prospects — Cavan Biggio, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette, Danny Jansen, Nate Pearson, etc. — were in the mix as Toronto rose to 32-28 and made the playoffs for the first time since the Jose Bautista era.

Though the Blue Jays were swept out of the first round of the playoffs by the eventual AL champ Tampa Bay Rays, it wasn’t hard to envision Toronto being a contender for years to come. An uncommon number of their franchise cornerstones were the sons of former major-leaguers, which theoretically gave them an advantage in handling the life of a pro athlete, and the Jays had managed their breakout despite not being able to play in Canada due to the country’s COVID-19 rules.

The team would also have the financial flexibility to eventually open its pocketbook for big-ticket names to support the homegrown talent — which it later did with such additions as Kevin Gausman, George Springer, Jose Berrios, Chris Bassitt, Yusei Kikuchi and the like. With so many factors trending up, it seemed that things could only get better from here.

And yet, it’s 2024, and the Blue Jays are currently sitting below .500, last in the AL East and not especially close to the wild-card cutoff line. My forecast meta-model gives them roughly a 25% chance to make the playoffs. And even if they made it, they’re still looking for their first playoff win with this core¹ — after being swept in 2020, in 2022 (despite the Mariners spotting them an 8-1 lead in Game 2 of the wild card) and in 2023.

How did this happen?

The most obvious explanation is that their touted class of future stars hasn’t quite turned into the golden generation it was supposed to. Among players still with the team in 2024, here’s a plot of the Wins Above Replacement (WAR) per 162 team games produced by their most notable young prospects from around 2020, by season:

While some have had their moments, none have produced an MVP-caliber season, only a few have had All-Star-level years and most aren’t even producing at the level of an average MLB starter at this point.

That includes Alejandro Kirk, Biggio and Bichette, all of whom are on track for 1.2 WAR or fewer this year despite being the team’s most-used option at their respective positions. On the mound, Alek Manoah is working his way back from the nightmare that was 2023, and Pearson is still trying to turn his 98-mph average fastball into tangible success in the majors. At various points, all have had very good seasons² — Manoah finished third in AL Cy Young voting in 2022, for goodness’ sake — but they’ve all declined in recent years.

And even the exceptions to that trend come with their caveats.

Jansen is off to an incredibly hot start with the bat (1.054 OPS), but he only recently began splitting more of a share of the starts behind the plate with Kirk; we’ll see if he can keep it up with more demanding playing time. And Guerrero Jr. remains one of the most puzzling players in baseball — producing OK numbers (3.3 WAR/162), but doing it while hitting like Luis Arraez, not like the guy we expect to see blasting baseballs like this.

Vlad Jr. hit 48 home runs and had 78 extra-base hits in 604 at-bats in 2021, good for rates of 12.6 AB per HR and 7.7 per XBH. This year, he has 4 homers and 10 extra-base hits in 156 ABs, which translates to 39.0 AB per HR and 15.6 AB per XBH. This is despite ranking in the 98th percentile of exit velocity and the 93rd percentile of bat speed.

If we run a similar exercise to our Statcast percentile comparison here, Guerrero Jr. has one of the biggest negative gaps between expected isolated power and average exit velocity, suggesting he’s losing something in his launch angle and ability to square up the bat on the ball… but then again, his batting average and other peripherals suggest he’s also swinging like a contact-hitter this year, trading fly balls for line drives and hitting the ball center-right instead of pulling it.

Given that Bichette and Kirk also rank among the most negative gaps between EV and power-hitting, and Toronto’s offense ranks 28th in scoring, it’s easy to blame manager John Schneider and his coaching staff for mismanaging a lineup that seems like it ought to be dominating baseball (or at the very least, be better than third-to-last in the league). But the Jays also have the worst pitching staff in MLB by WAR, despite all of those aforementioned expensive arms, so there are plenty of problems all over. Toss in a tough early schedule, and it’s kind of miraculous Toronto isn’t more games underwater than it already is.

In some ways, the Blue Jays (and Padres) are lucky the White Sox exist. Chicago’s abrupt, mind-boggling downfall since 2020 was so historically extreme that it obscured the failures of that season’s other young breakout clubs.

San Diego has made the playoffs just once since 2020 despite a massive payroll; they’re also below .500 themselves this year. And Toronto’s future hasn’t unfolded quite like we all expected, either. While this year’s team does have time left to salvage the season, in the big picture it’s getting harder to see the franchise building into the powerhouse we all kind of assumed was its destiny just a few years ago.

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Filed under: Baseball

1. That’s just a playoff win in any game, much less a series win.

2. Except Pearson — but again, he literally was one of the hardest-throwing starters in baseball at one point.