As deadline passes, Blue Jays' focus shifts to contention in 2025

BALTIMORE — There is a pendulum in running a baseball team between managing toward a goal and managing against circumstances. Heading into the season, the Toronto Blue Jays were firmly pushed toward the former, believing they had a team capable of competing for a post-season berth. As 2024 rolled off the cliff and crashed into the abyss, they quickly shifted toward the latter, seeking to return what they could for their expiring contracts, making eight trades in five days that brought back 14 new assets for a barren system.

It’s easily the busiest stretch of deals in franchise history, surpassing the five subtraction trades in four days ahead of the 2019 deadline and the spectacular five addition moves in four days before the 2015 cutoff. This front-office very clearly understood the assignment.

Now, though, with the circumstances for the remainder of 2024 fairly clear — integrate the new players, give key additions Jake Bloss, Joey Loperfido, Jonatan Clase and Will Wagner and others already on the roster opportunity and runway — it’s time for the pendulum to swing back toward a strategic goal.

In the aftermath of the deepest deadline roster gutting the Blue Jays have ever been through, embattled GM Ross Atkins set that as a return to “competing and contending” in 2025, 2026 and “hopefully beyond that.”

With a lineup that now has more potential options and upside but can still make Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and, once he’s back from injury, Bo Bichette feel like roses in the desert, a rotation with two spots uncertain and a bullpen that requires rebuilding, that feels like a path to have next season turn out like this one.

One sell-off alone isn’t enough to suddenly catapult this roster back to contention, which is why Atkins called the past five days, “the first step towards that,” he said.

“There are several ways to make acquisitions, which we will continue to have to do,” Atkins said before the Blue Jays fell 6-2 to the Baltimore Orioles. “We're going to have to add in free agency and via trade and we've just increased the likelihood of doing that by creating more depth and increased flexibility. The versatility, the dynamic athleticism that we've acquired to complement the pieces that are here was a big part of our goal and we feel that we've accomplished that.”

No debate there as what the Blue Jays essentially did is have another draft, one that included the four near-term players and two interesting upside candidates in third baseman Charles McAdoo, acquired from the Pittsburgh Pirates for Isiah Kiner-Falefa and bound for double-A New Hampshire, and infielder Cutter Coffey, acquired from the Boston Red Sox for Danny Jansen and already at high-A Vancouver.

That really helps the organization’s foundation, eroded badly by four years of win-now trades and some drafts that didn’t sufficiently replenish the system. The picture definitely looks better but there’s far less established talent around. Clase and Loperfido are dynamic and promising, Bloss — among the better young players moved anywhere this trade deadline — rocketed up three levels to reach the majors this year and Wagner can hit and is due for a chance.

But most prospects don’t reach their ceiling. Development is rarely linear. Much work remains for the farm system, which had ranked in the majors' bottom third, to reach critical mass again. So, if contention in 2025 and beyond is the strategic goal, managing towards that needs a realistic and attainable plan.

Whether Atkins is still the general manager to implement it is the team’s next major call, with some clarity likely to come Aug. 7, when president and CEO Mark Shapiro meets with media for the first time since spring training. Behind-the-scenes murmurs earlier this month suggested a change was imminent, more recently that’s shifted to him continuing on, but only Shapiro really knows and without any interim public comments tipping his thoughts, he has room to manoeuvre in either direction.

This is obviously the time for the Blue Jays to decide where that lands, so they can be set and stable before the next decision window arrives in the off-season, when the team can work in free agency and trade, as Atkins mentioned.

That the club is “right on the razor's edge” of dipping below the Competitive Balance Tax threshold of $237 million is a potential “secondary benefit” of the selloff, the GM added, and should they get there, that changes some of the calculus on off-season pursuits.

But if the Blue Jays are truly intent on quickly transitioning into a renewed window, the first thing they need to do is make a genuine run at extending Guerrero, because they can’t begin next season with both him and Bo Bichette as pending free agents at the end of 2025.

Extending Bichette is likely to be more complicated given his season of injury and struggle, and they can perhaps play things out with one of their two pillars, but not both.

Then the Blue Jays need to resolve some of the internal dynamics that plagued them in 2023 and never came around this year to the extent they expected. Hence, it was especially notable to hear Atkins describe roster construction as “an underlying issue that's probably the largest one."

“Building a better 26-man roster and the depth around it so individuals are complementing others in a better way, especially as it relates to the run-scoring,” he explained. “We have to find a way to create a better run-scoring environment and we feel that the handedness, the power opportunities, the dynamic and versatile athletes that we have added, will help us towards that. … On a smaller scale, there are always opportunities for adjustments on deployment that we'll have to continue to dig into and make sure we're improving.”

All together, then, that’s a lot of work — a lot, a lot, a lot of work — to get the Blue Jays back in the mix for 2025.

There’s perhaps a path to that if Guerrero’s resurgence continues, George Springer’s recovery holds, Bichette rebounds, Kevin Gausman, Jose Berrios and Chris Bassitt hold up, a couple of the kids pop and some clever off-season adds hit.

But that’s a really worrying number of ifs that need to break right, too, which is how the Blue Jays could very easily find themselves managing against circumstance again, rather than toward their strategic goal.

Within that context, selling was easy. Now comes the hard part.