ST. LOUIS -- The Blue Jays are suddenly one of the hottest teams in baseball, and everyone is getting their moment.
Monday, it was Jonatan Clase who launched the unlikeliest home run of the Blue Jays’ season to save them in the ninth. In Tuesday’s 10-9 win over the Cardinals, it was Andrés Giménez who got the party started with his first home run since March. Tomorrow, manager John Schneider might call you on your lunch break to tell you that you’re batting seventh and playing right field.
This is the best we’ve seen the Blue Jays since at least 2023, now 37-30 after winning 10 of their last 12 games. The beauty of it is that there’s no clear and obvious answer for the team’s MVP through 67 games. This is happening because every single night, someone meets the moment.
“This is what the goal is, to keep stacking series wins, and to get two on the road is really, really nice,” Schneider said. “The guys are playing well. They’re comfortable and they’re confident. Scoring the way we did allowed us to work through some mistakes and some bumps in the road, too.”
Alejandro Kirk eventually gave the Blue Jays some breathing room with his second home run in as many nights, but it was Giménez who set the tone in the first inning.
Back in those early days of the 2025 season, it looked like Giménez had been reborn as a slugger with three home runs in the Blue Jays’ first five games. It was a brilliant first impression, but since then, almost everything has gone in the opposite direction for Giménez.
First came the offensive struggles, then a quad injury which cost Giménez four weeks on the IL. There’s some magic in this team’s timing lately, though, and Giménez just took his turn.
Schneider wrote in Giménez as the No. 5 hitter Tuesday, an unusual lineup with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. getting a rare off-day. So much of the Blue Jays’ offense has been coming from the bottom half of their lineup, though, which we can stretch the definition to call the fifth spot and lower.
“It’s definitely a different feeling,” Schneider said. “I think we’ve done it pretty consistently this year, and when you do it, you come to expect it. Whether it’s [Myles] Straw, Giménez, [Nathan] Lukes or Clase, they’re doing their thing. [Alan] Roden today had a couple of knocks and an RBI. It’s not easy to not play a lot, then do that. It gets contagious.”
Everyone feels this. Chris Bassitt spoke at length following the win, saying he “feels blessed to be here” while heaping praise on his team for playing together.
“I’m just really proud of this team,” Bassitt said. “From the second we showed up to Spring Training, even the offseason, I feel like we’re really fighting for each other, really working together. It’s hard to beat us when we’re doing that. One through nine is doing their job, if not way more, but we’re playing a very unselfish brand of baseball.”
Through Spring Training and those early days of the season, when the Blue Jays felt stuck to .500 and never truly got rolling, they continued to experiment with this bottom half. Even when the results didn’t follow, it was at least refreshing to see offense driving more of these decisions, not defense as we’ve seen in past years. Addison Barger had his moments and forced his way to the No. 3 spot in the lineup. Straw has enjoyed some hot streaks. Lukes and Ernie Clement have both stood in the spotlight. Even backup catcher Tyler Heineman is hitting everything.
This was all by design, even if the plan took some time to come together. This, more than anything else we’ve seen in 2025, captures how Schneider and his staff have looked in the mirror, adjusted and improved.
“Individual performance makes us look good sometimes, but I think we’ve made a pretty well-documented point of trying to grasp some platoon advantages down at the bottom,” Schneider said. “We didn’t do a great job -- well, I didn’t do a great job of that last year -- whether it was personnel or decisions. When you set the expectation of what you’re going to do and you do it regularly, guys are ready for it and they tend to have more success, but mainly it comes down to them.”
They’ve been taking turns, each one perfectly timed, and it will be someone else’s moment tomorrow.