TORONTO -- The Blue Jays’ strengths and weaknesses aren’t complicated. The optimist could view that as a good thing.
This team needs to score more runs and needs better rotation depth. Improve those two areas, and this is a playoff team, period. So much time has been spent tap-dancing around these problems over the years, particularly on offense, but something about this organization feels a little more direct in 2025, more to the point.
Friday’s 5-3 win over the Guardians, the Blue Jays' third in a row, showed us again how good this team looks when it all clicks. Hours before Toronto got back to .500, GM Ross Atkins addressed what the club can do to blow right past it.
“Obviously, [the offense] has to get better,” Atkins said Friday. “We’ve worked tirelessly over the last year and a half to correct that. We do believe in the adjustments we’ve made and do believe that good things are coming, but we can’t rest on that. We have to acknowledge that it is an issue. We’ve made adjustments to personnel and our roster -- 26-man and 40-man -- that we feel like will correct, but we need to see that.”
It’s refreshing to hear the emphasis placed more squarely on results, not the process to get there or the underlying metrics that hide “under the hood.” Those are still incredibly important and help to shape decisions, but at the end of the season, we tend to rank teams by wins and losses. The word “expected” doesn’t show up in the standings.
Toronto came into its weekend series against Cleveland at 15-16. It’s enough to say the Blue Jays have survived the first month, but they haven’t exactly thrived. Entering Friday, they ranked 27th in the Majors with 108 runs and 29th with just 21 homers. If they bottle up the momentum from their series win against the Red Sox and carry that forward, the story will change quickly, but this offense is clearly lagging behind.
“I know that we have guys who hit the ball hard,” Atkins said. “It’s about getting the ball in the air more and getting guys into better counts and situations to do damage. We’ve seen damage, we just haven’t seen it go over the wall as much.”
The other problem facing this team, which Atkins addressed directly, is its rotation depth. Max Scherzer could still be a few weeks away -- though that’s still being evaluated daily -- but even then, the Blue Jays need a No. 6 and a No. 7 starter who they can rely on in the coming months. Some internal options have cycled through already, but none have truly stuck.
“We also need to consider external alternatives, and we have a couple of things in the works there that are more on the depth front via free agency,” Atkins said.
Now that’s interesting. The Blue Jays don’t need to discover a diamond in the free-agency rough here, they just need to find reliable innings, even if just for a couple of weeks until someone like No. 6 prospect Jake Bloss settles into the season at Triple-A. Bloss owns a 5.75 ERA through five starts but, like Atkins says, has looked much better lately and has been forced to pitch through some ugly weather early in the season.
“I think that Bloss is an option right now, we’d just like to see more consistency out of him,” Atkins said. “The last two outings have been very effective. If he can repeat that another time or two, then he’s a very real option for us. I would be comfortable with him coming here tomorrow if that needed to be. His stuff is good enough. It’s the consistency in the zone that, the last couple of times, was there.”
The pessimist would rightly point to the fact that the Blue Jays have faced these same two issues for a few seasons now. Underwhelming power has become an annual tradition, and this club’s rotation depth has been awfully thin, an issue that their veteran starters have done a great job of covering up.
If the Blue Jays can patch up these problems, though, we all know that their defense is among the league’s best and this bullpen has been a pleasant surprise, finally catching up to the rest of baseball -- and blowing past it -- with strikeouts and whiff rates. Plus, if the Toronto can get to the Trade Deadline on July 31 still in the mix, it's expected to be extremely aggressive when the time comes.
These are simple problems, even if many of the conversations around them sound complicated. The Blue Jays will go as far as this offense takes them, and even an offense closer to the league average would be enough to let the rest of their strengths shine.