There's a colleague of mine who's had a whirlwind 6 months. His baseball team is the Blue Jays, and he got to see them make a World Series this year. And his football team is the Seahawks, and he got to watch them defy the odds and win a Super Bowl. That's a lot of good stuff in a small period of time, especially after the Jays' last WS appearance was over 30 years ago and the Seahawks' last Super Bowl appearance was over 10 years ago. A decade of nothing and then everything at once sure is a nice change of pace.
I think that one of those two teams has built enough to engineer playoff pushes and potential championship campaigns for the next few years. Unfortunately it's not the Blue Jays.
The Blue Jays' 2025 season, as triumphant as it was, happened because of so many other factors. The momentum the Jays found was sustained even as the Yankees, Mariners and Tigers failed to expand on their strong regular seasons. The approach the Jays entered the season with was altered, and once the team fully favored the contact platooning and bare-bones battery, nobody could really outclobber that. Any power perk the team thought they'd get by signing Anthony Santander was less important than the contact perks of giving Ernie Clement, Myles Straw, Addison Barger, Nathan Lukes and Davis Schneider more playing time. Lukes accomplished more at DH than Tony Taters did, which was a reality the Jays were not really thinking of last February.
The 2025 Jays worked because nobody was quite prepared for them, and nobody could handle a full-season momentum like they could. But with every runaway surprise team comes the possibility of diminishing returns. There's two ways this team goes forward. Either it's the pie in the sky way, where this IS sustainable, Trey Yesavage is exactly who they think he is, nobody gets injured and everything falls in line exactly how it did in 2025...or the cynical view, where the lack of Bo Bichette, the overpaying for Dylan Cease and thereby losing out on Kyle Tucker, the steepening competition in the AL East and the inevitable atrophy of the deliberate recreation of success keep the team from making much of a dent in the overall picture of 2026. Both are possible. One more than the other.
Eyes are going to be on Ernie Clement to have a bigger season this year. There's no Bo, I'm guessing this'll be a down Springer year, and the team needs Clement to step up and continue his multi-tool contact work. It's just not clear if Clement is going to be that guy or not. He'll be 30 this year, he's still an ace defender, but he's never been the full package at the plate. Last year he had 151 hits, a career high, in addition to highs in the runs and doubles categories. He'll likely be starting at second due to Kazuma Omamoto taking third, meaning Andres Gimenez will be moving to short. It might not click immediately for any of them. Either Clement steps up and takes a larger stake in this team, or he continues on as a 'good piece' without much further use. That's gonna be the big takeaway from this coming season, whether the carousel of 'good pieces' that got the team so far into the playoffs have staying power beyond the 2025 season. I'd love for Addison Barger to cement himself, but will he? Same with Lukes.
The rotation, at the very least, is less of a worry because there's already so many contingency plans. It's gonna be Cease-Gausman-Yesavage-Berrios-Ponce, Bieber will come back eventually, Scherzer will surface when he's ready and Lauer is the longman who can take starts if need be. That's a very good plan. There's also enough guys in their prime that there's not an extreme atrophy worry [though Gausman coooould take a step back]. If anything, the pitching will keep them competitive. But if what worked in 2025 stalls in 2026, they might need to crumple and toss again at some point.
With the talent they have on that roster, and the potential they've showed in the playoffs, the Blue Jays are still a formidable team. Clearly. They kept Vlad Jr. for a reason. I'm just not sure if the AL East is theirs right now, let alone the AL title. But we'll see I suppose.
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