In Dunedin, the Scoreboard Is Background Noise

[Sam Charles]

Spring training is never time to get too high or too low, and no group knows that better right now than the 2026 Toronto Blue Jays. The club’s first workouts in Dunedin were deliberately ordinary by design.

The team is preaching process and repetition as they gear up for the regular season, a mantra that has mattered even more following the emotional whiplash of their 2025 ride that ended two outs short of a championship.

In Florida, the daily scoreboard is background noise. The foreground is footwork around the infield, the finish on a slider, the length of a secondary lead and the spring-long auditions that will inform decisions far more than any Grapefruit League standings ever could.

Spring training is all about big scores and hard-to-follow box scores. Manager John Schneider has license to substitute everyone, roll innings, test matchups and even accept a tie if it keeps arms on schedule. The results are less important than getting players reps and evaluating talent.

With Sportsnet broadcasting nearly every spring training game on tv and radio, it is hard not to follow every box score and start making assumptions about how the regular season will unfold.

The Jays themselves know better. Their schedule is all about workload and evaluation, not a set of mini-season verdicts. It is planned with intention that include everything from back-to-backs that test recovery to night games that simulate travel-day routines. Even split squads let staff see twenty pitchers in the same seventy-two hours. The presence of a broadcast truck doesn’t change much for the coaching staff or front office.

One front office employee recently told me that spring training is the only time during the season where the collective brain trust is all in one place at one time.

With a busy off-season, spring training for the Jays is less about discovery and more about calibration. The infield is pretty well set, but after a handful of games there might be more question-marks in the outfield and pitching staff.

The rotation conversations are a perfect example. Kevin Gausman, Dylan Cease and Trey Yesavage make up the top three of the rotation. What camp must sort out is the arrangement and approach beyond those three. Even starting Eric Lauer, fresh off his arbitration case, in spring game number one shouldn’t be overly analyzed. Cody Ponce, José Berríos and Shane Bieber are all part of the discussion not to mention Ricky Tiedemann and the recently rumoured Max Scherzer.

The other preoccupation is the bullpen. Nearly all the new arms in camp including Tyler Rogers, Chase Lee and Angel Bastardo have seen action in first few games. Questions persist about Yimi García’s elbow timeline, which of the pitchers who aren’t in the starting rotation get bumped to the bullpen and whether Jeff Hoffman’s role will change for 2026.

Social media has had plenty of coverage of bullpen sessions with an arsenal of coaches standing behind the pitcher fixated on strike percentages, ground-ball profiles and how quickly a reliever can repeat his delivery after a throw-over.

Beyond the expected configuration of the roster, the team is weighing its immediate goals and longer arcs. The club invited a meaningful cohort of non-roster players, many of whom could impact the 2026 roster directly or serve as credible depth by midsummer. Arjun Nimmala is a good example.

Only twenty, he’s getting at-bats and infield reps that major-league staff need to determine where he’d fit in his development (and the trajectory that the team has for him). RJ Schreck, Charles McAdoo, Gage Stanifer, Chad Dallas and others populate the daily work groups, creating the kind of internal pressure that is supposed to make veterans lock in a little harder on everything from their swing to their defensive footwork.

Spring is an ecosystem where star names are the focus, but the sub-plots are almost more enticing.

As defending American League champion, there is an external impulse to treat spring as a referendum on whether the team is serious about a repeat performance. The Jays’ off-season didn’t end with a ring ceremony. It ended with the quiet building of a roster to prevent runs more efficiently up the middle, spread power throughout the order and lengthen a pitching staff whose postseason usage revealed both strengths and stress points.

Camp is where the deepening of the outfield and internal improvements can be pressure-tested to see what works and what might still need to be upgraded or tweaked.

Multiple studies have found that spring training results, whether at the team level or for individual hitters, rarely correlate with regular season outcomes. One analysis put the correlation between spring records and regular season win totals at roughly five percent. Even attempts to get clever like looking at big spring slugging spikes to forecast power breakouts seem to fizzle when tested rigorously.

Scores and stats in the spring are somewhat irrelevant when it is all said and done. Take for instance the 2012 Blue Jays who posted the best record (24-7) in the Grapefruit League and finished sixteen games under .500 that season. If this year’s edition starts 10–15 in camp or rips off ten wins in two weeks, it has little to no impact on the ninety to one hundred actual decisions they’ll win or lose starting Opening Day.

As a fan you might want to take a closer look at how Davis Schneider or Addison Barger are controlling the zone and carrying high-quality contact regardless of who is on the mound. For Andres Giménez, the conversation is not about his March slash line but about his first-step reads to his right, the 90th-percentile throw on a backhand behind the bag, his communication with Clement on feeds they’ll repeat 400 times during the year.

Spring is where those read-and-react patterns become muscle memory.

In Kazuma Okamoto’s case, he’s looking to transfer his NPB success to MLB through timing, angles, and adjustments, so spring offers a lower-consequence lab for that process.

And spring training is also where a clubhouse culture begins to take shape, and don’t forget that everyone needs to work out the kinks of the new automated ball-strike (ABS) challenge system.

One thing is for sure: Opening Day is right around the corner, and that’s when the results really matter.

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