Injuries Haven't Cost the Blue Jays Their Season Yet, But the Clock Is Ticking

[Jesse Burrill]

“It feels like we just keep getting punched in the mouth.”

It wasn’t the first time Eric Lauer spoke about taking a punch to the mouth. But this time, instead of joking about a fat lip courtesy of Max Scherzer, he was talking about something far more damaging: the injury bug that has battered the Blue Jays early in the 2026 season.

“It’s one of those things where we want it to just stop at some point. But we’ve just got to keep going through it, hoping the next guy steps up. Keep grinding.”

Lauer has a point, and you can tell that the injury bug has gotten to the Blue Jays. Just this week, George Springer fouled a ball on his left toe, causing a fracture. After getting X-rays done, the Blue Jays decided to put him on the 10-day IL, joining several of his teammates that are currently hurt, only 15 games into the young season (as of April 14).

Springer joins a list of offensive players on the sidelines that includes Addison Barger, who is on the 10-day IL with a sprained ankle, Alejandro Kirk who is out with a fractured thumb, and, dating back to the spring, the Blue Jays can factor in Anthony Santander, who had shoulder surgery in February and will likely not be back until September, if he returns at all.

On paper, the Blue Jays are missing four of their projected top six hitters, and although they have depth on the roster, it's a situation no team wants.

On the pitching side, things aren’t much better. Shane Bieber, Bowden Francis, José Berríos, and Trey Yesavage were all expected to be key pieces in the starting rotation. Yimi García was set to be a flamethrower out of the bullpen, but none of them left spring training healthy. Cody Ponce, who was expected to be a key part of the rotation after signing a three-year, $30 million contract this winter, lasted only 2.1 innings before he tore his ACL and is expected to miss most, if not all, of the 2026 season.

There’s no way to sugarcoat it; the injuries have been brutal, and they're a big reason why the Blue Jays are below .500 early in the season. But just how bad have things been?

The Blue Jays actually don’t have the highest number of players on the injured list (the Diamondbacks lead the way with 13), but in terms of the expected value of their hurt players, no team in baseball has been hit harder than the Toronto Blue Jays.

Graphic per the Baseball Prospectus Injured List Ledger

Coming into the season, Baseball Prospectus projected the Blue Jays to win about 88 games and produce approximately 41.4 WARP (wins above replacement player). Through just 15 games, the Blue Jays have already lost a meaningful chunk of their projected production to injuries. If that pace holds (nearly 1.0 WARP lost every 15 games), it would equate to about 10 fewer wins than expected coming into the season, which would be the difference between making the playoffs and missing them entirely.

Yesavage is reportedly nearing his return, while Springer isn't expected to be out for long. Still, Bieber, Ponce, Santander, García, and Berríos are set to miss significant time, and it's almost certain more players will get hurt between now and the end of the season. It hasn’t been all injuries; the Blue Jays haven't necessarily played their best on the field, either. But PECOTA now projects Toronto to end up with just 83.5 wins overall, a pretty sizeable drop this early on in the season. That's still the fifth-highest win projection in the American League. The concern is whether it keeps dropping.

Every season, one team gets decimated by injuries.

In 2025, it was the Houston Astros, who lost 12.44 WARP and narrowly missed the playoffs on the final day of the season.

In 2024, the Atlanta Braves lost even more value (13.11 WARP), and they still made it in.

The Blue Jays now find themselves in this exact situation, and there is no single blueprint for how a season like this plays out:

Year	Team	WARP Lost	Playoff Result
2025	Houston Astros	12.44	Missed Playoffs
2024	Atlanta Braves	13.11	Made Playoffs
2023	New York Yankees	13.42	Missed Playoffs
2022	Minnesota Twins	9.601	Missed Playoffs
2021	New York Mets	14.43	Missed Playoffs
2020	Houston Astros	6.305	Made Playoffs*
2019	New York Yankees	17.98	Made Playoffs
2018	Cleveland Guardians	8.752	Made Playoffs

There’s no clear cutoff; teams in the past have both survived and collapsed under similar injury loads.

The good news? Injury-plagued teams can still make the postseason.

The 2018 Guardians, 2019 Yankees, and 2024 Braves all managed to do it. But they had something the 2026 Blue Jays don’t: they were coming off 100+ win seasons. Their baseline was so high that even a significant drop still left them in contention.

The Blue Jays don’t have as much luxury. Injuries alone don't determine a team's fate, but they do expose it. Teams with strong foundations and a high floor can survive them, but teams without those assets don’t have the same margin for error.

The key for this team is just to try to do whatever they can to stay afloat until reinforcements arrive. Being three games below .500 with a -25 run differential, one of the worst in baseball early on, is what it is. But no one in the American League is running away from the pack. One good week, and the Blue Jays can be right back on top again.

The Blue Jays are doing everything they can to make that happen. Just this past week, the team signed Patrick Corbin to reinforce the starting rotation. They’ve also made trades with the Giants and White Sox for Tyler Fitzgerald and Lenyn Sosa, respectively They’ve recalled Brandon Valenzuela, who has shown flashes of promise so far, and called up Eloy Jiménez, who had a two-hit game in his season debut. If the Blue Jays can get some impact from elsewhere on the roster and start putting some wins together, it may be the difference between this team fighting for a spot in October and being on the outside looking in.

Whether they can do it won't just depend on getting healthy; it'll depend on whether or not the Blue Jays were good enough to weather this in the first place.

For Eric Lauer and the rest of the Blue Jays, it's their turn to do the punching. They will keep grinding, they will keep going until the next man steps up, and if that does happen, then they get to do the sweetest punch of all, and that's punching their ticket into the postseason.

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[Terry Mesmer]

The headline is silly.