Should the Blue Jays Re-Evaluate Their Offensive Identity?

[Matthew Creally]

The current reality that the Toronto Blue Jays find themselves in would've been almost impossible to fathom at the start of spring training. It wouldn't have been much easier to foresee just six weeks ago, when they climbed back to .500 and maintained a one-game lead on the final Wild Card spot. It's everything that's happened since then that made the idea of selling key pieces at the trade deadline simply unavoidable.

Now, they certainly didn't punt. They acquired value for their expiring contracts and bet big on starting pitcher José Soriano, who will assume a key role in 2027 and 2028. Forgive the fanbase, though, for feeling like one or two of their trades were a tad redundant.

This is a team that, entering play Wednesday, has gone from the fourth-highest scoring offense in MLB last year to the very worst this year. By no means am I saying that the hard work of Ross Atkins and the front office to make the best of a difficult situation should be written off (for the record, my overall first impression is that he had a decent deadline), but the position players they acquired in recent days have very similar skill sets to a lot of the guys that have been regulars for their league-worst offense. Given the precipitous fall-off for a lineup that was built to win in 2026, it's worth asking if they're picking up the pieces the right way, so let's talk about it.

There's more than one way to interpret the excellence of last year's Blue Jays, but for the sake of getting something straight: This team wasn't good in 2025 because they made a lot of contact. They were good because they made a lot of contact while also hitting for more power than the average team. Remember 2024, when they finished in last place, didn't score any runs, and completely restructured the hitting coach situation? They didn't strike out that year either. The defining trait of what made the offense so tough to beat was their ability to pair contact with damage.

Toronto Blue Jays Team Offense MLB Ranks, 2024-26

Stat	2024 Rank	2025 Rank	2026 Rank
K%	6	1	3
Contact%	3	1	3
Hard-Hit%	23	11	29
ISO	22	12	30
HR	26	13	29

Their collective ability to get bat on ball has been the lone constant in recent years. It's still there right now. The power outage relative to last year is the real elephant in the room. 

It's fair to argue that the shortcomings of the 2024 offense in this department were a roster construction issue. The Jays gave a combined 858 plate appearances to Isiah Kiner-Falefa, post-peak Justin Turner, and Danny Jansen that season, all guys who struck out less than 20% of the time but didn't slug enough to make it mean something (As an aside, IKF and Turner posted wRC+ marks of 117 and 111, respectively, in Toronto. IKF hit .292! This year's Jays would kill for that kind of production. Parallel to this was Alejandro Kirk hitting for a 93 wRC+ despite a 13% K rate and the underperformances/absences of Bo Bichette and George Springer, but I digress.)

The point is, they did not have enough slug surrounding Vladimir Guerrero Jr. In the offseason, the organization took action. Don Mattingly was moved away from his offense-related duties to more of a leadership role as bench coach, Guillermo Martinez was let go, and David Popkins was named the new hitting coach. Popkins, who made his name as the hitting coach of the Minnesota Twins, made it clear early on that he would take an adaptive approach to hitting and was a lot more open to the idea of hitting for power than his predecessors. Anthony Santander was also added in free agency, but you don't need me to tell you how little he has been around.

Under Popkins and his assistants Lou Iannotti and Hunter Mense, the lineup completed a 180-degree turn. Addison Barger, who was an erratic package of bat speed and swing-and-miss in his first stint in the big leagues, channeled his raw power to hit for a .211 ISO with 21 homers and 32 doubles. Springer made some mechanical adjustments, adding 2 mph to his average bat speed and producing a career year at age 35. Kirk added 2.4 mph to his average bat speed compared to 2024, the third-largest increase in baseball, and hit a career-high 15 homers. Daulton Varsho missed plenty of time with injury, but he too added two ticks of bat speed and clubbed 20 homers in 71 games. 

In terms of bat speed, the Jays did not stand out at the team-and-season level last year, but it was truly remarkable how they improved in this department as the season progressed. As a group, their average bat speed increased nearly a full mile per hour in August and September compared to June and July. The faster your swing, the harder you hit the ball.

It's hard to beat a lineup that never strikes out but also threatens to hit for power like this. So, why didn't it carry over into this year? 

Last week, I read a comment under an article by Jay Jaffe over at FanGraphs that chronicled the Blue Jays' struggles. It read, "sometimes there's nowhere to go but down." To an extent, that's certainly true. Springer was never going to hit for a 166 wRC+ this year. The team's resounding success with runners in scoring position, as well as their relatively clean bill of health, wasn't sustainable either. However, the fact remains that some of their hitters made deliberate changes to their swings in favour of making more contact over hitting for power. 

One such player is the recently traded Varsho, whose OPS was down around 150 points from last year before he was shipped to Houston. Varsho is currently running the lowest strikeout rate and the highest BABIP of his career, but that has come at a cost. His 92 wRC+ would be his worst since 2023, his first year in Toronto. Remember how he hit 20 homers in 71 games? This year, he's on a 162-game pace of 11.

Daulton Varsho's Baseball Savant Hitting Percentiles, 2025-26

Why? What's the rationale for moving away from a plan of attack that, if not for his time on the injured list, would have made him a 30-to-40-homer bat to go along with his elite glove in center field? Varsho is a notorious tinkerer; his swing took on a different form every year he was in Toronto, which was more justifiable after his underwhelming start to his tenure with the club. The reason players like Ernie Clement and Nathan Lukes were so effective in last year's lineup is that their presence as bat-to-ball guys was offset by power-hitting pull-air types like Varsho and Davis Schneider. A transformation like this detracted from the diversity of profiles within their structure and added more of something they already had.

Not only did the Blue Jays pay for this change on account of their lack of runs and homers this season, but Varsho himself may have left a ton of money on the table as a pending free agent. If he replicated something close to last year over a full season, he would've been a standout in a shallow free agent pool. Now, that doesn't look like it's going to happen.

Of course, there's also Guerrero. I'm not going to beat a dead horse too much because I'm sure the Jays have tried everything with him, and concerns that he's been playing through an injury amidst his career-worst slump resurfaced on Tuesday night. It's possible there's plenty going on that we, the public, are not privy to. Nonetheless, it's early August, and Guerrero is one of just three qualified hitters in the league whose chase rate has increased by 10% or more from last year. If he wouldn't be okay striking out a few more times in exchange for more damage, that's a bigger issue.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s Baseball Savant Hitting Percentiles, 2025-26

With all this going on, the Blue Jays continued to pursue contact-heavy profiles at the trade deadline. Brett Bateman, the main piece in the Kevin Gausman deal, is a .280 hitter in 315 career minor league games, but he only has six homers in that span. The other prospect in that package, Ty Southisene, has yet to hit a single home run in 157 career minor league games. Josh Smith has a good track record as a big league utility player, but he's never slugged higher than .394 in a given season. Dameury Pena, one of the prospects acquired in the Jeff Hoffman trade, was regarded as a Luis Arraez type by Baseball America in their 2025 scouting report on him.

There are glass-half-full perspectives to be had about these deals. Half of Bateman's six career professional homers have come in 2026. He's hitting for a 125 wRC+ in Triple A at 24 years old and boasts a great combination of power and speed in center field, where the Jays do not have an immediate replacement for Varsho. Smith hit for a 112 wRC+ two years ago, more than good enough for a player whose defense is an asset at multiple positions. If he were to produce at that level for the Blue Jays, the trade would be more than worth it. While I don't have a personal vendetta against contact hitters, lineup diversity matters, and it's arguable that the Jays have once again begun to drift too far toward the position they were in back in 2024.

It has now been more than a decade since the slap-hitting Kansas City Royals won the World Series. To win a championship in today's game, a certain level of slug is required. A contact-first, power-second lineup might still hypothetically be able to get it done. A contact-first, no-power lineup is a different story. Ultimately, if the Blue Jays' brass wants this season to be a mere blip on the radar, they're once again going to have to make a more concerted effort to inject some pop into all levels of the organization heading into 2027.

All stats entering August 5, 2026.

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