Are the Blue Jays a Bad or an Elite Defensive Team?

The Blue Jays have placed an emphasis on defense when it comes to roster building for years now. They’ve gone out of their way to trade for notoriously good defenders like Matt Chapman, Daulton Varsho, Myles Straw, and Andrés Giménez. 

They’ve found value in defensive-minded free agents like Kevin Kiermaier and even turned fringe roster pickups like Ernie Clement, Tyler Heineman, and Nathan Lukes into important pieces on winning teams, each of them with high defensive floors as essential skills.

The Jays have long understood that preventing the other team from scoring a run is just as good as scoring one of your own.

This philosophy has paid off, because the Jays have been one of baseball’s best defensive organizations in recent seasons. 

Baseball Savant explains Fielding Run Value (FRV) as, “Statcast’s metric for capturing a player’s measurable defensive performance by converting all of Statcast’s individual defensive metrics from different scales onto the same run-based scale, which can then be read as a player being worth X runs above or Y runs below average.”

That’s baseball nerd for “Fielding Run Value is a statistic that takes into account a bunch of different defensive stats and combines them into one number.” Similar to WAR, players accumulate FRV throughout a season, they can gain both positive and negative fielding runs, and the larger the sample we’re working with, the more we can read into it. 

Blue Jays players accumulated more FRV than any other team in both 2024 and ‘25.

And if you’re more of a traditionalist, and analytics aren’t for you, just take the fact that the Jays also won back-to-back American League Team Gold Glove awards in 2023 and ‘24 and enjoy the rest of the article.

Defense is obviously something the organization has taken a lot of pride in, which is why the errors piling up early in 2026 feels so uncharacteristic.

Errors are back-breaking plays. Best case scenario, they allow a runner to advance a base, and at their worst, they allow a runner that should have been out to reach base, or score a run. 

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, the Jays have been one of the worst defending teams in baseball this season when it comes to errors, yet they remain near the top of the leaderboard when it comes to total FRV.

There could be a couple of reasons for this.

Firstly, errors are as subjective as they’ve ever been. An official scorer watches the game and determines how to “score” each play. If you’re a long-time fan, you may have heard or noticed that fewer and fewer plays are being scored as errors, and you’d be right.

In the 2000 season, players accumulated 3447 errors, compared to 2451 in 2025. That’s almost 1000 more errors over the same number of games, or a 29% decrease in the number of errors just 25 years later.

Without having gone through all of the plays, there’s a chance that official scorers have been particularly tough on the Jays' fielders compared to those on other teams when it comes to determining what’s an error and what isn’t.

Errors, as we understand them, also don’t tell the full story. For example, it’s more than possible that a good defender with great range gets to a ball and then makes an error that a slower defender wouldn’t have even had the chance to make a play on. 

The other, much more concrete explanation is that the Blue Jays have remained close to the top of the FRV leaderboard because their catchers are elite. 

It’s well known that Alejandro Kirk is one of the best defensive catchers in the sport. Since 2022, he’s accumulated the second most fielding run value of any player in baseball, behind only Patrick Bailey of the Giants.

But he’s been hurt since early April!

This year, the Jays’ backstops – Tyler Heineman, Brandon Valenzuela, and Kirk (before his injury) – have combined to lead catching groups in fielding run value. 

Catchers are unique when it comes to FRV because they have way more opportunities to collect it. Blocking, framing, and throwing are weighed heavily in the formula, which is why we often see catchers separated from the other positions when it comes to tracking their defensive value.

If we sort FRV by infielders and outfielders, excluding catchers, we can see that the Jays are still good, with a top 10 ranking, but not nearly as elite on the whole.

So, what can we take away from this when it comes to the Jays and their defense?

Well, if you’re a Jays fan, feel comforted that during the years they were considered one of the best defensive teams in baseball, total errors and fielding percentage saw them more as an average team anyway. There’s a lot more to baseball defense than these traditional stats take into account.

You can also feel comforted that defensive statistics are among those that take the longest to normalize. Small samples can throw them out of whack very quickly. Fielders have far fewer opportunities than hitters or pitchers, so one or two weird or unlucky plays can make a great defender look average when it comes to advanced defensive metrics, especially this early in the season. 

At the same time, what has happened on the field has had consequences for the Blue Jays’ actual record. Ernie Clement, who was elite as a defender in 2025, with +10 fielding runs as a utility infielder, has been worth -2 as a defender so far in 2026.

Daulton Varsho and Andrés Giménez are regarded as two of the game’s best up-the-middle defenders, but they’ve also fallen behind the pace, having been worth just +1 and +2 defensive runs, respectively, after being worth +6 apiece in injury-shortened 2025 seasons.

The Jays are off to a disappointing start to a season that they entered with very high expectations, so keep an eye on their defensive statistics going forward. Once they start to improve, expect their record to improve along with it.