In Dunedin, the Scoreboard Is Background Noise

Spring training is never time for one's expectations to get too high or too low, and no group knows that better right now than the 2026 Toronto Blue Jays. 

Every team in Major League Baseball uses spring training to instill its "way" of playing. In the 1950s, Dodger executive Al Campanis famously penned the book The Dodger Way to Play Baseball that outlined the team's overall philosophy of being fundamentally sound and disciplined.

To build on last year's success, the Jays will be looking to foster the attributes that made them successful in 2025: solid defence, consistent contact, aggressive baserunning and contributions from across the lineup.

While these attributes aren't being described as the "Jays Way" just yet, they do align with the team's culture that continues to flourish.

According to team sources, the Jays are 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 his 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, including everything from back-to-backs that test recovery to night games that simulate travel-day routines. Even split squads let the 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 when the collective brain trust is all in one place at one time. They aren't just discussing what's happening that day or week, but looking into options across seasons.

Following a busy offseason, 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 (depending on his health) and the recently signed 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 the first few games. Questions persist about Yimi García’s elbow timeline, which of the pitchers who aren’t in the starting rotation will get bumped to the bullpen and whether Jeff Hoffman’s role will change in 2026.

Social media has had plenty of coverage of bullpen sessions with an arsenal of coaches standing behind the pitcher, fixated on strike percentages, groundball 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 to camp, many of whom could impact the 2026 club directly or serve as credible depth by mid-summer. Arjun Nimmala is a good example.

Only 20, he’s getting the at-bats and infield reps that the major league coaching staff needs to see to determine where he is in his development (and the trajectory the team will set 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 in which star names are the focus, but the subplots are almost more enticing.

For the defending American League champions, there is an external impulse to treat spring as a referendum on whether the team is serious about a repeat performance. The Jays’ offseason won'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 dig deeper, 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 16 games under .500 that season. If this year’s edition starts 10–15 in camp or rips off 10 wins in two weeks, it has little to no impact on the 90 to 100 actual decisions they’ll win or lose following 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 Andrés Giménez, the conversation should not be 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.

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.