What Will the Blue Jays Do About George Springer?

We need to talk about George Springer.

I want to make it clear right up front that I love Springer. He seems like a genuinely good guy, and he’s had an excellent career. I will absolutely be rooting for him this season. However, we need to prepare ourselves to have a difficult conversation about him, because I’m genuinely worried about his performance. It’s not because Springer is so far batting just .136 during spring training, though obviously I don’t love that. We need to look at the bigger picture.

In 2024, Springer ran a 95 wRC+, mostly because of some bad luck at the plate. He deserved to be right around 104, where he was in 2023, 4% better than the league-average hitter. Unfortunately, that’s still a huge drop-off from who Springer was as a hitter of the first nine years of his career. From 2014 to 2022, Springer ran a 134 wRC+, making him 34% better than the average hitter. Over the past two seasons he’s been at an even 100, completely average. Moreover, as he’s got gotten older, his defensive value has eroded to the point that it's now underwater. He’s no longer a bat-first center fielder, he’s a corner outfielder who doesn’t hit or field. It’s been two years now since Springer could muster even league-average performance. That’s just plain not tenable for a team with playoff ambitions, especially when things don’t have to play out that way.

I went over to FanGraphs and pulled the ZiPS projections for every Blue Jays outfielder. This season, ZiPS sees Springer bouncing back somewhat – after all, he really did get unlucky in 2024 – to run a 105 wRC+, to hit 17 home runs, and to put up 2.0 WAR over 128 games. But here’s the thing: Even the bounce-back season that ZiPS is projecting wouldn’t make him one of the team’s best outfielders. In fact, it wouldn’t even be close. The table below shows projected WAR, prorated for 600 PAs, for all of the team’s contenders in the outfield. Essentially, it shows what ZiPS thinks every player would do if they got to play a full season in the outfield.

I don’t know how much clearer things could be here. It’s not just that the projections don’t think Springer is one of the team’s three best outfielders; they don’t even think he’s in the top five. Over a full season – and once again, this would constitute a bounce-back season – ZiPS sees Springer putting up 2.2 WAR. That’s a hair better than a league-average player and it’s tied with Joey Loperfido for seventh-best among Toronto outfielders. Davis Schneider, Nathan Lukes, Addison Barger, even Alan Roden, who has only played 71 games above Double-A: all of them are projected to perform better than Springer this season. Steamer, another projection system run by FanGraphs sees Springer as the team’s fourth-best option, behind Roden and a hair ahead of Lukes and Barger.

Maybe Springer will bounce back this season, not just in a league-average way but in a big way. He’s 35, and it wouldn’t be crazy to see him put up one more three-win campaign. But if he doesn’t, if he gets off to a scary, slow start, the Blue Jays will have to act. They’ll have to act because the season hangs in the balance and a win here or there could make all the difference. They’ll have to act because they will have several materially better options waiting on the bench and in the minors. As always, some players will outperform their projections and some players will underperform. If Springer can’t turn into one of the pleasant surprises, the Blue Jays will have to make room for whichever one of those players can.

Here's a possible scenario: Daulton Varsho’s shoulder ends up not quite being ready for Opening Day, so for the first week or two, he sits or needs to DH. During that time, Lukes or Roden fill in and plays great while Springer scuffles. Are the Blue Jays really just going to sit the player who’s performing well down in order to spare the feelings of the player who is now, for the third year in a row, performing badly?

I recognize that this would be an extremely difficult conversation. Springer is a leader: a respected veteran, an All-Star, a World Series champion, even a World Series MVP. Putting him on the bench (or worse) would probably be really ugly. Moreover, Springer will make $22.5 million this season and next. But that’s a sunk cost. The Blue Jays can’t let it deter them from putting their best team on the field. And they can't deny their best prospects at-bats, hurting their development. Too much depends on it. The team’s outfield depth is a real strength, but only if they actually use it.