Jesse Burrill

After a rollercoaster 2024, the 2025 Blue Jays season is filled with question marks. Let’s dive into five bold hypotheticals. Baseball is truly an unpredictable game. No matter how many projection systems you look at or how well you think you know a player or a team, you really can't know how well a player is going to perform. Take last season’s Blue Jays, for example. How could you predict that the Blue Jays would have the worst bullpen in franchise history? Or that Bo Bichette would go from getting down-ballot MVP votes three seasons in a row to posting a negative WAR in just 81 games played? Or even that the Blue Jays would be a top-five team in baseball in home runs from 2021 to 2023, then to drop to 26th? Being unpredictable isn't necessarily a bad thing. Surprises can come in a positive direction too. Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Ernie Clement both had surprise three-win seasons. Chad Green proved he could stay healthy and be a good major-league reliever again. Spencer Horwitz didn't get called up until June, but ran a 125 OPS+ while hitting cleanup most of the season a very welcome surprise. That's how things go, and that's the reason the projections are generally accurate: most teams have good surprises and bad surprises, which tend to even out. Looking forward to the 2025 season, this Blue Jays roster is likely going to be unpredictable yet again. But with spring training right around the corner and optimism for the Blue Jays starting to rise, let's take a look at some unlikely, but not impossible storylines that help them reach their potential. Let's be clear, none of these scenarios is likely to happen. In fact, your friends at the bar might think you’re crazy if you bring them up. But none of these things is impossible either, and it would be good to explore the best-case scenarios. 1) What if second-half Bowden Francis is the real Bowden Francis? Bowden Francis was dominant in the second half. Starting in August, he finished either first or second among all qualified starters in ERA (1.52), WHIP (0.54), and strikeout-to-walk ratio (8.00). It was clearly the best story of the second half of the season. Most projection systems don't see Francis repeating that, performance and honestly, he probably won't. But what if that's who he really is? You would be looking at Bowden Francis as not just the best pitcher on the Blue Jays, but one of the best pitchers in the game, and that would certainly change the outlook for the Blue Jays. 2) What if we get one last elite season from Max Scherzer? Max Scherzer signed with the Blue Jays earlier this week, and conventional wisdom tells you that a pitcher in his 40s isn't likely to bounce back to stardom after showing signs of decline. But if there is any pitcher who can do it, it might be Max Scherzer. His 2023 whiff rate of 29% far off from his career average of 32%. He’s mentioned on record that he’s healthy going into the offseason, and who knows what he can accomplish if he's able to fully harness his competitiveness. If anyone can surprise us with one more elite season, Max Scherzer might be the best bet. 3) What if Andrés Giménez turns into the guy he was in 2022? Just two seasons ago, Andrés Giménez looked like he’d be a superstar for years to come. A former top 100 prospect who was the key return in the blockbuster trade that sent Fransisco Lindor to the Mets in 2021, he turned it on in 2022. Giménez combined his elite defence and baserunning with .837 OPS, and when all was said and done he put up a 7.4-WAR season at the age of 23. It looked like it was just the beginning of a superstar career, but then the bat fell off, as Giménez posted an OPS of .712 in 2023 and .638 in 2024. His hard-hit rate dropped by nearly 10 percentage points too. It was enough of a downturn that Cleveland was willing to trade him away for salary relief. Let's not forget that Giménez is only entering his age-26 season. He’s just now entering the prime of his career and he’s shown the ability to put up a seven-win season already. If the quality of contact can improve, we could be looking at another high-impact player this season. 4) What if Orelvis Martinez just keeps hitting home runs? Orelvis Martinez might not even be on the opening-day roster, but he is certainly among the players who will get a good look this season. Before his 80-game PED suspension essentially ended his season, Martinez had an elite power stroke. His 17 home runs in triple-A Plate translate to one home run for every 18.8 plate appearances. For Reference, that's a higher rate than Gunnar Henderson, Max Muncy, and Teoscar Hernandez. Expecting Martinez to do that in his first look at big-league pitching is a tough ask, but for a Blue Jays team that desperately needs an influx of power and production, he has a chance to be that guy. 5) What if Alek Manoah finally regains his for, upon return from injury? Remember David Price? Who doesn't? Price showed exactly what a dominant second half-performance from a Blue Jay could look like. He joined the Jays at the deadline in 2015, went 9-1 with a 2.30 ERA over his 74.1 innings with the Jays, and helped the team soar to its first division title since the 1993 World Series. What if Alek Manoah can do the same thing? Manoa underwent a hybrid Tommy John surgery in June of 2024, and assuming no setbacks, he’ll be back in the second half. Now, similar to Giménez, he’s two years away from his last stretch of dominance, but in 2021 and 2022, Manoah was one of the best pitchers in baseball. His 2.57 ERA was third-best among qualified starters during that time. What if a spot opens up in the rotation and Manoah can find that slider again? Could he turn into the guy he was in ‘21 and ‘22? Manoah has been putting in the work this offseason, and a strong second-half surge could be the difference between the Blue Jays going into the playoffs or being on the outside looking in. As I said up front, none of these things is likely to happen. But the game is unpredictable, and if you combine that with the talent and grit of these Blue Jays, why couldn't we get a breakout from one of these five players? Either way, the 2024 Blue Jays had more negative surprises than positive ones. If you believe we are due for some positive surprises in 2025, this is are a good place to start. View full article

some other fun Jays milestones i stumbled across: Berrios 1500 Career K's (Currently at 1343) Springer 40 Career bWAR (Currently at 37.3) Jeff Hoffman 100 games finished (Currently at 57) Chris Bassitt has 100 hit batters (Currently at 83)

The Toronto Blue Jays have made a blockbuster move, signing three-time Cy Young winner Max Scherzer! We cover what this means for the team, how Scherzer fits into the rotation, and what Jays fans can expect from the veteran ace. Can he be the missing piece for a deep postseason run? View full video

Davis Schneider could not hit the four-seam. Is it possible to fix that? Every baseball fan knows about Babe Ruth, but the nickname Babe is more widespread the game than you might think. A quick Baseball Reference search reveals 20 different major league Babes. The name went out of fashion roughly half a century ago, but at the the very bottom of the list, you'll find that the Blue Jays are bringing it back thanks to the help of Davis “Babe” Schneider. Davis Schneider didn't hit like Babe Ruth, nor was he ever going to, but the numbers he put up in the 2024 season left us with a sour taste in our mouths. He struggled to a slash line of .191/.282/.343 with 13 home runs. That resulted in a wRC+ of 80, which meant that his batting line was 20% worse than the league average. That was the seventh-worst batting line in baseball among players with at least 450 plate appearances. Schneider was never going to repeat the 176 wRC+ he put up in the 35-game sample of his rookie season. Expectations were that he’d be a league-average player, and Steamer projections saw him putting up a .756 OPS and a 112 wRC+, but his performance fell far short of that. So what happened? First, Schneider's luck balanced out. His unsustainably high line drive rate fell back to earth, his rate of home runs per fly ball got cut in half, and his BABIP went from one of the highest in baseball to one of the lowest. That's the part we expected. What we didn't expect that all of those excess line drives would turn into groundballs instead of fly balls. We didn't necessarily expect that his chase rate would rise by a whopping seven percentage points, cutting his walk rate by nearly a third, or that his defense would go from grading out as above average to below average. None of those things is what you want to see. The main culprit, though, was Schneider's inability to hit the four-seam fastball. He ran a .496 wOBA against four-seamers in 2023, but there was some good fortune pumping up those numbers. He only put 16 four-seamers in play, with three home runs skewing the sample in a big way despite the fact that he whiffed more than 50% of the time. The good fortune disappeared in 2024, when he put up a .242 mark against four-seamers. Exactly 192 different players saw at least 500 four-seamers in 2024, and Schneider's .242 wOBA ranked 192nd. Literally no one in baseball was worse. According to Baseball Savant's run values, he was worth -15 runs against for-seamers. Not only was that tied for the worst mark in baseball against four-seamers; it was tied for the worst mark in baseball against any pitch at all. Yikes. This also shouldn't come as a surprise. Schneider had mentioned to the media a handful of times that he historically struggled against four-seamers, which, in retrospect, was not a promising indication. Pitchers listened to that and attacked him with it until he could prove he could hit it. There is still hope that the 26-year-old can be a key contributor in 2025. First, after getting very lucky in 2023, Schneider seemed to be a bit unlucky in 2024. His .292 expected wOBA was a bit below average, but it was also better than his actual .277 wOBA. He started out hot and was largely dragged down by a dreadful month of August, where he went 3-for-47 with five walks and 23 strikeouts. That month aside, Schneider was roughly a league-average hitter, running a .308 wOBA. So what does this mean for 2025? You can be sure that Schneider and the Blue Jays will be working on ways to improve his performance against the fastball, but even if he improves against it, there is still the question of playing time. Last season, he saw 56 games at second base, but with newly acquired Andrés Giménez in the fold, that window is closed. The other option is left field, where he played 93 games, but the outfield picture is crowded. The newly-acquired Anthony Santander will see some time in left, and even with Daulton Varsho out to start the season, the Jays still have Nathan Lukes, Joey Loperfido, Addison Barger, Jonatan Clase, and Steward Berroa on the 40-man roster, and let's not forget about Alan Roden, who should be on this team at some point this season and the new trade addition Myles Straw. If everyone is healthy, Davis may be best suited as the small side of a platoon, facing mostly left-handed pitchers. It may be hard for the Blue Jays to keep a guy like that on the roster, especially when he has minor league options. One thing is for sure. We know that Davis “Babe” Schneider can still do great things. You don't hit a Josh Hader Slider 423 feet by accident. By all accounts, Schneider is well-liked by fans and his teammates, but at the end of the day, it will always come down to how well he performs with the bat. Most projection systems see him returning to being an above average hitter. However, there might not be a single player on the roster with more to prove than Schneider, as he runs the risk of spending a large part of the summer either in Buffalo or with another organization. But if things can click for him, he could turn back into the Toronto version of the Sultan of Swat, and that would be most welcome. View full article

Trey YesavageRicky TiedemannOrelvis MartinezArjun NimmalaJake BlossJosh KasevichCharles McAdooKendry RojasAdam MackoKhal StephenAlan RodenJuaron Watts-BrownFernando PerezEnmanuel BonillaWill WagnerLanden MaroudisBrandon BarrieraJohnny KingEddinson PaulinoDasan Brown

The advanced numbers show why Gausman may not have been 100% in 2024, and what he might need to do to get back there in 2025. From 2021 through 2023, Kevin Gausman was one of the best pitchers in baseball. Over that period, his 15.5 fWAR were tied for the second-most among all pitchers, and among starters with at least 200 innings pitched, his FIP and xFIP both put him in the top five. He finished in the top 10 in the American League Cy Young, voting in all three seasons. A large part of that success came because Gausman had one of the best weapons in baseball, his nasty splitter. Splitter usage across baseball has risen over the last few seasons, leading to articles about the Splitter Revolution and the Year of the Splitter. The numbers speak for themselves. The increased splitter usage shouldn't come as a surprise. In an MLB.com article, Mike Petriello used the table below to break down the trend. It shows that on a per-pitch basis, the splitter increased its value more than any other pitch type. Gausman’s splitter was one of the best. He threw it 37.1% of the time over those three years, with Stuff+ marks of of 112, 119, and 105. But in 2024, it was a different story. The pitch's Stuff+ fell to just 88, and it wasn’t nearly as good as generating whiffs either. From 2021 to 2023, Guasman's splitter ran a 44.6% whiff rate. In 2024, it fell to 32.4%, the lowest mark of his career. Part of the reason for the drop-off was that the pitch broke less. The pitch lost more than an inch of arm-side run and more than two inches of induced vertical break. It also saw its velocity increase by nearly a full mile per hour, even though Gausman's four-seam fastball actually declined in velocity. In other words, there was less of a gap between the two speeds, so the splitter represented less of a change of pace from the fastball. There could be many reasons for the decline of Gausman's splitter. He's going into his age-34 season and he’s thrown at least 180 innings in each of the last four seasons. It's possible that he's tipping his pitches again. All of those could be true, but I have another theory that may give some hope he may bounce back in 2025. Kevin Gausman was never fully healthy in 2024. At first glance, that might seem ridiculous. Gausman made 31 starts last season, throwing 181 innings without missing a start, but two things can be true at once. You can be healthy enough to pitch but not healthy enough to be at your best, and I’d argue Gausman never got to his best. Flashback to spring training 2024: Gausman got into camp and said he “tried to do too much too early,” and ultimately, the Blue Jays shut him down for most of Spring training with right shoulder fatigue. He got into the last game of spring before making his season debut on March 31. Gausman later told Sportsnet that starting the season on the IL might have been best for him. You never want to see right shoulder fatigue, especially from a guy who has thrown as many innings as Gausman. A decline in arm angle is one possible indicator of a shoulder injury. The shoulder muscles, particularly the rotator cuff, are crucial for maintaining proper arm position during throwing. When injured, these muscles may not provide enough stability, leading the humerus (upper arm bone) to rotate internally more than desired, causing the arm to drop. There is a history of this, too. CC Sabathia, one of the newest members of the Hall of Fame, saw his arm slot drop in 2010 and eventually dealt with a meniscus tear that season. Gausman's arm angle has slowly dropped throughout the few seasons. Not only that, but Gausman's has dropped steadily as the season within the last couple seasons. The graph below shows the month-by-month breakdown. There is likely more to it than this, Gausman might have just been tipping his pitchers. His arm angle on his splitter last year was 34 degrees, whereas when he threw his fastball it was 37 degrees. That may not seem like much, but when you’re predominantly a two-pitch pitcher like Gausman is, major league hitters can likely pick up on this small difference. This could be why we saw him incorporate more sliders and sinkers as he got deeper into the season. The hope here is that with an offseason full of rest, Gausman can get fully past the shoulder injury. If the arm angle can rise yet again and he can get that “bite” back on his splitter, Gausman has a chance to bounce back to the high-end starter that he was prior to 2024. Its a big ask, but for a Blue Jays team with playoff aspirations, a healthy and effective Kevin Gausman will go a long way to getting this team to the promised land. View full article

Reframing the discussion around the Canadian catcher's Cooperstown credentials. Everyone who has followed the game of baseball has followed the careers of their favourite players, whether it was Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, and the Big Red Machine of the 1970s, sluggers like Frank Thomas or Jim Thome in the early 2000s, or the uber athletes who amazed every time they were on the field, like Ken Griffey Jr. or Rickey Henderson. There are many different ways to play the game of baseball and there are many different ways to be great at it. The pitcher who throws 102 mph and strikes out a third of the batters he faces can be just as effective as a pitcher who has mastered the knuckleball and makes a living on making the best major league hitters look silly. A slugger who blasts 500 home runs can be just as valuable as a guy who can steal a ton of bases and play elite defence. At the end of the day. Making the major leagues is incredibly hard, and to be recognized as one of the best to do it is even rarer. Only 1.5 % of all major leaguers are inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The Blue Jays have of their share of representatives in Cooperstown. Rickey Henderson spent 44 games with the team and got a World Series ring out of it, Scott Rolen brought his elite third base defence and to Toronto for parts of two seasons, and let's not forget the late Roy Halladay, a two-time Cy Young winner, eight-time All-Star, and the master at finishing what he started, leading the league in complete games seven times. Who will be the next Blue Jay to will enter Cooperstown? The 2025 Hall of Fame ballot features a few former Jays: Curtis Granderson played 104 games in Toronto, Omar Vizquel played 60 in his final season, Troy Tulowitzki was a key part of the 2015 and the 2016 squads, and Mark Buehrle spent his final three seasons in Toronto. But one notable name with an interesting case for induction is Russell Martin. Russ had an excellent career. He played for 14 seasons, was a four-time All-Star, hit 191 Home Runs, and amassed 38.9 career WAR. Most notably, though he was a winner: Between 2008 and 2016, his team only missed the playoffs once. Getting into the Hall of Fame can be tricky, especially for a ctacher. There are only 17 catchers in the Hall, and the statistical case may make it hard for him to get in. The average WAR for a Hall of Famer at the position is 53.6, and as previously mentioned, Martin is only at 38.9. He never finished in the top 10 in MVP voting. Mickey Cochrane is the lone catcher to make it to Cooperstown with fewer than five All-Star selections, but he boasts accolades Martin doesn't: two MVPs and three World Series championships. There is one saving grace that may earn Russell some well-deserved support: His ability to frame pitches. Framing is hard to see, as the goal is to make pitches look like they were strikes all along. If you do your job well, it's undetectable. Some fans even argue that framing is cheating or a form of deception, fooling the umpire into calling something that isn't true. Regardless, earning strikes for your pitchers is always going to be beneficial, and Russell Martin was one of the best in baseball at doing just that. Baseball Prospectus put in the work to quantify the value of pitch framing, calculating the run value of all the strikes a catcher earns (or fails to earn). Martin grades out as one of the best. Here’s how many runs he saved, solely by framing, from 2006 to 2016, the first 11 seasons of his career, along with where that total ranked among all catchers. Year Runs Rank 2006 22.9 2 2007 24.8 1 2008 14.3 3 2009 17 2 2010 3.9 9 2011 31.2 2 2012 25.9 1 2013 15.1 4 2014 19.4 2 2015 17.7 3 2016 15.8 3 The only season in which Martin ranked worse than fourth was 2010, when a hip injury limited him to 97 games. He still finished ninth. Add those numbers up, and he helped add 208 runs for his team just from framing alone. That number grows to 222.7 if you include the final three seasons of his career. To put that in perspective, last season, the Blue Jays scored 218 runs from August on. Through his career, just by framing, Martin added half a season's worth of runs for an entire team throughout. That's awe-inspiring stuff, and for that reason, Baseball Prospectus calculates Martin's career WAR at 55.8, a huge jump from his Baseball Reference mark. Likewise, FanGraphs keeps its own framing runs total, and those numbers go back to 2002. Over that time period, they rate Martin's framing as worth 165.7 runs, the highest total among all catchers. According to FanGraphs, Martin accrued 54.5 WAR over the course of his career, 11th-most among all catchers in AL/NL history, and ahead of several Hall of Famers, including Cochrane, Joe Mauer, and Ted Simmons. Martin might not get into the Hall of Fame, but he was a catcher with over 1,400 hits, 100 stolen bases, and 190 home runs. He combined his off-the-charts baseball IQ with immaculate leadership skills, and he was a highly productive player throughout his career. He gets overshadowed because he played in an era with Yadier Molina, Brian McCann, and Buster Posey, but don't be mistaken, in an era where catcher framing was finally quantifiable, Martin did everything possible to help win games. Even if he doesn't end up in Cooperstown one day, the mark he left on the game of baseball can't be denied. View full article

Few teams this century have seen their bullpens fall off harder than the 2024 Blue Jays. History says that they'll turn it around in 2025. Baseball is full of unpredictable occurrences. Unlikely heroes can emerge at any point, unbreakable records can be shattered, and even Alejandro Kirk can make the impossible happen and hit a triple. It's part of the game's charm. The unpredictability makes the game unique and occasionally makes you frustrated enough to want to bang your head against the wall. Few things are more unpredictable or more frustrating than volatile relief arms, and the Bue Jays bullpen was a frequent source of frustration in 2025. It was supposed to be a strength for the team; in 2023, Jordan Romano was an All-Star and his 36 saves were second in the AL. Erik Swanson, Jordan Hicks, Jay Jackson, Bowden Francis, and Genesis Cabrera all had sub-3.00 ERA’s. And let's not forget Tim Mayza, whose 1.52 ERA was the sixth-lowest among all pitchers with at least 50 innings pitches. In fact, the pen as a whole was pretty good. Its 3.68 ERA ranked eighth, its 3.91 FIP ranked sixth, and its 3.11 strikeout-to-walk ratio was the absolute best. The Blue Jays definitely benefitted from having to throw fewer relief innings than most teams, which meant depending less on the back-end of the bullpen, but even so, Fangraphs projections had them as the tenth-ranked relief corps in baseball going into the 2024 season. That's not how the season played out. Romano was ineffective and only threw 13 2/3 innings before getting hurt. Swanson ran an ERA over 5.00 and earned a midseason demotion. Mayza, who had been so dominant the year prior, pitched to an 8.03 ERA before being designated for assignment at the end of June. Only Yimi García, Chad Green, and deadline acquisition Ryan Yarborough had a positive bWAR pitching predominantly out of the pen for the Blue Jays. That ultimately led to a negative WAR overall by the pen, dead last in all of baseball. Talk about frustrating. We’ve already seen the Blue Jays make some changes to help improve the bullpen, Romano was non-tendered, and Cabrera, Luis Frias, and Dillon Tate all elected free agency. They’ve also made some additions, Jeff Hoffman has been one of the best relievers in baseball over the past two seasons, and he will certainly help. So should the re-signing of García and the addition of Nick Sandlin in a trade with the Guardians earlier this off-season. But as things currently stand, Swanson, Green, Zach Pop, Brendon Little, and Tommy Nance are all currently projected to be in the 'pen and several others will make an appearance throughout the long season. ZiPS projections just ran over at FanGraphs, and they have the bullpen projected for 3.2 WAR (before the addition of Jeff Hoffman). If the Jays can get anywhere close to this number it will go a long way to improving on 2024's 74-win total. But just how much can we expect the Blue Jays bullpen to improve in 2024? Let's start by taking a look at how the Blue Jays bullpen has shaken up over its history. No matter how you look at it, 2024 was an outlier in every sense of the word. Not only was it the worst in baseball; it was also the worst in franchise history. Odds are, no matter what happens this year, the Blue Jays aren't going to repeat that. Throughout franchise history, they have averaged 2.67 RP WAR per season, that number should be a good goal to shoot for in 2025. The Blue Jays had a 6.1-win Drop from 2023 to 2024 and that simply just doesn't happen often in baseball. Since 2000 it has only happened eight times (and that number falls to six if you throw out the short 2020 season. Year Team Year 1 WAR Year 2 WAR Difference Year 3 WAR 2001-2002 Guardians 8.4 2.1 6.3 3.2 2006-2007 Twins 8.1 2.0 6.1 1.7 2009-2010 Athletics 8.4 1.2 7.2 3.4 2009-2010 Diamondbacks 2.5 -3.6 6.1 1.9 2012-2013 Astros 2.4 -5.1 7.5 0.6 2017-2018 Guardians 8.2 -0.1 8.3 3.7 Take a look at year three. After their disastrous drop-off, these six teams improved their WAR by an average of 3.0 wins the next season (and that number becomes 4.0 if you include the 2021 Red Sox and Yankees). Some of this is simple regression; in order to have a big enough drop to appear on this table, you need to start out great in year one, then fall off terribly in year two, so your true talent level is probably somewhere in the middle anyway. And teams with such bad bullpens don't just run back the same terrible squad the next season; as the Blue Jays have, they get rid of the worst performers and bring in reinforcements. Now, while this should be reassuring, it doesn't guarantee anything. The Blue Jays will still need their relievers to stay healthy pitch well, and they will likely need a one or two of them to step up with surprise performance. But even if they don't reach their franchise average of 2.67 RP WAR or the 3.2 WAR that ZiPS projects, history says that no matter what happens, the Jays are unlikely going to end up with a minus sign in front of their WAR again. That should make for a lot less frustration coming out of the bullpen in 2025. View full article

No one lifts the ball more than Daulton Varsho. No one squares it up less. The path to success may lie in the middle. The Toronto Blue Jays have mentioned on several occasions that “internal improvement” will go a long way to improve the 74-game win total they had in 2024. That statement is true for all 30 teams in baseball, and the Blue Jays are no exception. In fact, they had several players who underperformed their expectations. George Springer, Davis Schneider, Alejandro Kirk, Ernie Clement, Daulton Varsho, and Bo Bichette all made at least 300 plate appearances wile running a wRC+ below 100. If you include the 83 wRC+ that Andrés Giménez put up in Cleveland, that makes seven players; only the Chicago White Sox had more. That's not where you want to be, and it's simply not good enough for a team that says it has playoff aspirations. The good news is all seven of the aforementioned players are projected to be much better than they were last year, according to Steamer. Even if that doesn't come to pass, getting above-average production from at least five of those seven players will go a long way toward helping this team score more runs and ultimately compete for a Wild Card spot. Varsho might be the most interesting of the bunch. His elite defence has made him one of the best outfielders in baseball. In fact, his 9.7 fWAR over the past three seasons ranks 14th among all outfielders, ahead of players like Christian Yelich, Teoscar Hernández, and Seiya Suzuki. It's pretty good company to be in. Varsho's bat has held him back. Despite hitting 38 home runs over the past two seasons, he has a combined 92 wRC+, making him 8% worse than the average hitter. These numbers are fine, but they pale in comparison to the 27 HRs and 106 wRC+ he put up in his final season in Arizona. So what happened over the last few seasons? Is there hope that Varsho can take his offensive game to another level in 2025? To answer those questions, let's look back into the 2022 season and see what he did well. The first number that pops up is his 10.2% barrel rate, which was roughly three percentage points higher that year than any other year in his career. Barrels are the designation given to balls hit at an ideal combination of exit velocity and launch angle. In 2024, the typical barrel produced a .719 Batting Average and a 2.402 slugging percentage. Varsho's barrel rate dropped to 7.3% in 2023 and to 6.2% in 2024, which put him in the 31st percentile in baseball. Let's start with his batted ball profile: Varsho has seen his flyball and popup rate increase dramatically over the last few seasons, while his line drive rate, normally a fairly volatile stat, has bounced up and down. Overall, the combination of fly balls and line drives (the balls that can end up as barrels) has stayed roughly the same, but it's clear that, like so many players in today's game, he's trying to get the ball in the air more. However, Varsho's popup rate is very concerning. In 2024, it was 18.2%, the highest of his career and the highest of any qualified player by a huge margin. Moreover, when Varsho does hit a fly ball or a line drive, he's not hitting the ball as hard as he used to. In 2021 and 2022, when Varshio hit one of those air balls, he had a 93.8-mph exit velocity and 55.8% hard-hit rate. Since he joined the Blue Jays, those numbers are 91.9 mph and 47.3%. Varsho may be getting carried away with trying to lift the ball. Could a simple mechanical adjustment be the key to getting Varsho to square up the baseball more? Maybe! Thanks to Statcast's new bat tracking information, we know that he has solid bat speed. The problem is in his squared-up rate: On a per-swing basis, Varsho squares the ball up less than nearly every player in baseball. If you look at how often he squares it up when he makes contact, he's dead last. There's a pretty clear connection here. Esteban Rivera has written about Varsho's attack angle over at FanGraphs. Varsho has turned himself into a master of lifting the ball; his 24.4-degree launch angle was the highest among all qualified players in 2024. However, the extremely steep bat angle necessary to hit virtually everything in the air also means that Varsho's bat doesn't spend much time on plane with the ball. He's not making much contact, and he's among the worst players in the league at making solid contact. In order to succeed at the plate, Varsho will likely need to strike a better balance in his attack angle. That may be a big ask; hitting a round ball with a round bat is one of the hardest things to do in sports. New hitting coach David Popkins is coming from the Twins, who have for years been deeply committed to pulling the ball in the air, the exact thing that Varsho's swing is designed to accomplish. If Popkins can help Varsho strike that balance, barreling up the baseball just a little bit more, his offensive numbers could combine with his elite defence and above-average base running, to make the complete player we've been hoping for since Varsho's arrival in 2023. The Blue Jays don't even need Varsho to become elite at squaring up the ball. If he can just improve from worst in baseball to somewhere in the middle of the pack, then we should see both the batting average and the power numbers take a step forward this season. For a team expecting internal improvements, the star center fielder is a good place to start. View full article

FanGraphs' Steamer projections for the 2025 Blue Jays have released. What can we glean from the information? The Toronto Blue Jays off-season has been mostly uneventful so far. Between a trade for Andrés Giménez and the signing of Yimi Garcia, the team hasn’t made many impact moves so far. There have been numerous reports of the Jays being interested in players, but ultimately, they have come up short. There are still many moves to be made, and we fully expect the Jays to add somebody to this roster. But until that happens, the Jays' success in 2025 will come down to getting some real productive baseball from the players they already have on the roster. As things stand, the Blue Jays have a very intriguing group of 26 guys on the roster. There is a mix of older players who have had very good major league careers, young players who still may have untapped potential, and a little of everything in between. Now, the real question is, where will that performance come from? Is George Springer going to prove he’s still got some high-level baseball left in him? Will Daulton Varsho tap into the power that saw him hit 27 home runs in Arizona? What version of Bo Bichette will appear in 2025? The one that got down-ballot MVP votes in 2021-23, or the one that struggled to a 71 OPS+ in 2024? There is no way anyone can know for certain (predicting the future is hard), but we have our next best thing. Every year, several websites release projections that estimate how well (or poorly) players will perform based on factors like previous track records, aging trends, and pitch tracking data. They then devise a median projection of what they expect a player to do. Projections aren’t perfect. They have no way of knowing if a player is suddenly going to throw two mph harder or make a swing change to add some bat speed or if a player is dealing with some sort of injury (these games are played by humans, after all). Still, they give us some baseline of what to expect from some players. Steamer has come out with their projections for all MLB players, and a few Blue Jays ones caught my attention. We’ll go over three of my favourites here: Will Wagner Will Wagner joined the Blue Jays and immediately made a great first impression. In his rookie season, he hit .305/.337/.451 with 4 home runs in just 86 plate appearances, which was good enough for 0.7 fWAR in that limited amount of time before ending his season early due to a knee injury. Early reports say he should be good to go for spring training and the projection systems, as they’ve seen from Wagner. Here’s what Wagner did in 2024 vs. the projections for 2025. For the most part, the projections seem to buy into what Wagner did in his rookie season; the 117 wRC+ is projected to be 4th highest on the team, and getting on base at a .351 clip would be impressive (only Vladimir Guerrero Jr and Horwitz did that last year, minimum 100 PAs). Playing time is still to be determined, as we expect the Jays to add more to the roster, and with the Gimenez trade, that might limit the amount of at-bats Wagner sees at second base, where he played all but two of his games last season. He was significantly better vs. RHP (149 wRC+) vs LHP (57 wRC+). There is something to be said from taking data from such a small sample, as Davis Schneider's hot streak in 2023 as an example, but even if he’s just a LH platoon bat, there could be some real impact from Wagner, and the projections seem to agree. George Springer Part of the reason the Blue Jays offence struggled so much last year was because George Springer also struggled. The downward offensive performance has been the trend over the last few seasons for the 35-year-old. Here is his OPS+ over the last 3 seasons: 2022: 132 2023: 102 2024: 94 His quality of contact numbers has also decreased, seeing a decline in stats like average exit velocity, wOBA, and hard hit percentage. All while seeing an increase in strikeout percentage and having the highest ground ball rate of his career. It's not ideal for a guy who was second in the Blue Jays in at-bats in 2024. But there is still hope; Steamer is projecting things to bounce back somewhat in 2025. Most notably, he was in the power department, with a .411 slugging percentage, which is 40 points higher than where he finished in 2024 and is projected as the fourth highest on the team. The Blue Jays have said at points in 2024 that they have stats that believe Springer will bounce back. Still, it will be hard for a now 35-year-old with an elevated ground ball rate and decreasing exit velocities to bounce back, but if the Blue Jays can get anything close to this projection, the front office (and fans) should be thrilled. Bowden Francis There are a lot of question marks surrounding the Blue Jays' pitching staff in 2025. Chris Bassitt, Jose Berrios, and Kevin Gausman are all on the wrong side of 30, and with Yariel Rodriguez, Jake Bloss, and injuries to Ricky Tiedemann and Alek Manoah, there are a lot of question marks behind them. One player who was a pleasant surprise down the stretch was the performance of Bowden Francis, who, since joining the rotation on AUG 7th after Yusei Kikuchi was traded to Houston, was phenomenal. Nine starts with a 1.53 ERA, allowing opposing batters to just a .422 OPS against him and twice taking a no-hitter into the 9th inning. This season, one of the burning questions for the Blue Jays is who the real Bowden Francis is. Is this who he is, or is it more so the guy who pitched out of the pen and had a 5.68 ERA (with a FIP to match) that we saw in the first half of the season? Steamer takes its best guess and thinks that the full-season numbers we saw are more predictive than the player we saw in the second half. The most notable jump here is that they expect the ERA to be a full run higher (maybe expecting the superb quality of contact he induced last year to regress to the mean), with walk and strikeout numbers holding steady; it is also worth noting that no matter what happens this season, Bowden Francis is going to have a dramatic leap in innings pitched this year and no one knows how that will affect his performance. It's worth noting that Marco Estrada consistently outperformed his peripherals, and Francis is a candidate to do just that. One thing is for sure: the 2025 Blue Jays season is going to be one of answering a lot of questions. The looming free agency of Vlad Jr and Bichette is the biggest one. Still, there are a lot of question marks with some of the other key players on the roster, too, and although we have six months to follow these players and ride the roller coaster of a long season, getting a look at these projections can be a quick way of getting a feel of what could happen this season with just 78 days until Opening Day. View full article