Trying to Make Heads or Tails of the 2025 Blue Jays

Were Giménez and Santander mistakes? Is Springer for real? Are the bullpen and rotation going to be OK? Is the farm improving? Can the front office keep surviving?

Your paid support makes independent, thoughtful, grass-fed, naturally raised, free-range coverage of Toronto Blue Jays baseball possible. Thank you.

What are the 2025 Toronto Blue Jays?

It is both an easy question to answer—they’re a mediocre baseball club playing in an era that rewards mediocrity like never before—and a bit of a tricky one.

Are they the team that swept the San Diego Padres last week? The one that was painfully swept by the Rays over the weekend? The one that gutted out a 2-1 win against Jacob deGrom and the Rangers on Monday? The one that will too often need lights-out performances, like the one Kevin Gausman provided in that game, from a deeply imperfect rotation in order to overcome their lack of offensive juice? The one that left, conservatively, 1,400 runners on base in a shutout loss on Tuesday?

They’re all those things, I suppose. It just depends on the day.

But as we mark two months having passed since Opening Day, with the season now one-third complete, it’s time to think about things a little more concretely. To take stock.

I forget who it was, or if it’s simply conventional wisdom with no particular quote to cite here, but they say that the first third of an MLB season is a time to find out what a team is in reality, not just in the offseason’s paper version. After Memorial Day, through June and July, it’s time to correct what can be corrected, either internally or via trade. And then August and September, after the deadline has passed, are about about really making your push—or playing the kids and making your assessments as you begin thinking about next year.

I’m sure that’s a little too one-size-fits all. I mean, it’s not as though teams haven’t been trying to correct problems up until now. But we’ve reached the point where the sample sizes are getting big enough to take a bit more seriously, and the meaningful questions about where this thing is going are starting to require answers.

And for a lot of those questions, when it comes to these Blue Jays, the answer could still go either way.

What the hell do I even mean by that, you ask? I mean that there are some big questions looming about the future of this season and the direction of this franchise, many of which have arisen or been reframed over the course of these last two months, that could just as easily be answered by the flip of a coin than by any kind of sober, rational analysis.

Let’s take a look at several of them…

---

---

Was Andres Giménez a mistake?

Tempting as it may be to write a guy off after just 36 games, this isn’t an argument that can be won using incoherent samples and bizarre hyperbole—though apparently that won’t stop people from trying. Gregor Chisohlm wrote for the Toronto Star on Sunday that, since Giménez has been out injured, he “hasn’t been missed,” because Ernie Clement has “performed better with the bat and his defence has been just as good.”

He later added that Clement, Addison Barger, and Nathan Lukes “have all proven to be more valuable than Giménez at a fraction of the cost.”

Proven! After 36 games!

“When he returns, the 26-year-old Giménez will reclaim his everyday role at second, which will push Barger and Clement into a time-share,” we’re told. “Occasionally, Barger will start in the outfield, which will cut into Lukes’s playing time. These decisions won’t be made on merit. They’ll be based on how much money each guy earns.”

Thought I was reading the Sun there for a second!

Anyway, we don’t need to interrogate this entire humdinger too vigorously, I don’t think. If cutting too much into Nathan Lukes’s playing time becomes a long-term problem, chalk that up as a massive victory, I say. But the stuff regarding Clement, specifically, is somewhat interesting.

To support the idea that he’s been better on both sides of the ball, we’re told that Clement has hit well since Giménez left the lineup—“.306 with a pair of extra-base hits, six RBIs and a .751 on-base plus slugging percentage heading into Saturday night’s road game against the Tampa Bay Rays”—and that he’d produced two Outs Above Average at second base over that same span. That’s equal to the number that Giménez has accrued so far this year, though it took Clement about half the innings.

Impressive stuff. Compelling argument? I’m not so sure.

Offensively, those numbers didn’t even take into account Clement’s strong Sunday in Tampa, which pushed his slash line since Giménez went down to .314/.390/.392, giving him a 130 wRC+ over that span. Problem is, we’re now just two 0-fers and a 1-fer later and that mark is all the way back down to 100. Not only does that make clear the kinds of utterly miniscule samples being used here, it’s also exactly the number (100) that Giménez has produced over his career. Meanwhile Clement currently sits on a career wRC+ of 79.

If we’re just talking this season as a whole, yes, Clement is at 73 and Giménez is at 67. But, I’ll remind for a third time, for Giménez that represents just 36 games—better than the “since May 7th” split above, and concerning given that he produced just an 83 mark last season, but still not very meaningful.

Giménez also has a dimension of speed that Clement doesn’t. He’s been +15.8 runs above average on the bases over 604 career games. In 331 games, Ernie’s at just +0.5.

Defensively, it’s true that Clement’s advanced metrics have been very good at any of the infield positions. You can extrapolate from them some pretty similar numbers to what Giménez has put up, though that’s provided we only look at OAA.

In 446 1/3 innings at second in his career, Clement is +6 by OAA, and in 4,279 innings there, Giménez is +52. By DRS—which Baseball Reference still uses, though I'm not sure there remains a great argument for that in the Statcast era—Giménez leads 64 to zero.

Still, one could argue that Clement simply has lacked the opportunities to prove himself as an everyday second baseman that Giménez has received, and that maybe the Jays, to their detriment, overlooked him. But the 79 career wRC+ goes a long way toward explaining that.

Thing is, Clement is the absolute prototype of a utility player—exactly the kind of guy that can easily make way for players like Barger or Will Wagner once they’re ready, and still find ways to help as a part-timer and late-inning defensive replacement. Clement, in that role, has worked like a charm so far. No need to expand it.

Giménez, meanwhile, looked like a utility guy in 2024, but very much was not that in the two years prior. He was a six-win player in 2022 (144 wRC+) and a four-win guy in 2023 (96 wRC+).

On paper, would it have have made more sense to invest in a slugging third baseman instead of Giménez, handing second base to a combination of the younger guys and Clement? Absolutely. But that still would have made it tough to get everyone the reps they deserved, and assumes a deal like that was even out there.

I also think that overlooks the fact that a major dimension of the Giménez deal was that he’s the most likely candidate to take over next season for Bo Bichette at shortstop—where having a little bit better range and a little bit stronger of an arm should make a legitimate difference compared to Ernie.

Anyway, I like Clement! I like Gregor! Giménez I’m not sold on, and if you think he'll never get back to even being a league average hitter—and that the real Clement as a hitter is the guy we’ve seen the last couple seasons and we can throw out his earlier numbers—the similarities do get stronger, along with the notion that Giménez might not be a particularly special player or difficult type of guy to be able to find. I’m not disagreeing that this could be true or that the deal could end up being a big mistake. I’m just saying it’s a bit absurd to think it’s a question that’s already been answered. It could go either way.

STOETEN’S COIN SEZ: Tails — After all that, I must admit that I worry too much about the bat to really love where this one seems to be going, though I’m sure he will look more at home when he’s the shortstop next season.

Is Anthony Santander another Kendrys Morales?

Frankly, at this point I might actually straight-up take the 28 homers that Kendrys provided in the first year after he controversially signed on to be Edwin Encarnación’s replacement over whatever we may get from Santander, even considering the .308 on-base he produced. Hell, that mark wouldn’t even look so bad here in 2025, when the league average is at .316. Kendrys would be just eight points below league average this year, instead of 16. Double hell, that was Santander’s mark last year!

Anyway, I get why this comparison would be a thing. We’re talking about a couple of sluggers on the upper portion of the age curve—though Santander, at 30, is meaningfully younger than the 34-year-old Morales was in his first year in Toronto. They’re guys who’ve had ups and downs year-by-year, occasionally pushing toward elite level production, but more often landing just shy of that relative to their defensive positions. They both sport identical career marks of 110 wRC+. And, of course, Morales came in and instantly disappointed, while Santander so far has done exactly the same.

With a fan base full of people that act like the real Blue Jays are only the team they see when they lose games, and seem desperate to always have their worst, most negative thoughts about the franchise validated—and plenty of media people happily willing to feed them shovels full of that shit for the sake of engagement—it’s no surprise that we’ve ended up here.

It’s also… you know… a product of how horrendous Santander’s Blue Jays career has started off.

Since becoming a full-time player the notorious slow starter has never had a wRC+ or an ISO at the end of May that are as poor as the ones he’s currently sporting: 69 and .129. His current strikeout rate (25.9%) would set a career high. He’s on pace for just 18 home runs, which would match the total of his worst full-ish season as a pro; 2021, when he played in just 110 games, produced a 92 wRC+, and was worth -0.2 WAR.

Undoubtedly he has it in him to be quite bad over the course of a full season, we just haven’t seen it in a while. And that’s understandably concerning. Especially because, as with Morales, the team swallowed more term on his deal than they would have preferred because it was so important to add his production in year one. And that element, of course, understandably deepens the negative feelings about the whole thing.

Now, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think that for sure that things will get better from here. The will! Santander looks clearly mixed up, and maybe feeling the effects of his hip injury more than is being let on—whereas Morales maybe always felt more like an ever-diminishing version of himself. The age difference makes it an awkward comparison, too. And it’s hardly like Santander is the only big name player struggling so far this season…

But if this is just one of those weird down years, and then, as expected, his production slips a little at age-31, then a little more at 32, well…

STOETEN’S COIN SEZ: Heads — I will admit that this one is all about feels, vibes, trying to manifest, and hoping that the knee-jerk, way-too-soon haters will ultimately end up looking as dumb as they deserve to, but I think he’ll be fine—maybe even beloved by the time all is said and done.

Was George Springer’s May more real than his April?

George Springer has certainly had a more pedestrian May than he did April, when he burst out of the gate slashing .306/.406/.482 for the month. A .183/.326/.380 line is enough to get you a 108 wRC+ these days, apparently—which is completely insane and says a lot about how tough it is out there for hitters right now. But that’s not going to cut it if Springer is going to continue to be the kind of X-factor that could really add unexpected depth to this lineup after several years of clear decline. Not to mention if he’s going to keep on being the guy to make up for some of the struggles Anthony Santander has been having.

Over the last three season’s we’ve seen growing precedent for Springer having peaks and valleys of production, with the gaps between peaks widening. He began 2023 in an awful way, producing a 67 wRC+ in April, and was down at 60 again in July, but kept his head above water for the year with marks of 133 and 120 in May and June, and 129 and 110 in August and September. Last year he was above league average in just June (106) and July (141), producing marks of 82, 81, 75, and 84 in the other four months of the season.

Obviously his 154 wRC+ this April is a mark he wasn’t likely to sustain, and even if it’s felt a little like it, he hasn’t fallen off of a cliff here in May. Still, the optimism of last month has unmistakably waned.

That said, there are positive markers in some of his numbers. He’s still seemingly trading strikeouts for power, and that renewed power threat seems to have made pitchers less comfortable pitching to him in the zone. His strikeout and walk rates for April and May are the two highest of any month since the beginning of 2023.

His hard hit rate here in May is the third-highest over that span, too. He just hasn’t been hitting nearly enough line drives—his 12% rate ranks third-last over that same period—and has returned to hitting too many balls on the ground. In April, his groundball rate was the lowest it’s been since the start of 2022, and it was one of just two months since the start of 2023 in which he hit the ball in the air more often than on the ground. He should do that more!

I wish I could say there is something that jumps out at me in his newfangled bat tracking data, but there really isn’t anything to see there but a lot of tinkering. However, I do think the graph below is pretty interesting.

Data via BaseballSavant

Springer made a change right before joining the Jays, as we see a dramatic shift in his average launch angle in 2020 after years of consistency. This coincided with the three most pull-heavy seasons of his career—and three very good years.

He got away from that version of himself in 2023 and ‘24, returning to more of an all-fields approach and presumably a flatter swing—though, before anybody goes crying about Don Mattingly (who wasn’t even involved in the offence that first year!), it must be said that his pull rates were shifting pretty significantly within each season. For example, he pulled the ball 35% of the time in April and May 2023, but over the next three months the rates went up to 47, 44, and 48%. So, I’m not really sure what exactly to make of all this.

However! If you wanted to say that, as far as late career Springer goes, the higher the launch angle the better, that might give you some optimism going forward. It would be an oversimplification, to be sure. But it might help you.

Then again, once I tell you that his launch angle was 20° in April and is at just 13° so far here in May, maybe it won’t.

STOETEN’S COIN SEZ: Heads — I mean, if .183/.326/.380 gives you a 108 wRC+, I think he can at least keep on being an above average hitter.

Is the bullpen going to be OK?

This is one of those questions that basically never ceases to be a question, but I think it’s worth considering at this very moment, since Yimi García is currently on the IL—he received a cortisone shot for a shoulder impingement and is taking a couple of days off before getting back on the mound—and Jeff Hoffman is now sporting a 5.79 ERA.

Yimi’s injury is different from the elbow issue that ended his season not long after he was sent to the Mariners at the deadline in exchange for Jonatan Clase last year, but I couldn’t say that makes this any less worrisome. What potentially does is that it’s being described as something that has developed slowly over the last few weeks. He’s been pitching effectively through some form of it, and the Jays’ actions seem to suggest that they think rest and the cortisone shot should clear it up well enough.

Maybe that’s not the right reading at all, but it would definitely feel worse if he was shut down for longer and being sent for an MRI, I think. (None of the reporting has suggested an MRI, though that doesn’t mean one wasn’t done.)

There’s optimism to be found when it comes to Hoffman, too. His 25% HR/FB rate is completely out of whack, especially compared to the sub-10% marks he’s put up since moving to the bullpen full-time. And metrics that don’t use home runs, or normalize HR/FB rate to league average, like xERA (2.77), xFIP (2.15), and SIERA (1.97), still look incredibly strong for him.

This great Twitter thread also showed that the majority of Hoffman’s pitches that have been taken over the fence recently have been pretty good ones, or at the very least in spots that it shouldn’t have been likely for them to be turned into home runs.

Add in the fact that Yariel Rodríguez and Brendon Little have been revelations so far in the ‘pen, that Mason Fluharty has been more than solid, that Chad Green has improved since his ugly April (despite getting burned by Josh Jung on Tuesday with a great piece of hitting off of a really good pitch), and that Erik Swanson and Nick Sandlin are progressing toward their returns, and you could say there’s a reasonably decent group there.

But it’s undeniably top-heavy. Anything that keeps García off the mound, or Hoffman still in a funk, will make things awfully difficult. And if they’re ever both unavailable? That could get ugly.

STOETEN’S COIN SEZ: Tails — It’s a bullpen! Bullpens are never fine! Even when they’re fine they’re never fine!

Can the rotation be fixed?

I think it’s fair here to start from the premise that the Jays’ rotation does need help. According to FanGraphs the club’s starters rank 26th in WAR as a group, and by the Baseball Reference version of the metric they rank 23rd.

Yes, Kevin Gausman has recently been turning back the clock, inducing whiffs with his splitter like it’s 2023 in each of his last two starts. And, sure, Max Scherzer will be eligible to come off the 60-day IL by the end of the week, and will be facing live hitters in the coming days. But whether Scherzer is able to provide any help is still up in the air—giant flashing “barring any setbacks” sign—and even with Bowden Francis making his best start of the year against a limp Texas lineup on Tuesday, the four and five spots still leave a whole lot to be desired.

Francis getting pulled after 77 pitches against the Padres, and after 75 in Arlington, make it clear that the club is not currently willing to pay the third-time-through-the-order penalty with him, which is completely understandable seeing opponents are now slashing .389/.463/.694 when seeing him a third time. Somehow he’s been even worse (.435/.519/.783) once he crosses the 75-pitch mark, regardless of how many times a batter has seen him.

Meanwhile, Eric Lauer’s tidy ERA is masking some pretty pedestrian numbers that seem to be worsening. Even if you believed the ERA was more representative of how he’s pitched than some of the other metrics, he’s not yet even into five-and-dive territory, having lasted just 4 1/3 and 3 innings in his last two starts respectively. Not that anyone’s been expecting a ton of length out of him—his outings have been more bullpen days than starts, really—but still!

And where do you go from there? More Easton Lucas? More Paxton Schultz? Waiting for Spencer Turnbull to ride in on a white horse?

It's a tough spot. And it’s made worse by the fact that there may not be a ton of sellers at the trade deadline, that the ones that do exist won’t have much to offer, and that the Jays probably aren’t going to be looking to blow big holes in their prospect pipeline to get a major deal done anyway. They may even be more likely to fall into the seller's category, or become one of those hybrid buyers/sellers. (Trade Bo but not anyone else?)

On the other hand, the potential returns of Scherzer and the good version of Gausman are exciting. And even though it was just against the struggling Rangers, Francis looking better certainly doesn’t hurt the mood. Add in that Alek Manoah has August as a target for a return to the mound, and Adam Macko is back (and dominating the Florida Complex League), and maybe you’re not in quite as bad shape as it appears.

STOETEN’S COIN SEZ: Heads — They’ve got a durable bunch and I’m not yet willing to write off the idea of getting meaningful contributions from Scherzer or Francis. I think it gets better rather than worse.

Is the farm improving enough?

I use the qualifier “enough” here because I think it’s fairly undeniable that the Jays’ farm system is improving, if for no other reason than that there’s no other direction for it to go. Also, we’re getting closer to seeing a bunch of important pitching prospects return from Tommy John, or various other surgeries. Adam Macko, Ricky Tiedemann, Landen Maroudis, Brandon Barriera, Chad Dallas and others should all be back and ready to go in 2026, if they aren’t already. And, of course, we’ve been seeing guys like Trey Yesavage and Arjun Nimmala really start to pop.

So, it will certainly be a healthier system as we head into next season. And there have been other good stories so far this year, too. Khal Stephen, Gage Stanifer, Yohendrick Pinango, R.J. Schreck, Edward Duran, Sam Shaw. And room for even more of those—Josh Kasevich? Dahian Santos? Orelvis?—as the season progresses and guys get healthy and/or something clicks.

Granted, you don’t see a ton that you would envision as future top-100 type players. There’s Nimmala, Yesavage, a healthy Tiedemann, maybe Stephen, theoretically a resurgent Orelvis, maybe eventually a healthy Jake Bloss again, and surely some lower minors guys and others I’m sleeping on here. Plus whoever they take with the eighth pick in the upcoming draft. But it’s not great. It’s a system with more guys than guys. Though that can sometimes work.

Alan Roden is still an exciting one, too. And there are guys who may have lost their prospect status but remain interesting potential big leaguers to varying degrees: Will Wagner, Leo Jiménez, Jonatan Clase, Joey Loperfido, Davis Schneider.

Help is coming, definitely. Things will get better. And in the meantime they have enough payroll space to continue trying to fill in the gaps to keep this thing afloat, as they’ve been doing the past few years.¹

Better enough, though? Man, that’s a tough one.

Movement can happen quickly in the prospect world, which is important to remember. The Detroit Tigers, for example, were ranked 23rd by MLB Pipeline heading into 2023, and heading into 2025 they were ranked number one. But, uh, the thing about that is, the Tigers have a great system and are one of the teams now back in the mix for AL playoff spots. The Rays rank number two. The Red Sox are number three. The Mariners, Guardians, and Twins are all in the top 10.

So, while the Jays are waiting for the fruits of their Great Reset, those other systems are going to be pumping out big leaguers—and likely quality ones at that. Their system, according those same Pipeline rankings, placed 27th. There are evaluators that are more bullish on them—Baseball America had them at 23rd coming into this season, for example—but they definitely need some guys to hit. And fast.

STOETEN’S COIN SEZ: Tails — I really like the top five or six guys they’ve got coming, but fixing this is going to be like turning a battleship in a bathtub and they’ve really only just gotten hold of the wheel again.

Can the front office keep surviving?

How will Mark Shapiro keep his job after Brandan Shanahan lost his?

That’s the question posed by the title of a predictably ass-dumb, bad faith recent piece by the Sun’s Steve Simmons.

“Brendan Shanahan, whose Maple Leafs won 32 playoff games in 11 seasons, was essentially fired the other day as president of the hockey club,” he writes. “Mark Shapiro, whose Blue Jays have won five playoff games in 10 seasons on the job, remains president of the baseball club. The five playoff wins, for the record, came from a team Shapiro inherited in 2016, not from one he built himself.”

You can’t help but admire his commitment to the bit here. Shapiro’s predecessor, Paul Beeston, has been out of the job for over a decade, so carrying all that water still has surely become little more than a Sisyphean task. You also can’t help but admire Simmons’ ability to typify the kind of Hockey Brain that has infected all corners of sports discourse in this vast country of ours.

Oh, fer sure, running the Toronto Maple Leafs—makin’ a couple-a picks each year and tryna find a coach that can remember who plays with 34 and 16—is definitely the same as overseeing a franchise in an uncapped league with five affiliates, a 20-round draft, large operations in Latin America, and which is also the sole operator of major facilities—a player development complex built on Shapiro’s watch after negotiations with multiple levels of government, and a stadium that cost $300 million just to renovate—and requires savvy relationship-building at the highest levels of the club’s multi-billion-dollar parent company to get buy-in on astronomical expenditures like these, Vlad Jr.’s contract, and others.

Totally the same job!

I mean… OK, that’s a little bit of bad faith there on my part, because I’m sure the Leafs job is a touch more complex than I suggest. But let’s be just a little bit fucking real here about the scope of what Shapiro does and stop trying to tie whether he should continue solely to the wholly unserious metric of counting playoff wins—the petty dullard’s favourite “gotcha” move when they realize that a more honest assessment, like playoff appearances or displaying any kind of understanding of the nature of baseball's playoffs, would be just a little too charitable for their hit piece.

This is not to say that I think Shapiro necessarily needs to keep his job. The baseball aspect of it is pretty significant! And on that front they’ve developed badly, spent badly, and things only seem to be getting worse.

I’d say here that they’ve also thrown away a ton of goodwill, but thanks to folks like Simmons—who went into flag-waving overdrive with talk of cronies and carpetbaggery (or was that Rosie?) to gin up hatred for this front office from basically the minute they arrived—there was hardly any of that to begin with.

Of course, there have been plenty of opportunities along the way to build that back up, so Shapiro can’t get a pass on this. I just honestly really wanted an excuse to link to this old piece on the subject, which I'm pretty sure I nailed.

Anyway, Shapiro’s contract is indeed up at the end of the season. If that weren’t the case, I might not even think this is much of a question. Ross Atkins, whose contract runs through 2026, feels like a more logical guy to send packing, as the failures seem to have been much more on his side of the business. But right now I think it would be pretty difficult for Rogers to announce extensions with either of them purely because of the optics.

I don’t think it would go over well.

Maybe that doesn’t matter as much as I think. Plenty of owners keep unpopular executives around as long as they’re making money for the company. But on the other hand, maybe with the renovation finished and the payroll ceiling lifted as high as could have ever been imagined, Shapiro’s work here is bascially complete.

I mean, wasn’t that really the job anyway? To lift the Jays out of the financial stupor that had them acting like a poverty franchise and add another true big market to further inflate the league’s bottom line?

STOETEN’S COIN SEZ: Heads — They’ve managed to last this long, so I think it would be foolish to count them out. It wouldn’t surprise me if Shaprio’s preaching about the value of stability has broken through. Plus, I’m a sucker for the funniest possible outcome.

---

Twitter ⚾ Bluesky ⚾ Podcast ⚾ Facebook

⚾ Want to support without going through Substack? You could always send cash to stoeten@gmail.com on Paypal or via Interac e-Transfer. I assure you I won’t say no. ⚾

1. Incidentally, this is why I think the “top five payroll!” criticism that we’ve heard a lot of this year is particularly lazy, as if they started from scratch and this is what they chose to spend on. No, they’ve largely been forced to spend inefficiently because of the failures of their development system. That’s a different kind of bad, obviously. But it’s certainly a more accurate description of the situation they’re in, and correctly casts the club’s ability to spend—and the front office’s ability to convince Rogers to spend—as a positive.