With the power of friendship sapped from the Blue Jays, Ross Atkins got busy at the trade deadline
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Blue Jays’ George Springer talks with former teammate Daulton Varsho, who went from being a member of the Blue Jays on Monday morning, to a member of the Houston Astros on Monday evening, playing against his suddenly former team.David J. Phillip/The Associated Press
It has been obvious since just about the start of the season that this Toronto Blue Jays team is not the same one that went to the World Series last year.
Most of the players were the same, but the team wasn’t anywhere close. Whatever magic you felt watching them last October was gone, replaced by bad juju and never-explained incompetence.
In an interview with the Toronto Star a few days ago, starter Kevin Gausman put words to that feeling – “We’re just not nearly as close knit of a group as we were last year.”
On some teams, this sort of radical honesty would be the spur for change. On a team that’s losing like that’s the mission, it was the signal to begin the purge. It’s probably a coincidence that Gausman was the first one thrown overboard, but it doesn’t feel that way.
So while many teams were either giving up on their year or going for it on trade deadline day Monday, the Jays were doing something else – exorcising the roster that came within two outs of a championship.
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Gausman, who started Games 2 and 6 against the Dodgers, left for Chicago. Daulton Varsho, who patrolled centre, headed to Houston. He didn’t have far to go – across the hallway. He was in the Astros lineup against the Jays on Monday evening.
Shortly before the deadline at 6 p.m. ET, Toronto got rid of the main culprit of the Game 7 collapse, Jeff Hoffman.
It was a clear-out, but it wasn’t a selloff. Among the incomings were L.A. Angels’ starter José Soriano, a high-quality piece. Soriano cost the Jays one of their top prospects. He’s Gausman, but cheaper and under team control for a couple of years.
So where does this leave the Jays right now?
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Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins, seen here in April of this year, said after his busy trade deadline day that he wants his team to compete this season and that it’s in position to improve in the future.Jon Blacker/The Canadian Press
“We’re turning our focus to continuing to win games and compete this year and to make us better for the ’27 season and beyond that,” Jays GM Ross Atkins said after the deadline passed.
One wonders what their focus was turned to before that?
This was transparently about dismantling the malfunctioning version of last year’s team that showed up in spring training. That’s the problem with human chemistry experiments. You can’t know if the ingredients will explode until you mix them together.
Clearly, something went awry in the Jays’ lab over the winter. It’s hard to even know what to call what was lost – a synchronicity?
Even when they had it, the team had a hard time defining it. People remember Ernie Clement’s attempt best – “the power of friendship.”
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They definitely couldn’t explain it when it was suddenly gone, mostly because nobody tried. Until Gausman’s comments, the party line throughout 2026 has been that things should start clicking any day now.
Maybe it was as simple as letting Bo Bichette go. Maybe it’s all the new additions. Maybe it was the emotional letdown of getting so close against what’s starting to look like one of the all-time great teams and then pooching it. Maybe it’s a combo or some other undiscussed factor. But it’s something.
A team that buried the Yankees, rope-a-doped the Mariners and stood there slugging with the Dodgers until they got TKO’d didn’t just turn into pumpkins over the winter. Or, at least, didn’t turn into pumpkins for no reason.
It’s taken the Jays nearly six months to accept that and take the logical next step – continue changing until, hopefully, you change back.
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Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has had a frustrating season, with just six home runs. He hit eight in the team’s 2025 run to Game 7 of the World Series, and had 23 in the regular season.Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
The problem with this kind of thing for a modern baseball team is that there is no way to metricize it. One presumes that the Jays’ preseason spreadsheets had them walking away with the American League East. Why else invest so much of Edward Rogers’s not-so-hard earned money? Then the chaos of human relationships jumped into the calculation.
Now we’re getting outside predictive models and into pure voodoo. Does Soriano for Gausman minus Hoffman and Varsho equal a Vladimir Guerrero Jr. who remembers that you have to hit the ball up in the air? Up, as in not at the ground. Toward the fence. In a best-case scenario, a little bit beyond that point.
Does getting rid of Max Scherzer, George Springer and Shane Bieber at year’s end let successful newcomers like Dylan Cease and Kazuma Okamoto assume control of the clubhouse? And if so, is that a good thing? I’m sure the Jays have many ideas, but I doubt they have any clue.
All they can know is that there was a point at which the locker-room atmosphere translated to winning, and now it promotes reflexive shoulder shrugging.
Unlike so many teams of Toronto’s recent past, the problem isn’t talent. If the holdovers had played to their 2025 average, plus Cease, Okamoto and Tyler Rogers, this should have been a great year. Even with the perma-excuse of injuries, it hasn’t been anywhere close.
So now the Jays have one option – wait. They’ll have to see if a change really is like a vacation.
There’s a world in which things turn around fast, and they make a run to the wild card. There’s another in which things stay the same and they take a mulligan on the year.
Given the volatility of baseball’s labour situation, they could continue waiting a couple of years until they can find out if the new new Jays are anything like the old Jays.
By that time, could that Jays team be said to be the same one that surprised and delighted the country in October, 2025? And if not, would that squad – the one that got thrown in the recycling on Monday – represent the shortest, most memorable ‘era’ in Toronto’s baseball history?
