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It’s getting grim very early in Toronto.
Sentimental-glances-at-the-diamond grim.
Quiet-uncertainty-in-the-clubhouse grim.
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Six-teams-to-catch-before-even-thinking-about-a-playoff-spot grim.
Yes, your defending American League champion Blue Jays are feeling it – not that glorious buzz that electrified their clubhouse, their city and most of Canada year ago, but rather the sensation that all of this will be broken up long before anyone imagined, and there’s nobody but themselves to blame.
These Blue Jays are now 46-56 after the first-place Tampa Bay Rays won a third consecutive game at Rogers Centre, a 4-2 victory Wednesday, July 22.
Toronto is 13 ½ games out of first place. It will be 14 ½ if the Rays complete the four-game sweep Thursday afternoon.
More important, the Blue Jays are showing few, if any, signs of altering their fate before the Aug. 3 trade deadline.
They’ve scored 402 runs, fewest in the majors. Have 16 multi-error games. A pitching staff ravaged by injury and middling performance.
And suddenly, a palpable feeling the band is breaking up.
Taylor Gausman knows. The wife of Blue Jays ace Kevin Gausman has seen him in a deadline deal before, and is well-aware Gausman’s five-year, $110 million deal expires after the season. Gausman has contemplated retirement after this season.
With that in mind, Taylor hopped a flight from their Louisiana home to Toronto, where Gausman started against the Rays on Tuesday. She snapped a photo of him pitching and surprised him with her presence and even coaxed him back onto the playing surface long after the game ended
Too soon to reminisce? Well, it certainly could have been Gausman’s last start at Rogers Centre.
“She just kind of told me, like, ‘Hey, let's go onto the field for a little while,’ not really thinking too much of it, but now I'm glad we did,” Gausman told Sportsnet. “The biggest thing, I really hope that I'm able to come back here, at least next weekend, just like one last time.”
Woah. The Blue Jays are not yet dead set on selling. There’s still 12 days left before the deadline. The expanded playoff format means you’re never truly out of it.
Yet maybe the Blue Jays have seen enough to know that a stealthy sprint down the backstretch into contention simply isn’t coming.
All falls down
Vlad Guerrero Jr. chose happiness Wednesday, greeting fans attending batting practice with high fives and then firing up his dugout after hitting a double that led to the Blue Jays’ first run.
By the end of the night, though, this stunning fact remained: Guerrero has yet to hit a home run at Rogers Centre this season.
There are baseball stats that border on minutiae, that can deceive or are missing crucial context. Yet there is little more to interpret from this: Guerrero, in the first year of a 14-year, $500 million contract, has not hit a home run in his home ballpark.
A cynic might note that on the bright side, Guerrero still has 13 more seasons to go yard at home. The overall lack of production, though – he’s got six home runs and a .689 OPS that’s 11% below league average – is alarming.
Not that it’s the only thing killing the Jays.
For a while there, rookie Kazuma Okamoto was one of the few sentient pieces of the Jays offense, posting a 1.026 OPS and hitting seven homers in a three-week span of June. Thursday, in what amounted to a do-or-die kind of game against the Rays, he was benched.
That’s what an 0-for-18 and a 10-for-67 slide in your last 18 games will get you. Okamoto has hit 22 home runs, and his first season since coming over from Japan will largely be viewed as a success, and he remains a key part of their future.
It’s just that in this season, the bottom fell out at the wrong time.
Other failings are harder to grasp. Daulton Varsho is a Gold Glove winner, a valued part of the Blue Jays’ core. Yet this iteration of Varsho has seen his outs above average dip to five after posting nine and 15 his previous two seasons.
This Varsho committed errors on consecutive nights against Tampa Bay, simply dropping a Yandy Diaz fly at the wall Wednesday, sparking a three-run inning that snapped a 1-1 tie. Nothing felonious.
Just more anecdotal data points that it’s simply not happening for these guys, this year.
Blue Jays trade chips: A whole bagful
And suddenly, we have a most unlikely pop-up seller.
It never seemed like it’d come to this. Baseball fandom gets so swept up in the binary buy-sell shtick that ancillary factors – such as the state of a franchise at a given time, and its objectives for the near- and long-term – can be forgotten.
And coming into 2026, the last thing the Blue Jays needed to do was sell.
The fervor and popularity in Toronto has once again, finally, reached early 1990s and mid-2010s level. A half-billion dollar renovation of Rogers Centre paired with a charismatic and winning team means crowds of 42,000 stuff themselves into the retractable-roof stadium, no finer place to watch a game when the roof is open and the summer nights are long.
Shoot, the club’s parent company, Rogers Communications, reported that sports and media revenue was up 13% in the second quarter, “largely driven by Blue Jays-related revenue” thanks to 95% of the seats filled for home games.
That drove a tacit understanding, from the overlords at Rogers, to club president Mark Shapiro and baseball operations chief Ross Atkins down to manager John Schneider, that this was once again a go-for-it year. That falling two outs shy of a World Series title in 2025 laid a foundation that, with a few tweaks and additions, would see the team over the top, or at least playing well into October once again.
Instead, the trade market is set to receive a significant transfusion from Toronto.
You want pitching? Gausman remains one of the game’s most reliable starters and has only a limited no-trade clause, with Milwaukee, Detroit, Pittsburgh and the Chicago White Sox the only contenders on it, according to multiple reports.
Shane Bieber just tossed six shutout innings at the White Sox, the best of his five starts after missing the season’s first three months due to arm woes. He, too, will be a free agent at season’s end.
And lurking in Class AAA, completing another rehab start without incident Wednesday: Two-time World Series champion Max Scherzer, ready to duct tape himself together for another October run.
You want outfielders? George Springer has 10-and-5 no-trade rights and has been banged up this year. But you think the pending free agent would like another crack at a World Series? Perhaps he’s exactly what the Philadelphia Phillies have been missing.
Varsho and Myles Straw won’t galvanize a lineup but are elite defense players and Straw emerged as a clubhouse glue guy in Toronto; both are on expiring contracts, too.
Need a bullpen? Jeff Hoffman’s stuff remains good even after he’s struggled following his soul-crushing World Series finish. He’s due $11 million in 2027.
And then there’s Louis Varland, who could bring a significant return after his playoff heroics a year ago were backed up by an All-Star first half. He will have four years of team control after this season, and could fetch the kind of impact player who could help the Blue Jays sooner, rather than later.
As for now? Varland was summoned in the ninth inning Wednesday down 4-2, glorified mop-up work for a guy who’d only pitched four times this month. The Blue Jays would love to keep him, for many years, but constructing a bullpen can wait until 2028.
It’s just that 2028 was the last thing on Toronto’s mind, even a few days ago. But reality is getting harder to ignore.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Will MLB trade deadline break up AL champs? Blue Jays collapsed quickly
