Olney: Blue Jays' struggles 'don't make sense'
Published
Following another late-inning collapse on Tuesday night, the Toronto Blue Jays have now dropped three games in a row, bringing them to 4-11 in their past 15 contests and a 16-19 record overall.
Toronto’s offence has struggled mightily to begin the year, continuing a worrying trend from last season. The Blue Jays rank in the bottom third in all of baseball in categories such as hits, runs, RBI, home runs, total bases, and slugging percentage.
The inability to produce runs early on in the season has now started to take a toll on Toronto’s bullpen, with back-end arms such as Jeff Hoffman, Yimi Garcia, Brendon Little, and Chad Green all having made at least 15 appearances through the team’s first 35 games of the season.
Garcia entered the month of May with an earned run average of 0.00 but has now allowed seven runs across his last two outings, while Hoffman’s ERA has more than doubled since last Friday.
A lack of offence has directly contributed to an unsustainable amount of high-leverage innings for the team’s relievers, who have now blown two out of the last three games in the eighth and ninth innings.
Buster Olney of ESPN joined TSN 1050’s First Up on Wednesday morning to try and make sense of the Blue Jays’ struggles to start the year.
“I called around yesterday and spoke to a number of evaluators on a lot of different fronts and I was amazed that when I brought up the Blue Jays, in preparation for my conversation with you guys, the responses were almost identical, which was, ‘Man, they don’t add up to the sum of their parts, there’s something missing.’
“I got that sort of refrain back time and time and time again, where it’s just like…they don’t make sense, that you have the players that they have and the performance that they have. Folks just look at it and they say it doesn’t square, and they’re sort of scratching their head about what’s going on. But, I think they’re as mystified by the Blue Jays and the Blue Jays’ performances than probably a lot of Blue Jays fans.”
While there is still more than enough time in the 2025 season for the Blue Jays to turn things around, there are a number of expiring deals on the team that could force management to make a move in the near future if the team remains in the same position a couple months down the line.
Bo Bichette, Chris Bassitt, and Max Scherzer are all set for unrestricted free agency at the conclusion of the 2025 season, while Kevin Gausman, George Springer, Daulton Varsho, and Garcia will have their deals up after 2026.
Olney, however, said that the chance Toronto looks for a rebuild, or even a retool, is unlikely.
“When I had those conversations with the evaluators yesterday about (becoming sellers) in regards to the Blue Jays, everybody I spoke to said they won’t do that because of where the franchise is right now with Bichette nearing free agency, they just paid Vladdy a lot of money.
“Their feeling is that Mark Shapiro is nearing the end of his term and a decision is coming up on him, Ross [Atkins] and John Schneider. They can’t imagine that the Blue Jays would blow it up. But the sentiment with a lot of other teams is that, yeah, it might be time to start turning it over if it doesn’t happen. They just don't think the Blue Jays would do that.
The Blue Jays sit 3.5 games back in the American League East as continue their three-game series against the Los Angeles Angels on Thursday night, with Jose Berrios getting the start against former teammate Yusei Kikuchi.