The Bo Bichette era is over in Toronto.
Bichette agreed to an three-year, $126 million deal with the Mets on Friday, ending his 10-year run with the Blue Jays’ organization after a drawn-out free agency.
Relive Bichette’s journey as a Blue Jay, from his selection in the second round of the 2016 draft all the way to the cusp of a World Series championship last year, and everything in between.
High expectations
When you’re the son of a 14-year MLB veteran with nearly 300 career home runs, being known as anything other than Dante Bichette’s kid in baseball circles would have been challenging. But Bichette quickly established his own reputation, hitting .569 as a senior in 2016 at Florida’s Lakewood High School to win the Gatorade/USA Today Florida Player of the Year award, cementing him on many MLB teams’ radar ahead of that summer’s draft.
The Blue Jays had hired new team president Mark Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins the year before, bringing them in to restock the organization’s farm system with an emphasis on player development.
The duo selected Bichette in the second round with the 66th overall pick, and the interest seemed to go both ways. Bichette later told Rodney Page of the Tampa Bay Times that he had turned down offers from other teams and preferred the Jays over everyone else, even sacrificing a little in his signing bonus to make it work with Toronto.
That turned out to be a good call.
Bichette drove in 36 runs in 22 Rookie Ball games that season and showed no letup whatsoever the following year. Assigned to Class-A Lansing to begin 2017, Bichette earned a promotion to High-A Dunedin and represented the Jays that summer at the 2017 Futures Game at All-Star Weekend in Miami.
Bichette closed out that year hitting .362 and, according to MLB.com, became the first teenager to lead the minors in batting average since 1963.
The Jays bumped him up to Double-A New Hampshire to begin 2018. By then, the majority of the Blue Jays’ prospect coverage focused on Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who, like Bichette, was the son of a former MLB star and made his professional debut with the organization the same year.
Guerrero had been much discussed since he signed with Toronto as an international free agent in 2015, but the legend of Vladdy only grew once he walked off the St. Louis Cardinals in Montreal – the city he was born and where his father spent half his career – with a towering home run in an exhibition game just before the start of the 2018 season.
As much of the attention turned to Guerrero, Bichette turned in a solid, yet unremarkable season where he slashed .286/.343/.453 with 11 home runs and 74 RBI in 131 games for the Fisher Cats. Guerrero would earn a promotion to the Triple-A Buffalo Bisons that summer but the Jays held Bichette back, instead waiting until the following year to allow him to take the next step, pairing him with Guerrero in Buffalo to begin 2019.
Things started rocky for the shortstop. After he was hit on the hand by a pitch, the Blue Jays ruled Bichette out for an indefinite period of time on April 23. Three days later, Guerrero joined the Jays in Toronto for his MLB debut while Bichette stayed back rehabbing.
It took until mid-June for Bichette to return to the Bisons, but by July he was knocking on the door of the majors. There was a case to be made that the Jays – firmly out of contention in mid-July – should leave Bichette in the minors for the rest of the season in order to gain an extra year of team control.
But Bichette was clearly ready and was over the injury that caused him to miss time early in the season. When the Jays made the call on July 28, Bichette graded as the eighth-best prospect in all of baseball, according to MLB Pipeline.
Guerrero and Bichette had long been tied at the hip as prospects in the Jays organization. Now they had the chance to see what they could do in the show.
A franchise cornerstone
To say Bichette hit the ground running is an understatement.
Toronto bumped Bichette to the bigs at the start of a 10-game road trip, a common tactic for organizations that don’t want to overwhelm highly-anticipated prospects with any extra pressure that comes with playing at home.
Bichette made his debut at the age of 21 in Kansas City against the Royals on Aug. 29 and over that 10-game trip, he hit .409 with 11 extra-base hits and a 1.254 OPS. He also became the first rookie since Ted Williams in 1939 with extra-base hits in nine straight games.
Bichette’s star grew on Aug. 20 when he homered twice off future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw in a game at Dodger Stadium. A couple weeks later, Bichette hit a 12th-inning walk-off home run against the Yankees.
All in all, Bichette led the Jays that season in batting average (.311), OPS (.930) and OPS+ (144), indicating he was 44 per cent better than the average MLB shortstop at the plate. The sample size of 46 games was relatively small, but Bichette proved he was worth the hype.
The 2020 season was extremely short for Bichette, and that wasn’t just due to the truncated schedule necessitated by COVID-19.
Bichette landed on the injured list with a knee sprain one quarter of the way through the 60-game schedule, and at the time he went down he was leading the team in batting average (.361), OBP (.391) and slugging (.672).
Bichette returned on Sept. 12 and helped lead the Jays to their first postseason berth in four years. Although they were swept by the Tampa Bay Rays in the Wild-Card Series, many considered the 2020 season to be the turning point for the Jays, who had also finished above .500 for the first time in years. And despite him missing more than half the season, Bichette still played a major part in that.
The Orlando native shined in his first full season of big-league action in 2021. Not only did he make the American League All-Star team for the first time in his career at just 23 years old, he led the AL in hits (191) and established career highs in home runs (29) and RBI (102) that still stand today.
Guerrero – who had been so-so in his first two MLB seasons – overshadowed Bichette’s production with a near-MVP 2021 campaign where he finished tied for the MLB lead in home runs. Guerrero and Bichette’s performance wasn’t quite enough to put Toronto back in the postseason as the Jays were eliminated on the regular season’s final day, but they would return to October the following year.
Bichette started slowly in 2022 and entered the month of September hitting just .260, but he caught fire over the final month with the Jays in the heat of a postseason chase. From Sept. 2 until the season’s final day on Oct. 5, Bichette hit .406 with a 1.105 OPS as the Jays closed out their schedule 22-10 to earn the top wild-card spot.
But that season did not end the way Toronto was hoping as the Jays blew an 8-1 lead in Game 2 against the Seattle Mariners.
Bichette returned to All-Star form in 2023 by finishing fourth in the AL in hits (175) despite a pair of stays on the injured list. He finished the year hitting .306 and likely would have led the league in knocks for a third straight season had he stayed healthy, coming up just 10 shy of the AL lead. But the Jays stalled once again in the postseason with a 2-0 wild-card sweep at the hands of the Minnesota Twins.
So far in the Vladdy and Bo era, Toronto had three postseason and appearances and not one win to show for it, going a combined 0-6. While Guerrero’s production ebbed and flowed throughout his first five years in the majors, Bichette’s was largely consistent, with his elite bat-to-ball skills and low strikeout rate. But all that changed in 2024.
Facing adversity
Bichette entered his sixth MLB season expecting to help anchor the Jays’ offence as he had done in years prior. Now 26 in the prime of his career, there was no reason to believe any sort of regression was on the way, especially with his high-contact hitting profile and age.
But 2024 went about as poorly as it could have. And it prompted some legitimate questions about Bichette’s long-term star potential.
He started slow, finishing March and April hitting just .213. But he’d done that before, and it’s not uncommon for players to need a few weeks of game action under their belt to find their timing at the plate.
May was better, but he nosedived the month after, and that’s when the injuries started.
He landed on the 10-day IL in mid-June with a right calf strain and was back on the shelf roughly four weeks later when he aggravated the injury, forcing him to miss two more months.
By the time he returned on Sept. 17, the Jays’ season was long over and Bichette’s numbers were far from salvageable. The plan was to finish the year strong and head into 2025 with some confidence. Except he was hurt again after just one game back, this time breaking his finger while taking ground balls. That ended his season for good.
All in all, Bichette posted career-lows across the board. He hit .225 with four home runs and 31 RBI in 81 games. His .598 OPS was drastically below his career total of .826 entering that season. According to Baseball Reference, Bichette had a Wins Above Replacement of -0.3 and his OPS+ of 70 meant he was 30 per cent worse than the average shortstop at the plate. No matter what metric you look, it was far from flattering.
Had he been healthier, maybe he would have rounded into form. Had the Jays been able to score more runs – they finished 23rd on the season – maybe Bichette would have gotten more pitches to hit. But the results were what they were, and they were puzzling.
His timing wasn’t great, either. Bichette was scheduled to become a free agent after the 2025 season, giving him just one more year to re-establish himself as a star before hitting the open market.
Blue Jays manager John Schneider had no doubt he would do just that.
“He’s been one of the best hitters in the league for a lot of years. I don’t think anyone expected him to have the year he did, both physically and performance-wise,” Schneider said via The Athletic’s Kaitlyn McGrath in a story posted in October of 2024.
“That gives you a lot of confidence just because of what he’s done over his career.”
As it turns out, Schneider was bang on.
Bouncing back
There was a case to be made the Blue Jays came into 2025 headed for disaster. Toronto finished last the year before and had not won a postseason game since 2016, raising questions about the future of their front office leadership.
That leadership entered the season without Bichette or Guerrero signed long-term.
Each player had expressed their desire to remain with the organization and win a World Series alongside one another nearly 10 years after coming up together in the low minor leagues. Much of the focus was centred on Guerrero, whose monster 2024 season alleviated any questions about his status as a superstar.
Guerrero set an extension deadline of the first full-squad spring workout, which came and went without an agreement, saying Toronto would need to compete with all other teams the following winter to sign him.
But once the season began, momentum toward a deal built and the Jays and their first baseman reached a $500 million contract that locked him up through 2039.
When the dust settled, that raised the question: What about Bo?
“I’m not sure how that will look. But for me right now, I’m just focused on being the best that I can be helping the team win. That’s really it,” he told reporters in spring training.
Even though Bichette’s long-term future was undetermined, the Guerrero deal seemed to ease everyone’s temperature and put the focus back on baseball. And after an up-and-down start to the season, the Jays thrived.
The power took a little while to come back, but Bichette’s ability to make contact and tally hits like few others was on full display. On July 27 and 28, Bichette had nine hits in a two-game span. A week later, he upped his batting average above .300 as Toronto pummeled the Rockies by a combined score of 45-6 in a three-game set at Coors Field.
By early September, Bichette’s OPS stood at a season-high .838 while the 82-59 Jays had a four-game divisional lead and appeared set to win their first AL East title in 10 years. And then a setback threw it all into question.
Oh so close
On Sept. 6 in a game against the Yankees, Bichette tried to score from second on a Nathan Lukes single to right. Right-fielder Cody Bellinger delivered a one-hop strike to catcher Austin Wells at home plate, who tagged out Bichette to end the inning. On the slide, Bichette’s legs twisted underneath him as he attempted to avoid the tag and his left knee crashed hard into Wells.
The shortstop was slow to get up and needed help to make it back to the dugout, except all appeared okay when he jogged out to shortstop for the top half of the seventh following a rain delay.
He finished the game, but he wasn’t okay. He sat in the series finale and went on the injured list 10 days later with a knee sprain. A week later, he was ruled out for the rest of the regular season.
The Jays were only so-so the rest of the season, but did enough to hold off the hard-charging Yankees and take the division with the best record in the American League, earning them a bye to the Division Series.
The initial target for Bichette’s return was the start of the playoffs, but that didn’t happen. He wasn’t ready for the AL Championship Series either, and it looked like Bichette’s season was about to come to an end when the Jays trailed the Seattle Mariners 3-1 in the seventh inning of Game 7.
However, George Springer’s dramatic three-run home run flipped the script and a few outs later, the Jays were off to their first World Series in 32 years.
That presented Bichette one final chance to return. Even if he was healthy enough, where would he play?
Andres Gimenez had been magnificent at shortstop all playoffs, Ernie Clement was red-hot with the bat and Addison Barger’s power from the left side was valuable, meaning the only conceivable position for Bichette to return at was second base, a spot he had never played before at the big-league level.
The Jays insisted Bichette was making progress in his recovery, except the clips that popped up on social media of him running – if you could call it that – did not inspire confidence. Did it really make sense for someone who had missed six weeks, could barely run, and was about to hit free agency to return and play a position he’s never played before? On the other hand, it was the World Series, and the Jays needed all the help they could get against the defending-champion Dodgers.
The 27-year-old had been consistent about wanting nothing more than to help the team win, and according to him, approached the coaching staff about shifting to second.
“It was something that I felt like I could get ready for quicker than another position. I just want to be ready to help the team in any way that is afforded to me, so that felt like an opportunity for me, and obviously they were on board with it,” he told reporters on the day of Game 1.
Bichette singled to right in his first at-bat back and collected eight hits during the World Series while holding his own in the field. Never one to shy away from a stage, his most impactful moment came in Game 7, when he crushed a slider Shohei Ohtani hung for a three-run home run that put Toronto up 3-0 in the third inning.
Undoubtedly the biggest home run of his life, it brought the Jays to the cusp of their long-awaited title. But nothing in Game 7 was as it seemed, and the Jays came so close so many times, ultimately ending up on the wrong end of one of the most dramatic finishes in sports history.
Bichette’s comeback was one of many highlights from the Jays’ postseason run in 2025. Guerrero was as locked in as he’s even been in his career. Clement set the postseason record for hits with 30. Max Scherzer had some memorable outings and said some bad words.
Had Miguel Rojas not hit an improbable game-tying homer in the ninth, or stumbled a quarter of a second longer on the Daulton Varsho ground ball in the bottom half of the inning, Bichette and the Jays would be World Series winners. Or pick from a half-dozen other things that went the Dodgers’ way in the late innings and the Jays are world champs.
But that’s how it goes in sports. And with news of Bichette’s signing Friday, that’s how it ends for him in Toronto.
“I’ll remember this group forever. This group has taught me what a team is. I think it’s probably the most valuable lesson of my career,” he said.
