The Toronto Blue Jays’ slow start to the season continued with a tough series against the Brewers in Milwaukee, where they dropped two of three and scored just one run in each of the final two games.
It was a continuation of a problem that has plagued this team through the first three weeks of the 2026 regular season: the offence is not scoring enough runs.
The Blue Jays (7-11) lost 2-1 on Wednesday against the Brewers, where both runs scored in an eighth inning where the Brewers didn’t hit a ball out of the infield.
“When you boil it down,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said after the game, “you’ve got to score more than one run.”
Thursday’s winning run for the Brewers came in an inning in which they led off with a walk and followed with three consecutive bunts.
“We’ve got to get back to everyone doing their part, whether that’s contact or slug,” Schneider said after Thursday’s loss. “It seems like we’re missing that extra-base hit right now.”
The Blue Jays enter action on Friday ranked 25th in runs scored per game (3.78), tied for 25th in walks taken and 27th in average exit velocity, per StatCast, while they have the second-fewest strikeouts in the majors.
As MLB.com’s Keegan Matheson suggests, the team is following the same approach as last season, where they led the majors in batting average and struck out the second fewest times of any club in the league, but the contact the team is making is just not productive enough in the early parts of this season.
That is reinforced by a significant drop in batting average on balls in play (BABIP) - which tracks a player’s average strictly on balls hit in play, removing strikeouts, home runs and sacrifice flies from the equation. In 2025, the Blue Jays ranked eighth in the league in BABIP (.298), and through 18 games this year, they rank 19th (.277).
One other facet on offence that has been a struggle for the team in 2026 has been batting with runners in scoring position. The Blue Jays rank tied for 14th in the majors with 183 plate appearances with runners in scoring position. In those situations, the team has just 11 extra-base hits, and their slugging percentage with runners in scoring position (.299) is second-worst in the league.
This year’s Blue Jays have already dealt with their share of bad injury luck, as TSN’s Steve Phillips detailed earlier this week, and that injury bug has hit the offence in two significant ways with George Springer and Alejandro Kirk already missing time this year.
In nine games since Kirk went down with a fractured thumb, rookie catcher Brandon Valenzuela has a batting average of just .174, and Nathan Lukes - who got a turn in the leadoff spot on Thursday with Springer out of the lineup - has hit a dreadful .065 in 13 games thus far.
“Just trying to get him going, really,” Schneider said of trying Lukes in the leadoff spot. “We’re not being married to one person in the leadoff spot. Looking at the profile of [Brewers starter Chad] Patrick, it’s a lot of stuff in the zone, and there’s a lot of contact. We’re trying to get [Lukes] going. We’re trying to get some traffic on for Vlad, Sanchez and Okamoto, so we’re trying to be a little creative if we can. If he’s going to be in the zone, we know Nate makes a ton of contact.”
The Blue Jays have scored three-or-fewer runs in nine of 18 games so far this year, and they own a 1-8 record in those instances.
A few big wins could help lessen the tension the Blue Jays have been playing under so far this year. Through 18 games, the Blue Jays have won just one game by more than four runs (10-4 against the Minnesota Twins on Apr. 10).
Their weekend opponent, the Arizona Diamondbacks, have played in a lot of high-scoring affairs this season, and have allowed their opponent to score more than three runs in six of their past 10 games.
