2024 MLB Season Preview: Toronto Blue Jays
The Toronto Blue Jays are coming into the 2024 season with high hopes and a sense of urgency as this team will look to make a deep postseason run and fulfill their potential as a franchise while they still have a roster full of talent. Though they’ve been competitive in each of the last four years, they’ve failed to win a playoff game in that span, and missed the tournament altogether in tough luck 2021 season in which 91 wins wasn’t enough to garner an invitation to October. Sure, they’re in a tough division, but this is an excellent team on paper right now.
Where were they in 2023?
The Blue Jays are coming off of a solid yet perhaps ultimately disappointing 2023 season. They made their third postseason appearance in the last four seasons, but again managed to get swept in two games, this time by the Minnesota Twins. The franchise hasn’t won a playoff game since 2016.
In the regular season, the Jays’ 89-73 record was the ninth-best in MLB... but only the third-best in the ultra-competitive AL East. The team played solid-to-great ball all year, aside from an 11-17 May that really put a damper on their 18-10 start to the season, and more or less played as expected. There was a minor scary moment in mid-September when they were swept at home in a four-game set by the Rangers and fell out of playoff position, but promptly reeled off a five-game winning streak and ended up seizing the AL’s last playoff spot by a game.
Production-wise, this was a very solid team, finishing in the top five in pitching fWAR and the top ten in position player fWAR. Few teams had a more well-rounded roster: they had four starters with at least 2.6 fWAR, four relievers with at least 0.9 fWAR, eight position players with 2.0 fWAR, and another four between 1.0 and 2.0 fWAR. Kevin Gausman, Bo Bichette, and the now-departed Matt Chapman were their key producers, but a huge reason for the team’s success was how much they minimized value bleed: Paul DeJong’s horrible 44 PAs of -0.9 fWAR ball represented literally the only sub-replacement position player performance on the roster, and the pitching was pretty similar, with only a few relief innings by Adam Cimber, Zach Pop, and former Brave Wes Parsons, along with the travails of Alek Manoah’s 19 starts, falling below replacement.
What did they do in the off-season?
Toronto made few big splashes in the offseason, instead adding more role players and going with the solid-everywhere approach that worked so well for them last year. They re-signed Kevin Kiermaier for one year and $10.5 million, added Isiah Kiner-Falefa for two years and $15 million, grabbed Justin Turner for one year and $13 million, and most recently, added veterans Daniel Vogelbach, Eduardo Escobar, and Joey Votto on minor league deals.
Their big move was signing Yariel Rodriguez, fresh out of a stint in Japan, to a five-year contract worth $32 million. Rodriguez has been limited with a back injury in Spring Training and it’s not clear whether he’ll be a starter, a long reliever, or more of a fireman, but given the Jays’ clear preference for a specific type of depth, you can see what they’re angling for.
It’s possible that no individual move they made this offseason will make up for the loss of Chapman, but collectively, the Jays again look to have few weak spots.
Where are they hoping to go?
For the Jays, the question is whether their solid and deep, but not quite overpowering roster can help them overcome the crowded AL East field, and maybe win a playoff game or something. A bunch of the core is hitting free agency after the 2025 season, and some of the veterans are gone after 2026, so the window is essentially right now for Toronto.
While the Jays project for something like a third-place tie with the Orioles per FanGraphs at this moment, they still have 50-50 playoff odds. If they played in another division, well... those odds would be considerably higher. Still, this is a very strong roster despite its 84ish-win projection. Its positional rankings per FanGraphs’ Depth Charts at the moment include third (catcher), fifth (first base), sixth (right field, rotation), seventh (shortstop), and ninth (bullpen). Meanwhile, the only position that looks even bottom ten-ish is third base, where a combination of Turner, Kiner-Falefa, and Santiago Espinal look okay-ish but not exactly first division starter material.
Braves 2023 head-to-head
Maybe the less said about this sort of thing, the better. The Braves were swept in Toronto in 2023; they’ve lost their last nine games against the Blue Jays. The sweep was particularly brutal, too, as they were shut down by Chris Bassitt in a Spencer Strider start in the opener, bled away a 2-0 lead late and lost 5-2, and then had a Raisel Iglesias meltdown turn into a walkoff loss.
Atlanta will have to wait quite a while to snap that nine-game losing streak against the Jays, as they don’t face them until September, when the latter will fly in for a weekend set.
