Three Blue Jays Who Need To Turn Things Around the Most

Through 17 games, the Toronto Blue Jays sit in fourth place in the American League East division with a 7-10 record, and this is far from where they expected to be. The Jays have suffered a lethal combination of injuries to key players and a lack of performance from others, leaving them in need of some better luck to turn things around early in 2026.

Toronto’s gotten some help from certain players, like Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (.328/.446/.443, six multi-hit games) and Andrés Giménez (.274/.318/.468, 3 HR, 11 RBI), but several holes in their lineup that have been just that so far; holes that aren’t generating much of anything.

The Jays’ pitching staff has been through all sorts of trouble, thanks to injuries to a myriad of their top arms, and the offense is missing several key players, including George Springer and Alejandro Kirk, making it even more crucial that the rest of the team steps up to get through this stretch.

Regardless of all the injuries the Blue Jays are going through at the moment, it hasn’t helped that these healthy players haven’t performed well so far in 2026.

Stats updated prior to games on April 16.

Kazuma Okamoto

The first player a Blue Jays fan might tell you isn’t living up to expectations is third baseman Kazuma Okamoto, who just signed a four-year, $60 million contract this offseason.

Through his first 15 games, Okamoto is slashing .224/.297/.345 and is one of 25 batters across MLB to strike out at least 22 times this season. The swing-and-miss in his game has seemingly grown astronomically in his transition from Japan’s NPB to MLB, as he’s expanding his zone and whiffing on over 35% of his swings.

One of the most appealing parts of Okamoto’s skill set in NPB was his ability to control his strikeouts at the plate, only posting a strikeout rate above 20% once in his NPB career (2019). His K-rate in 2026 is 34.4%.

He’s a player that can get hits in bunches, but he’s only notched three multi-hit games so far in 2026 and has six multi-strikeout games, including a four-strikeout disasterclass (affectionately referred to as a ‘golden sombrero’) on April 3 in Chicago.

There were concerns about how he’d handle fastballs at the MLB level, and he’s actually done a great job adjusting thus far, batting .333, slugging .593, and posting a +2 Run Value (RV) against four-seamers. However, against every other type of pitch, he’s totalled a combined -4 RV, including whiff rates at or above 40% on sliders, cutters, curveballs, splitters, and changeups.

There’s not much Baseball Savant pages can tell you in terms of league rankings this early in a season, but there’s so much blue on his page (indicating poor rankings) that it’s hard to see his performance in any sort of positive light thus far.

Okamoto definitely has the skill set to work his way out of this funk, and there’s still room to consider his struggles as part of the adjustment period to MLB. However, he’s got to figure it out soon because the Jays need a power bat badly, and that’s his specialty.

Nathan Lukes

Nathan Lukes had 17 hits for the Blue Jays in the 2025 postseason, including four extra-base hits and eight RBI, and in the regular season, he sported a strong .255/.323/.407 slashline with 12 home runs and 65 RBI. Through 12 MLB games in 2026, he looks like a shadow of himself with a meagre .071/.129/.071 triple-slash with only two singles to his name.

Lukes hasn’t been much of a power hitter in his career, but his squared-up rate (swings that get at least 80% of potential exit velocity based on bat and pitch speed) dropped from 30.3% in 2025 to just 16.4% this year.

He’s nearly replicated his ~14% whiff rate from last season, so he’s not missing the ball; he’s just not hitting it very well. He’s hitting the ball less to his pull side (30.8%) and more to the opposite field (34.6%), so he’s not hitting line drives or hard-hit balls to the pull side like he did last year.

In 2025, Lukes had 58 swings classified by Baseball Savant as line drives while also being ‘squared-up,’ and this year he only has three, which puts him on a hypothetical 162-game pace to tally about 37 of these hits. He only has a total of two hits in 2026, neither of which exceeded an exit velocity of 100+ mph or went for extra bases.

He doesn’t have any barrels yet this season either, which are batted balls that are expected to have at least a .500 batting average or 1.500 slugging percentage. He’s not a qualified hitter, but there are only 23 other hitters who are qualified that are still searching for their first barrel of the year. Lukes needs to step up in a major way for the Jays as a point of stability going forward.

Max Scherzer

Considering the immense pressure that the Jays’ rotation is under due to the plethora of injuries their pitching staff has suffered, the healthy arms that remain need to pick up their games and step up in bigger roles than usual. One pitcher who’s had a tough start so far is Max Scherzer.

His second start was abridged to just 2.0 innings due to right forearm tendinitis, so keep in mind he could’ve had more innings for this sample, but was unable to due to a brief injury. On the season, Scherzer has a 9.58 ERA through 10.1 innings with a 7.90 FIP, and a walk rate of 8.7%, which would be his highest since 2010.

One could use Goldilocks’ porridge as an analogy for Scherzer’s first three outings: one really bad start, one that was just alright, and one that was just right.

His first start of the year was his best by far; he threw six innings of one-run ball against the Rockies. The second start was his injury-shortened outing against the Dodgers, where he gave up two runs but didn’t get the chance to settle in and even the numbers out. His most recent outing was a nightmare come true: 2.1 innings pitched with eight earned runs surrendered versus the Twins.

It’s just a matter of him getting back into the swing of things after signing later in the offseason than most others. His fastball already has a Run Value of +3 on the season; only 13 pitchers have reached that mark this season while featuring the pitch as often as Scherzer (46.5%).

Scherzer still has the stuff to get big league hitters out with consistency, even at the age of 41. In the postseason last year, he threw 14.1 innings of 3.77 ERA ball and was trusted enough to start Game 7 of the World Series.

Closing Thoughts

You could probably pinpoint a million things that the Blue Jays could be doing to perform better than they have to start the 2026 season, but you could do the same with any team that’s lost even a single game over a sample this small. They’re performing well enough to get decent results, but they desperately need help from these three players.

Lukes and Scherzer were big parts of the Blue Jays’ success last year, and they need to reprise their roles as central players in this team’s quest to return to the World Series.

Okamoto was one of the Jays’ biggest additions this offseason. It’s understandable that there’s a necessary adjustment period when going from NPB to MLB, but sooner or later, he’s going to need to show Toronto why they spent $60 million on him.

This team has all the right parts to be one of the league’s best all-around groups, but it’s just a matter of staying healthy and making sure the healthy options are performing to their individual standards night in and night out.

Toronto is 7-10 and sits in fourth place in the AL East. It’ll take some time and effort for them to get out of this hole, especially when considering they haven’t played a single game against a division rival yet.