3 Blue Jays Who Need to Get Going to Keep the Wins Coming

The Toronto Blue Jays‘ 16-17 start to the 2025 season in many ways encapsulates their average performance so far this year. This isn’t to necessarily say that the entire team is performing at an average rate, but certain players have stepped up and really overperformed while others need to get the ball going as soon as possible.

Getting off to a strong 5-2 record through their first seven games of 2025 and winning 12 of their first 20, the Blue Jays looked to be making a surprising impact on the AL East after a somewhat eventful offseason. Despite the strength of their divisional rivals around them, it seemed as though Toronto might find themselves competing for a playoff spot.

Individual bursts in performances from unlikely places like backup catcher Tyler Heineman’s .500/.519/.731 slash line through his first 27 plate appearances spurred this hot start for the Blue Jays. Their recent success is coming from marginal improvements from key bats in Toronto’s lineup and good pitching performances, but these will have to become more consistent for the Blue Jays to see true success in 2025.

While some players have been outstanding thus far for the Blue Jays and are serving as beacons of hope, the majority of Toronto’s roster is underperforming in concerningly-large ways. On all sides of the ball, the Jays have seen some of their stars play more like replacement-level players than the leaders that they are expected to be.

In terms of success, it’s certainly worth highlighting some players finding consistent success and leading this roster at the moment. The back end of the Jays’ bullpen consisting of Yimi García and Jeff Hoffman has been absolutely lights out so far and have provided stability that simply wasn’t there last season for the Blue Jays. Combined, they have a 1.9 bWAR and 1.1 fWAR on this young season already.

Across 14 appearances so far this season, Hoffman boasts a 1.10 ERA and an insane 23/2 strikeout-to-walk ratio while posting 7 saves. He’s limited contact almost entirely from opposing bats with a WHIP of just 0.71 and his consistency in recent games has been more than welcome for Toronto. García hasn’t allowed a run in 14 innings of work, notching two saves of his own and 18 strikeouts to just 4 walks. These two have been incredible acquisitions for the Jays this past offseason and their bullpen has been completely remodeled with their help.

Starting pitcher Kevin Gausman followed up his 2.2 inning outing that saw 6 runs surrendered against the New York Yankees by tossing 6 scoreless innings of one-hit ball with 9 strikeouts against Cleveland on Saturday. If he can consistently be this version of Gausman for the Jays this year, they’ll have a much higher chance of winning.

After mentioning some decent play from certain Blue Jays, it’s important to focus on the ones who by all means should be finding similar or higher levels of success but simply aren’t.

Bowden Francis

Coming into the 2025 season, Bowden Francis was one of the brightest spots of the Blue Jays’ rotation with a 3.30 ERA across 103.2 innings in 2024 to go along with multiple no-hit bids. A simple glance at his Baseball Savant page shows the difference in his underlying stats between this season and last – for instance, his Fastball Run Value went from being in the 96th percentile in 2024 all the way down to the 25th percentile league-wide this year.

Not only that, but his Pitching Run Value as a whole, which is meant to illustrate the overall effectiveness of a pitcher’s arsenal with 0 as an average score, went from being a +13 last season (86th percentile) to -10 (1st percentile). His last two outings have combined for 10 earned runs against in just 7.2 innings total, making for an ERA of 11.74 across these two starts.

Whatever changes Francis needs to make, he needs to make them soon because his role in Toronto’s rotation is one that will largely determine the team’s success as the season progresses.

Anthony Santander

Anthony Santander has had a difficult start to his Blue Jays tenure after signing a 5-year, $92.5M deal this past offseason. Slashing just .174/.257/.306 with 4 home runs and 12 RBI across 136 plate appearances, his struggles are plain to see. Santander doesn’t bring much to the table in terms of his defense, so his hitting needs to improve in order for Toronto’s signing of him to turn out beneficial.

Santander ranks in the 30th percentile or below across all of MLB in barrel rate (5.5%), chase rate (30.6%), and expected batting average (.211) just to name a few. It’s been plain to see for quite some time now that it shouldn’t be expected that Santander will hit 44 home runs every season like he did in 2024. While last season’s performance may have been an outlier of sorts for the switch-hitting outfielder, his numbers thus far in 2025 are far below his career averages.

An increase in swings-and-misses and and a lack of hard contact when he hits the ball is coming together to form a nightmare scenario for Anthony Santander early in the 2025 campaign. Blue Jay fans will not be very receptive to this performance for long, considering that Santander was their big free agent splash this past offseason.

Andrés Giménez

Andrés Giménez, similarly to the overall performance of his team, saw a surge in offensive performance at the start of the season and has tapered off to an extreme extent in recent games. Through Toronto’s first 7 games of 2024, Giménez slashed .308/.400/.731 with 3 home runs, 6 RBI, and a 1.131 OPS. He wasn’t acquired from Cleveland this offseason for his offense, but rather for his defensive stability and consistency on both sides of the ball.

Ever since that 7 game burst to start the season, Giménez has struggled mightily, posting a slashline of .138/.234/.184 for an abysmal OPS of just .418 and notching just two extra-base hits in the 98 plate appearances that composed this sample size. Despite the fact that his bat wasn’t the priority in Toronto trading for Giménez, the Blue Jays did not sign up to pay over $10M for a season OPS of .558 thus far into the year. Something has to change with Giménez’s bat and soon.

He went 2-for-4 in Toronto’s 5-3 victory in their series opener against the Cleveland Guardians on Friday night, so hopefully a return to form is in order for Giménez.

While Toronto’s struggles cannot necessarily be entirely attributed to the shortcomings of a few specific players, their worst stretches of their careers thus far are syncing up with Toronto’s worst stretch of the 2025 season.

Despite the fact that these prominent players aren’t producing for the Jays at the level that they are expected to, hopefully their recent bump in wins is an indication that changes are just over the horizon and Toronto can find some consistent success going forward.