“It just came easier last year,” reliever Jeff Hoffman tells USA Today Sports. “It’s a very similar group to last year, and it was so easy. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we have to fight to get to this identity as a team.’ It was just us.
“This year, it feels like it’s a little bit of a battle to be us.”
Now, the team searching for something resembling its old self could be breaking up. Baseball orthodoxy says the 12th – place team in a league where only six reach the playoffs should sell off assets and plan for a brighter day.
Yet a variety of factors could conspire to make these Blue Jays different. At least the fellows in the clubhouse hope so.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised if we added’
George Springer and Kevin Gausman were the free agent bell cows for this generation of Blue Jays, signing $150 million and $110 million deals in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Now, both are on expiring contracts, with some control over their futures.
Springer, with more than 10 years’ service time and five in Toronto, can block any trade, and Gausman can block trades to eight teams. Both are in wait-and-see mode and, by many accounts, so too is the Toronto front office.
The baseball industry widely expects this deadline to pick up in the last possible hours, due to the preponderance of contenders and the uncertainty facing many teams in the final days. And the Blue Jays have several complex factors to consider.
Gausman’s been here before, dealt in a deadline deal from Baltimore to Atlanta eight years ago, before he realized superstardom.
Kevin Gausman has struck out 123 batters in 121⅔ innings this season for the Blue Jays.
Nick Turchiaro, Imagn Images
“I’ve been doing this long enough to know you never really know what will happen,” says Gausman, who has pondered retirement after this season, even as he still strikes out more than a batter an inning, and has a 4.51 ERA in an AL-best 22 starts. “A couple days that could possibly be crazy. Everybody can kind of play GM and speculate who’s going to add and not add.