What a difference a few months can make. Before the 2025 season began, you'd be hard-pressed to find a team with worse vibes surrounding it than the Toronto Blue Jays. What was a once-promising core had seemingly collapsed amid a 74-win campaign in 2024. GM Ross Atkins' best efforts at finally, at long last, landing a big fish in free agency once again ended in heartbreak, with Juan Soto choosing the New York Mets and Corbin Burnes choosing the Arizona Diamondbacks.
And to make matters worse, Toronto's two homegrown stars, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette, were both set to hit free agency in the coming winter, and neither seemed all that thrilled about sticking around. It felt like just a matter of time before the bottom fell out and the rebuild began.
But flash forward to October, and here those same Blue Jays are, prepared to host Game 1 of the World Series against the powerhouse Los Angeles Dodgers on Friday night at 8:08 p.m. ET. It's among the more remarkable one-year turnarounds that we've seen in recent memory; few even had this Toronto team making the playoffs this season, and yet they finished tied for the American League's best record and atop a rugged AL East. They took on all comers in the playoffs, but neither the New York Yankees nor the Seattle Mariners could stand in their way.
Which begs the question: How the heck did they do it? There are many answers to that question, as you might expect. But look under the hood, and a few patterns emerge that are worth paying attention to.
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Get as aggressive as it takes to land your star(s)
While it takes an entire team to win a World Series, it's the stars who shine brightest in October. The Blue Jays know this as well as anybody; were it not for the heroics of Vladimir Guerrero Jr., George Springer and Kevin Gausman, their postseason run may have ended a round or two ago, and they may not have won their own division this year if it weren't for another All-Star-caliber season from Bo Bichette. Those four are all among the six most highly paid players on the team this season, and all of them were brought to Toronto because the Jays front office refused to take no for an answer.
Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
Guerrero Jr. was among the top international free agents in his class back in 2015, the son of baseball royalty with a swing that portended big things to come. And yet it was Toronto who got a deal done, in large part thanks to some creative maneuvering: The Blue Jays dealt prospect Chase De Jong and then-Minor League infielder Tim Locastro to the Los Angeles Dodgers in order to assemble enough bonus pool money to outbid the rest of the field and secure Vladdy's signature.
Years later, once Guerrero Jr. had blossomed into the face of the franchise, they made sure he'd stay that way, ponying up for a record $500 million contract extension to keep him from hitting free agency this winter. Toronto knew what he meant, both as a leader in the clubhouse and as a fixture in the middle of the lineup, and they also knew how difficult it would be to build a title contender without a star to anchor the offense.
Bo Bichette
You might look at where Bichette was taken in the 2016 MLB Draft, midway through the second round, and assume that he wasn't all that highly regarded a prospect coming out of high school. But don't get it twisted: Just about everyone wanted Bichette, the son of a prominent big leaguer who just about every evaluator had as a comfortably first-round talent.
So how did he fall to Toronto? In short, the Jays put on the full-court press: Bichette played his high school ball some 40 minutes or so from the team's Florida complex in Dunedin, and they so thoroughly impressed him during the pre-draft process that he reportedly forewent a handful of other offers in order to sign with the Blue Jays at pick No. 66 overall. The next year, Bichette was tearing through A-ball. A year after that, he was one of the top prospects in the sport.
George Springer
Once again, Toronto was willing to go the extra mile for a player it coveted. There were plenty of interested suitors in Springer when he hit the market back in the winter of 2020-21, fresh off three All-Star campaigns in four years (with a World Series title in there to boot) with the Houston Astros. The New York Mets, for one, were hot on Springer's heels.
But the Jays would not be denied. In late January, they upped their offer to six years and $151 million, still a franchise record for a free agent and some $25-30 million above what New York was willing to pay. It seemed like that deal might age poorly, as Springer sure seemed like a player in decline over the last two years. But he's defied Father Time in 2025, first with a sensational regular season and then by delivering a swing that will be talked about in Toronto for decades to come.
Kevin Gausman
It might seem a bit silly in hindsight, but there were major question marks around Gausman as he entered free agency after the 2021 campaign. He'd been a frustratingly mediocre pitcher for most of his 20s, only breaking out with the San Francisco Giants that season. Was it really wise to bet on a contract year that sure seemed like an outlier, in a notoriously pitcher-friendly park?
Toronto decided that it was, and boy are Jays fans glad they did. The Blue Jays outbid the rest of the market with a five-year, $110 million deal, one that Gausman has turned into a bargain as he's emerged as one of the league's steadiest workhorses. And he's been an essential part of this playoff run, allowing four runs over 17 innings across three starts and even earning the win in relief on two days' rest in Game 7 of the ALCS. It's hard to imagine where this pitching staff would be without him, and he's been every bit the ace Toronto hoped he would be four years ago.
Find role players who complement them
Toronto did what it had to do to put the tentpoles in place in both their lineup and their starting rotation. But it's not enough to simply assemble a few stars. The next step is just as important: You need to surround those stars with role players who fill in the gaps and excel in the areas your biggest names might not.
With Guerrero Jr., Springer and Bichette in tow, Toronto knew it would have no problem doing damage offensively. But none of those three projected as real assets on defense, and so the Jays set about doing whatever they needed to do in order to put great gloves all around them.
Play great defense
If there's been one overarching theme behind Atkins' moves over the last couple of years, it's been prioritizing run prevention. Daulton Varsho was a maddeningly inconsistent bat who split his time between catcher and the outfield for the Arizona Diamondbacks. He was a player that most people didn't know what to do with, and plenty of Jays fans were irate when Toronto sent hot young catcher Gabriel Moreno and outfielder Lourdes Gurriel Jr. to the desert back in December of 2022.
But Atkins saw what others couldn't. Freed from any catching responsibilities thanks to Alejandro Kirk, Varsho has blossomed into a genuinely great center fielder, exactly the sort of player you want next to Springer as he ages into (and eventually out of) a corner spot. And that's far from the only once-unpopular move that proved prescient: It was hard to grasp why the Jays went out of their way to acquire Andres Gimenez from Cleveland last offseason, but his typically stellar glove has been a godsend next to the defensively challenged Bichette (and his flexibility has been huge while Bichette has been on the shelf with a knee injury).
Go down the roster, and you start to see it everywhere. Toronto leapt at the chance to pick Ernie Clement up off the scrap heap in the spring of 2023 because he excelled defensively all over the diamond. Alejandro Kirk was an afterthought of an international free agent, a stump of a catcher at 5-foot-8, but the Jays signed him anyway because of his preternatural framing ability. The end result? A team that was by just about every metric the best defense in the sport in 2025.
Of course, all those gloves do also need to hit. And while two-way stars are rare and expensive, the Jays found a way to maximize the players they put around Vladdy, Bichette and Co. in one very specific way.
Make tons of contact
The other thing many of the names above have in common? They hardly ever strike out. Kirk sits in the 95th percentile in K rate. Clement? 97th. And on and on it goes, from Gimenez (70th) to Nathan Lukes (91st) to Isiah Kiner-Falefa (77th). If you're not going to do a ton of damage, the least you can do is just put the ball in play and try to make something happen. It's no surprise that the Jays had the second-fewest strikeouts in the Majors this season.
And because they had guys like Vladdy to lean on, they were able to do so without sacrificing impact (looking at you, Milwaukee Brewers). Toronto still finished seventh in slugging percentage and third in team OPS, a rare combination of power and contact ability that's awfully difficult to pull off. Atkins recognized that while home runs were expensive, putting the ball in play and putting pressure on the defense came cheap; once he had the former in place, he immediately set about going after the latter on the margins, in the process building one of the most complete teams in the sport.
Be willing to try
It bears reiterating just how bleak the outlook was for Toronto just a few months ago. The team had slid all the way to last place in the AL East in 2024, and with Guerrero Jr. and Bichette entering contract years, there were more than a few calls for the Jays to abandon this era and tear things down to the studs. Heck, if this team were located in many other markets around the league, that's probably exactly what would've happened.
But Atkins knew that access to star-level talent like the Jays had wasn't easy to come by. There was still a whole season to be played, and who knows what might happen? Granted, many of the moves Toronto actually made over the winter, from Anthony Santander to Max Scherzer, didn't move the needle too much. But others, like closer Jeff Hoffman, proved critical. And more importantly, it's what the Jays didn't do that mattered most: They didn't pull the rip cord.
There was no trade for Guerrero Jr. or Bichette. On the contrary, Toronto ponied up to keep its biggest star around for the rest of his career. They didn't set on their hands in free agency. They kept themselves alive and gave themselves one more chance to see if lightning might strike, and sometimes that's all it takes.
Don't be afraid to push your chips in when the time comes
And then, once lightning had in fact struck, Atkins didn't get complacent. He knew what he had in this team, one that did just about everything well and entered the second half of the season as much a favorite as anybody in the wide-open American League. So, once the trade deadline rolled around, he got to work.
Shane Bieber has struggled a bit in the postseason to date, but he was a crucial addition to a beleaguered rotation down the stretch; it's likely that Toronto doesn't even win its division without his contributions, and without the No. 1 seed and a first-round bye, who knows how this playoff run plays out? And his two primary bullpen acquisitions, Seranthony Dominguez (3.00 ERA in the regular season with Toronto) and Louis Varland (a 3.27 mark over a league-high 10 appearances in October), have played crucial roles in capturing the pennant.
Toronto knew it needed more pitching if it wanted to parlay its hot start into a sustainable run at a title, and Atkins delivered just that. And now, here the Jays are, just four wins away from their first World Series title in over three decades. It's been a circuitous route to this point, and lord knows things could have broken very differently along the way. But this front office and organization stayed the course and kept on building. Now, only one hurdle remains.