Editor’s Letter: Will the real Blue Jays please stand up?

After the last out of the World Series, as the Dodgers leapt for joy and lifted the Commissioner’s Trophy high, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. sat in the dugout, his eyes glinting with tears, looking exactly how we all felt: sad, shocked, heartbroken. At spring training three months later, Nicholas Hune-Brown was one of the first reporters to get access to the players, who had spent the off-season replaying every at-bat in their heads. They had things to say; Hune-Brown was ready to listen.

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Baseball is a notoriously difficult game to predict, so much so that MLB executives pay handsomely for experts called sabermetricians to run predictive mathematical formulas to improve their odds of success. Yet, for all their efforts, winning (at least for anyone not in a Dodgers uniform) remains a crapshoot. In 2024, the Jays finished 12th in the American League; one year later, with largely the same cast of characters, they finished first. Today, the question buried deep beneath the Rogers Centre turf is a seismic one: which version was the real Jays? Had they finally lived up to their potential, or was 2025 a fluke? Under the hot Dunedin sun, and later on the line with Rogers executives, Hune-Brown probed for answers.

There’s a joke around the Toronto Life office that every spring, just as the first buds appear, I announce that this could be the Jays’ year. I remember back in 2011, in my second month at the magazine, passionately pitching a front-of-book article about just that. There was reason for optimism: the team had signed a prime-years José Bautista, who had led the league in home runs, to a five-year deal. My pitch was successful, the Jays less so: they finished ninth in the AL and missed the playoffs by a mile. Still, that didn’t dim my optimism the following year, or the next. In fact, last year might have been the only time I didn’t have much hope, and they ended up mere centimetres from winning it all. No, I don’t do well in Vegas.

Heading into this season, the challenge for the Jays’ front office was to improve the team without breaking whatever was working. They knew that the pillars were intact: elite defence and high contact rates (i.e., the opposite of “close your eyes and swing hard”). But that describes many MLB teams. What made the Jays click last year?

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Hune-Brown asked Edward Rogers and his fellow executives, and lo, much business jargon did flow forth. My favourite response, however, came from the team’s good-natured, plain-talking manager, John Schneider, who said, effectively, hell if he knew. In fact, he was wondering the same thing. As Schneider told Hune-Brown: “We were asking guys, ‘Hey, was it the card games in the clubhouse? Was it what we were doing on the plane?’”

Despite an ER ward’s worth of injuries to start the season, these Jays are more talented than last year’s team. Socially, they have the same great chemistry. And they are no doubt as dead set on winning the World Series. Still, no one Hune-Brown spoke with wanted to say so, preferring to talk about ­“process”—one day at a time and all that—rather than results. Except, that is, for Vladdy. He sat with Hune-Brown in the dugout, looked him in the eye and said he intended to win it all, full stop. Then he was gone, darting up the steps for batting practice and swatting balls over the left-field fence.

Hune-Brown departed Florida with the impression of a team recovering healthily from its brutal loss and players who were managing to stay both laser-focused and loose. Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but I think this just might be their year.