After beating the Tampa Bay Rays 13-4 on the final day of the regular season, Toronto Blue Jays superstar Vladimir Guerrero Jr. channelled one Kobe Bryant.
“The job is not finished,” he said that day. “Job’s not finished.”
With one goal in mind, the Blue Jays rolled their way to the World Series and came as close as one can get to glory but fell just short in a gut-wrenching 11-inning Game 7.
Nearly a month removed from getting their hearts ripped out, Bryant’s mantra is top of mind once more, particularly for Max Scherzer.
In an interview on Leafs Morning Take with Nick Alberga and Jay Rosehill on The Leafs Nation, the 41-year-old two-time World Series champ made it clear he wants to finish the job.
“Baseball gods got it wrong. We did everything right in a lot of different ways,” Scherzer said when asked about whether he’s drawn to return to the Jays next season to finish what he started. “So, that notion that there’s some unfinished business, yeah, we know we’re a championship-calibre team and we want to do that.”
Scherzer is currently a free agent after signing a one-year, $15.5 million deal with the Blue Jays ahead of the 2025 season, so it’s no guarantee he’ll be back north of the border in 2026.
However, he did make it clear that, despite being 41 years old, he’s still got some gas in the tank, and that running it back in a clubhouse he loved with teammates he loved is something he wants.
“Baseball’s funny. I understand the business of this. The team’s not going to look the exact same — there’s going to be free agent signings and guys traded — it’s just the way the game operates,” Scherzer said. “But from our standpoint, we just want everybody back. We want to get as many guys as we can back because we just know the clubhouse works and we know how well we play together, and it’s such a good thing we had there in ’25 that we want to do it in ’26.”
It wasn’t a perfectly smooth ride for the three-time Cy Young winner in his lone year with the Blue Jays. He pitched to a career-high 5.19 ERA and finished with a 5-5 record with 82 strikeouts in 17 starts.
But Scherzer attributed much of his struggles to a nagging thumb issue he dealt with through the start of the season, which held him out for all of April and May, and most of June.
He began turning a corner in August, when he earned a 4-1 record and a 3.34 ERA in six starts. He parlayed that into three solid appearances in the Jays’ post-season run, including Game 7 of the World Series, when he allowed one run over 4.1 innings with three strikeouts.
“Going through those playoffs, I knew like ‘Hey, I feel good,’ and especially with the thumb. To me, this was all about the thumb. The thumb was causing all the issues. The thumb was causing all my arm issues, all my shoulder issues. It was the only reason I wasn’t out there able to pitch the way I wanted to be able to pitch. I have solved that; that is completely gone. It’s over. That has freshened me up, and so how I pitched in the playoffs I feel is more indicative of how I can go out there and pitch next year.”
Scherzer mentioned that, with his thumb healed, he’s able to get back to his regular off-season training routine and pre-season ramp-up. He said that he sees himself being a 30-start pitcher next season and that he’s “really turned a corner. I’m really ready to go. The playoffs kind of cemented that.”
But the off-season in MLB comes with more than just training. For many players, it’s a time for decisions about their futures.
Scherzer’s been through it, having played for seven different franchises over the course of his 18-year Hall-of-Fame career, and he understands that he just has to “let the calendar work” as the months go by in free agency. But after coming that close to success with a group he seems to have a love for, it appears as though he wants to finish what he came to do when he signed that one-year deal last winter.
“I want everybody in that same exact situation playing the exact same ball,” he said.
