Opening week in baseball is a time for high hopes and boundless optimism.
For Toronto Blue Jays fans entering the 2025 season, though, hope is decidedly more measured, and the optimism is muted on the cusp of Opening Day.
Sure, the return of baseball is enough to put some extra spring in your step. On some level, you’re happy just to know that real games and warmer, longer days are almost here. And you can talk yourself into believing that this year’s team is set up for more than 90 wins and post-season baseball. You can imagine that the roster tweaks and positive progression and a breakout here or there could turn this into a summer to remember.
And yet, there’s sufficient reason at the outset of the schedule for Blue Jays fans to keep aspirations in check. It’s not exactly cynicism, although that’s always out there. It’s more a matter that fans are keeping their enthusiasm in reserve for the moment.
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Watch Blue Jays Opening Day on Sportsnet
The Blue Jays are officially back as they begin their season with Jose Berrios on the mound against the Orioles. Watch Opening Day, beginning with a special edition of Blue Jays Central, starting at 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT on Thursday, March 27, on Sportsnet and Sportsnet+.
Some of that is attributable to a deeply disappointing 2024 season. Given the anticipated trajectory of the franchise in recent years, to have an unexpected step backward and a deadline sell-off is enough to make a fan question the direction of the team, and wonder whether the best of times have passed for this iteration of Blue Jays.
A big off-season may have helped to salve those wounds from last season, but although the Jays dabbled at the top of the free-agent market again, there were no historic signings to spark uninhibited fervour. The hot stove brought fans a mostly satisfactory, basically competent set of signings and acquisitions.
More than anything, there’s the realization that the team has seemingly, possibly, reached the end of the Vlad and Bo era. After six seasons together on the big-league roster, and several more in their ascendancy as top prospects, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette are potentially entering their last seasons in Toronto, leaving significant questions looming for what comes next.
Their impending free agency poses the uncomfortable question: Is this the end of this competitive window? And if so, then what’s next?
There’s still six months and a whole season ahead, and perhaps some faith that at least one player or the other could be re-signed at some point. But if we are still thinking in terms of windows, the presence of those two second-generation all-stars on the roster served as an important signifier of the Blue Jays’ legitimacy as possible contenders. Their talent was an opportunity, and the opportunity has nearly passed.
The Blue Jays front office has stated for years that their goal is to remain perpetually competitive, with one window opening into the next. But, to torture the metaphor, one can’t be blamed for having trepidation that the step out of one window and into the next might involve a precipitous drop.
And one can’t help but acknowledge the general state of the world around us when it comes to the effort involved in mustering up positive feelings these days.
Those are the sort of ponderous notions that come to weigh down the spirits after a long winter. And yet, at least when it comes to baseball, there are some small blooms of belief if you look closely enough.
Despite the general consensus about the poor state of the Blue Jays’ minor-league system, 2025 marks the first season in several years that there were legitimate battles for roster spots that resulted in hard decisions between good young players. Addison Barger, Steward Berroa and Alan Roden spent the last several weeks crushing baseballs and generally looking like ballplayers. Roden has come north with the Blue Jays, despite being a long shot at the outset of spring training to make the team, but Barger also seems primed to take a step forward in the coming months.
On the mound, Trey Yesavage appeared as part of the Spring Breakout games in Florida this month, and despite his youth — he’s still just 21 years old — he looked fully grown, imposing and impressive in his brief appearance.
On the other side of time’s ledger, there is future Hall of Famer Max Scherzer, whose presence in a Blue Jays uniform near the end of his career is at least a curiosity for fans. How much of his legendary intensity and quality he can bring to bear on the upcoming season is an open, if compelling, question.
Notably, Scherzer will turn 41 on July 27, and Yesavage will turn 22 on July 28. If one represents the glories of the past and the other the potential for the future, the burning questions for the next few months will be where the Blue Jays find themselves on July 31, at the MLB trade deadline.
As the mantra goes, it’s a long season. But in this highly consequential moment for the Blue Jays, the coming weeks will be that much more meaningful in understanding if this is the end of one era, an extension of the current era (pardon the pun), or a turn toward something new, and perhaps further in the distance.
