3 pivot moves the Blue Jays should immediately make after missing out on Juan Soto

For the first time in months, fans of Major League Baseball can exhale, as Juan Soto has made his decision. The superstar is headed to the New York Mets on a 15-year, $765 million contract that is sure to make you dizzy if you spend enough time thinking about how much money that truly is.

Now that the Toronto Blue Jays have come up short (again...), it's time for them to immediately pivot and snag multiple players that are still superstar-caliber, even if they're not quite on Soto's level. The club has the financial flexibility to make multiple external moves and the one major internal one they've needed to make for over a year now.

The fact that they missed out on Soto is not going to go over well with fans, but turning around and promplty making a few moves to heal the wound is going to be paramount. The Blue Jays need a bounce-back in 2025 if there's going to be any hope of avoiding that looming rebuild, so now is the time. While the rest of the industry is catching its breath after the Soto sweepstakes, the Blue Jays need to be on the phones reeling in some big fish of their own.

3 moves the Blue Jays must immediately make after missing out on Juan Soto

Extend Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

This would've been on a "moves the Blue Jays must make after signing Juan Soto" list if things went any differently, so there's no real shock at its inclusion here. The Blue Jays are about to lose both Bo Bichette and Guerrero to the open market at the end of next season, so now is the time to get one of them locked up for the foreseeable future.

It's felt for a while now that Bichette is good as gone, but Guerrero has remained the steady, face-of-the-franchise type of superstar the Blue Jays have needed, so it's him that deserves a massive deal of his own.

Guerrero has finished in the top-six in AL MVP voting twice in a six-year career while making four All-Star Games, earning a Gold Glove and bringing him two Silver Sluggers as well. He's one of the game's most prolific stars and has multiple 30-home run campaigns to back that up. His 137 career OPS+ implies that he's been 37 percent better than league-average since he debuted, which is nothing to scoff at either.

Now that Soto's headed elsewhere, the Blue Jays need to throw some of the crazy money Guerrero's way to keep him in Toronto until the end of his career. Sportsnet's Ben Nicholson-Smith recently raised a valid question of whether Guerrero would even want to stay with the Blue Jays, but adding money on to the value of their offer may get him to agree to stay where he's been at throughout his entire career.

Sign Max Fried

Since the Blue Jays' needs don't stop on offense, signing their new staff ace to go alongside Kevin Gausman and Jose Berrios would be a pretty solid consolation prize. Enter Max Fried, who's just wrapping up an outstanding eight-year stint leading the Atlanta Braves' starting rotation.

The left-hander would give the Blue Jays their only southpaw starter and add some spice to the current group. His addition to the starting-five would push Yariel Rodriguez into a sixth-starter/bullpen role, one that the Blue Jays have seen in his future since the day they signed him to his own free-agent deal. Rodriguez's stuff would play excellently as a reliever, so a signing of Fried would come with multiple benefits outside of his own production.

In his career, Fried has made two All-Star Games, won three Gold Gloves and finished in the top-five in NL Cy Young Award voting twice. He's been durable in recent years and has regularly been one of the best starting pitchers in the game. Missing out on the best hitter in Soto is tough, but pivoting to the best-available pitcher would be a great bounce-back move by the Blue Jays. A necessary one, too.

Bring Teoscar Hernandez home

Rumors have been circling that Teoscar Hernandez and the Los Angeles Dodgers are nearing a deal that would bring him back to the place he just won the first World Series ring of his career. However, he's sitting pretty now that Soto is off the board, as non-Dodgers teams are going to be calling to try and raise their offers left and right.

One of those clubs needs to be the Blue Jays, as there's a ton of familiarity between the two sides and Hernandez experienced some of the highest highs of his career as a member of the Jays. His six-year stint in the middle of their lineup was more than enough to make him one of the more popular power-hitters in their franchise's history, and his tight relationship with multiple current members of the Blue Jays would certainly help Toronto in their attempts to bring him back.

Hernandez has been doing his thing for nearly a decade now, so you know what you're getting from him. A ton of home runs and doubles, a boatload of strikeouts and some not-so-great defense in the outfield corners. He's not going to be brought aboard for his glove, but his bat is game-changing.

To be clear, we're not suggesting the Blue Jays extend Guerrero or re-sign Hernandez, but rather that they do both. The two were close friends during their time in Toronto together and it's tough to ignore the fact that the best Blue Jays teams we've seen in recent memory came with the two of them at the heart of the starting lineup.