4 changes the Blue Jays must make immediately after 2024 debacle

Sacrifice defense for some offense

It wasn’t just too long ago that the Jays were one of the top offensive teams in the league. In fact, just two years ago, Toronto ranked in the top five in MLB across the bulk of the major offensive stat categories. However, with their defense severely lacking at the time, the team moved towards the mentality of upgrading their defense by sacrificing some offense in the process.

In doing so, the Jays ultimately moved away from power-producing hitters such as Lourdes Gurriel Jr., Teoscar Hernández and Brandon Belt in favour of more defensively-minded pieces such as Kevin Kiermaier, Daulton Varsho and more recently Isiah Kiner-Falefa. So what result has that approach brought to the club? Two straight seasons with a declining winning record along with a huge struggle to score runs in the process. This season, the Jays actually ranked near the bottom third of the league across many offensive categories. In addition, with their inability to generate runs, they ranked second-last only to the lowly Chicago White Sox in come-from-behind wins with only 25 all season. So basically if they ever fell behind in a game, it was a tall task for them to pull off a win in the end.

As a result, the Jays need to ditch that approach now and revert back to the offense-first mentality. In other words, their focus this offseason should be to bolster their offence once again at the expense of some of their solid defense. It has become evident now that the team had much more success previously in that setup and also provided some much more exciting baseball in the process. Therefore, when the Jays are set to explore options in free agency coming up, they should focus on offense, offense and more offense.