Last Updated on December 1, 2025 1:24 pm by Paul Williamson | Published: December 1, 2025

If you’re a Blue Jays fan, whether you look back on this season as an uplifting success story or a heartbreaking missed opportunity is something you’ve probably already discussed with your therapist. This team substantially outpaced their pre-season projections, becoming one of the feel good stories of the season as they came within literal inches of beating the Dodgers and winning their first World Series in 31 years – but the lasting impression in fans’ minds may be one of disappointment nonetheless. It takes a lot of good fortune and different parts coming together to turn teams into bonafide championship contenders and the Jays certainly got their fair share of such luck from the roleplayers on their team, making it difficult to predict a return to the Fall Classic. That said, they’ve wasted no time jumping head first into the free agent frenzy by retaining Shane Bieber and signing Dylan Cease so there’s still optimism to be had in the Great White North even if the pain of 2025 is not soon forgotten.

Catcher

After a pair of seasons with disappointing offensive production (a combined 13 home runs and 94 wRC+ over 226 games), Alejandro Kirk rebounded with what could be argued as the best all-around season of his career. Removing his 60-game season in 2021, this was Kirk’s best output in a number of important categories, most notably home runs (15), ISO (.140), and xwOBA (.357) with his numbers under the hood suggesting that the improvement wasn’t a fluke either. Almost across the board, his numbers took significant jump, with Kirk leveraging his already elite plate discipline skills (83rd-percentile Whiff% and 95th-percentile K%) to improve his quality of batted ball contact;

The interesting thing about Kirk’s newfound success is that it seems to have come at the expense of some of his contact numbers, with the Blue Jays’ backstop seemingly making the intentional choice to be less passive, with the intended outcome of doing more damage to the pitches he makes contact with. You can see the thought process clearly outlined when you note that this season he had the highest chase rate of his career, his second-lowest in-zone contact rate, but by far his highest swing percentage at “meatballs”, meaning he was focused on hunting only the juiciest of pitches, rather than settling for weaker contact on pitches around the edge of the zone. The process certainly seems to be working for him and he proved to be an integral part of the Jays’ World Series run, launching an additional five long balls while posting an .842 OPS over 18 postseason games. It’ll be interesting to see if the wear and tear of that run impacts Kirk out of the gate in 2026 but he’s suddenly making a strong case to be a top-10 catcher going forward.

As a 34-year-old journeyman, Tyler Heineman held down the backup catcher role admirably, posting a career-best 120 wRC+ over a career-high 64 games, but his expected statistics suggest that was largely a mirage as almost universally, his Statcast data suggests he was among the bottom 5th-10th percentile of all hitters while benefiting greatly from an unsustainably elevated .342 BABIP. He doesn’t reach the level of fantasy-relevant in even the deepest of formats.

First Base

The $500-million dollar man after re-upping during the offseason, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. more-or-less earned that contract on the strength of his all-time memorable performance in this year’s playoffs, hitting eight home runs with an incredible 1.289 OPS – but it’s easy to forget that his regular season was notably more of an up-and-down affair. Though by season’s end, he found himself with a Statcast page lit up with more red than the dashboard of a BMW with 500,000 miles on it, he continued his trend of mashing the ball around the park (but not leaving it) as he managed only 23 home runs across 156 games which was a far cry from my preseason bold prediction of him reaching 50 for the first time in his career.

The culprit, as per usual for Vlad, was his (relative) struggle to find the optimal launch angle on his batted balls. With a 97th-percentile bat speed, a 90th-percentile hard-hit rate, and the highest xBA in the league, you’d think that Guerrero should be a perennial threat for 40+ bombs, consistently competing with division foe Aaron Judge for the league lead, but even the best power profile can stall out when you’re in the bottom 40% of the league at achieving the launch angle sweet spot. After all, if you can’t find lift, a 100mph grounder is an out more often than not even with premium exit velos – something Vlad most definitely has as the owner of the hardest-hit ball of the 2025 season.

Though now forever entrenched as a playoff hero in Toronto, a strong six week stretch of play shouldn’t completely erase the 162 games that came before it, even if the fireworks came on the biggest stage possible. It’s entirely believable that his bevy of talent allows him to vault his production into the same superstar conversation that his name value holds but I’d be cautious about simply assuming that’s the case and using a first round pick on him. He may carry some of the highest upside of any big name hitter while also carrying one of the highest floors, but he’s still likely more of a second- to third-round value in my eyes.

Second Base

You sometimes see a two-headed monster in the infield with coaches playing the standard platoon game but it’s pretty rare to see a three-headed variety, like what Toronto deployed this season – in no small part because they each carry such a distinct skillset from their counterparts.

With Andres Gimenez, you have your stereotypical second baseman profile – low-power, high-speed, solid defense. Or at least, that was the expectation. Gimenez’s stolen base prowess of the last two seasons in which he stole 30 bags each year declined sharply through a combination of fewer games played (101 GP) and a career-worst batting average (.210) leading to fewer opportunities on the basepaths;

As you can see, his success rate on attempts has stayed steady but even factoring for the lack of opportunities, Gimenez showed he was suddenly far less willing to try to swipe an extra bag even when the chance was there. That reticence to steal is only one of several concerns with Gimenez’s fantasy profile going forward, as the underlying metrics point to him being one of the worst pure hitters among qualified contenders. Slap-hitting speedsters generally have a fairly short shelf-life in the fantasy world and barring a sudden turnaround, we could be nearing the end of the line for Gimenez’ value in our game.

The man, the myth, the mustache. Davis Schneider has proven able to hold down the power-hitting lane for this triumvirate, though he remains a mercurial player in many ways. After bursting onto the scene late in the 2023 season, blowing away all expectations en route to a 175 wRC+ and 1.007 OPS with eight home runs in a small sample of 35 games played, there was hope that he could hit his way into becoming a fixture in the lineup next year. Those hopes were dashed however, when Schneider crashed back to earth to the tune of a .191 average and .625 OPS across nearly a full season’s worth of games. Of course, the truth about Schneider’s true skill level was bound to be somewhere in between those two extremes and that’s exactly where he found himself by the end of the 2025 season, putting forth a .234/.361/.436 slashline with 11 home runs in roughly half a season’s worth of games. A righty with a reverse platoon split (ie. he struggles against lefties rather than righties), Schneider hit .259 against same-handed pitchers but only .215 against the opposite so he could be a candidate to get the lion’s share of the playing time at the keystone – especially if Bo Bichette lands elsewhere in free agency, which likely pushes Gimenez to shortstop.

When it comes specifically to glovework, Ernie Clement is perhaps the team’s best. Managing to accumulate 3.2 fWAR despite a batting line of .277/.313/.398 with just nine home runs and six steals, Clement is elite when it comes to bat control metrics; his whiff and strikeout rates rank in the 94th and 97th-percentile respectively, while he’s also elite in squared-up percentage (96th-percentile) and above-average in his ability to find the launch angle sweet-spot (76th-percentile) as well. Of course, if he married a power stroke to the rest of his profile, he’d already be a household name but he’s more of a cult hero instead – and perhaps mostly just in Canada too. Unfortunately, his average exit velocity ranked 249th among qualified hitters and he managed just 12 barreled balls all season, good for 237th in the league. There’s little reason to believe there’s a jump coming for Clement but he’ll likely find his way on and off of rosters throughout the season as a relatively safe fill-in option when the injury bug strikes.

Third Base

The aforementioned Ernie Clement soaked up a good portion of the reps at the hot corner this year as part of his utilityman role but it was Addison Barger that staked his claim to the role of being the Blue Jays’ third baseman of the future.

After struggling out of the gate during his rookie debut in 2024 with a .197 average and a 69 wRC+, Barger found his way to an above-average offensive season, posting much-improved numbers, including a .243 average and 107 wRC+, as well as a jump from a 38.0% hard-hit rate to a 50.9% mark that ranked in the top-10 percent of hitters. He then followed things up with a white-hot stretch in the postseason, batting .367 with a 1.024 OPS across 17 starts.

But as mentioned with Vlad up above, despite their importance and weight in our minds, postseason runs are such a small sample that they shouldn’t be the only consideration on projecting a player going forward. That said, they also shouldn’t be thrown out the window entirely, so it’s safe to presume that Barger’s regular season performance is reliable heading into next year – but he isn’t likely to hold an OPS above 1.000 either. I think cracking .800 might even prove difficult for him, as his tendency to swing and miss is still a major issue with him placing among the bottom half of the league in most discipline metrics.

Still, a third baseman who can hit 25+ home runs is becoming increasingly valuable in today’s game and with youth still on his side, he makes for an interesting upside play at the position.

Shortstop

Even though he missed 23 games, Bo Bichette finished the regular season just three hits shy of the league lead while setting a new career-high in wRC+ – all after what was undoubtedly his worst season as a professional in 2024. So why does it still feel like his season was somewhat of a disappointment?

To me, it simply comes down to his power plus speed output as among the 26 qualified shortstops this past year, Bichette’s HR+SB total of 22 ranked 19th. Outside of last season’s outlier, his home run totals have mostly stayed steady, making the culprit his declining stolen base totals instead;

It’s now been a couple years since Bichette added much value on the basepaths and he seems unlikely to reverse that trend going forward, particularly since injuries have taken a toll on his abilities of late. And if you’re only barely cracking a 50% success rate? Well, management is all the less likely to give you the green light for the opportunity anyway.

Instead, it will have to be an upper echelon average that carries his fantasy profile. That invites a fair bit of variance when evaluating him considering the inherent randomness that affects a hitter’s average. We saw a prime example of that in his down season, as Bichette managed a career-worst .269 BABIP after previously never dipping below .339 in any of the previous five seasons. That number returned to normalcy at .342 this season but the specter of the potential downside when things don’t quite click should remain top of mind when entering draft season next spring.

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Jeff Clowers

• Fantasy Baseball Year in Review - Toronto Blue Jays
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