There is no single reason the Toronto Blue Jays are hitting their first July off-day with a disappointing 41-46 record.
Some commonly cited sore spots include injuries, underperformance from Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and George Springer, inconsistent starting pitching overtaxing the bullpen, and an inability to generate offence early in games — or with runners in scoring position. That’s not an exhaustive list for brevity’s sake, but the point is that plenty has gone sideways for this club. An interesting complaint that has also arisen over the course of the season is the idea that the Blue Jays just aren’t playing good baseball.
That is a very difficult concept to define. Still, an idea has gained momentum that although Toronto has dealt with all manner of adversity, it has also been a bit sloppy, failing to execute at a fundamental level in costly ways. It’s an understandable theory when the Blue Jays are 11-15 in one-run games despite their late-inning duo of Tyler Rogers and Louis Varland having stellar seasons and recently lost a ballgame on a two-base wild pitch.
Anecdotally, the Blue Jays have looked sloppy at times and made mistakes that seem avoidable — like last Thursday when a needless, errant throw to third by Jeff Hoffman cost the team a run, then a rally was snuffed out due to Luis Urias getting doubled up at second base.
It’s easy for bad plays to be magnified when a team is losing. It’s worth understanding whether the Blue Jays have been hurt by sloppiness, or they are just a group whose sloppiness is showing through when there are few positives to mask it. If nothing else, playing poor baseball is probably easier to clean up than being bad overall in such a way that people notice your mistakes more.
Trying to get an answer here is a bit of a subjective exercise. There is no agreed-upon definition of ‘bad baseball,’ and there can be reasonable disagreement on what a ‘mistake’ really is. For example, a swing on a pitch way out of the strike zone could be considered an ugly mistake resulting from poor decision-making and the lack of a plan at the plate. It also could be thought of as an instance of a hitter being honestly fooled even if their preparation and approach to the at-bat was stellar. Failing to deliver hits with runners in scoring position could be interpreted as an execution issue, or a statistical fluctuation.
Examining whether the Blue Jays have been making an inordinate number of mistakes here will focus on things that players should be expected to do, almost regardless of their skill level. Vladdy failing to hit for power, fifth starters not producing viable starts, and corner outfielders lacking range can lead to bad outcomes, but there’s a difference between generating bad outcomes and sloppily playing the game.
Once again, there’s no existing definition for this, but we’re going to focus on three areas:
1. Making Routine Defensive Plays: It isn’t a mistake to lack the speed or agility to get hard-to-reach baseballs, but making errors and letting routine plays result in hits at a high rate is more of an execution problem.
2. Advancing Runners: Even the best hitters get out most of the time, but advancing runners (and scoring them from third with less than two outs) helps keep an offence moving between big hits — and is an attainable goal even for hitters who aren’t stars.
3. Functional Base Running: The Blue Jays lack the horsepower to be a team that swipes many bags, but that doesn’t mean they should make outs on the bases or get picked off regularly.
Making Routine Defensive Plays
The Blue Jays employ defenders that range from Gold Glove quality to barely adequate at the MLB level, but no one has an excuse to blow easy plays. It’s unfair to assume that blunders in the field will never happen, but if a team is making significantly more than its peers, that’s a bad sign.
Errors aren’t a perfect statistic by any means, but they are a decent place to start — and the Blue Jays have been slightly below average at avoiding them in 2026:
The average MLB team has committed 44 errors and has a .986 fielding percentage, so it’s fair to say the Blue Jays are booting the ball around too much.
We can get a little more advanced by seeing how many hits (excluding home runs) the team allows on balls with an expected batting average below .200. Because there is no league-wide data on precisely what a fair number to expect here is, we’ll use the 2025 Blue Jays as a baseline.
It’s not a profound difference, but it adds up. The Blue Jays are on pace to commit 14 more errors than last year’s team and concede 48 more hits on balls that are outs the vast majority of the time. Those extra base runners turn into runs against for a team that hasn’t been able to outscore its problems.
Advancing Runners
Two key situations for evaluating a team’s ability to advance runners are times when there is someone on second with no out, or a runner on third with one or fewer outs. Results in these situations show whether teams capitalize on run-scoring opportunities that don’t require a hit.
Considering how ineffective the team’s offence has been, it would make sense to assume the Blue Jays don’t succeed in these spots, but they have been above average this season.
The team has scored a slightly lower percentage of its runners (13.6 percent) than the MLB average (13.9 percent), but that’s due to a shortfall in timely hits, not an inability to move runners.
Another way to advance runners worth looking into is bunting. Like bunting or hate it, the Blue Jays do it more than other teams — Toronto has bunted at a rate 12 per cent above average in the John Schneider era — so it’s important to know whether they do it well.
That is tricky to measure due to some limits in which bunting statistics are kept, but one way to look at the issue is how successful the team is at delivering sac bunts compared to missing and fouling off bunt attempts. The chart below shows how they’ve done with that this year versus 2025, including a specific look at failed bunts in one-strike counts — misses that take hitters out of a bunting situation.
Bunting is pretty rare, even for the Blue Jays, but they have been far worse at it than last year.
Functional Base Running
The Blue Jays don’t often steal bases or take extra bases; they rank 26th in swipes (36) and 27th in XBT% (38 per cent). That doesn’t mean they can’t avoid outs that impede offensive momentum. The first way they can do that is by being self-aware and not consistently trying to steal despite a lack of speed. The team succeeds on this count with a stolen base percentage (80 per cent) that ranks sixth in the majors.
Perhaps the most avoidable possible out — and one that generates the most criticism — is the pickoff, and the Blue Jays have successfully avoided it in 2026. In fact, no team has been picked off fewer times than Toronto (3). To be fair, it’s easier to avoid outs of that nature when you’re not thinking to run in the first place, but we’re delving into sloppy baseball here, and it’s fair to point out that’s a type of sloppiness the Blue Jays have avoided.
Another metric in this realm is outs on the bases. There’s something to be said for finding the correct level of aggressiveness, which could include running into some outs if it pays off frequently enough. However, we know the Blue Jays are a slow squad that doesn’t take many chances with their legs, so keeping the outs on the bases number low is important. Toronto has made 26 outs on the base paths, slightly higher than the MLB average of 24. To its credit, just five of those have come at the plate, the third-lowest total in the majors.
These numbers are a bit inconclusive. This section is labelled ‘functional’ base running, and it seems Toronto is clearly that bar even if there have been some ugly individual incidents. The lack of value the Blue Jays have generated with their legs has more to do with a lack of dynamic runners than a tendency to shoot themselves in the foot.
Where does all of this leave us exactly?
Bad baseball and needless mistakes are slippery when it comes to measurement and definition, and perhaps it should come as no surprise that the Blue Jays have been a bit of a mixed bag, faring relatively well by some measures, but struggling with others — particularly on defence. A failure to excel in the little things probably isn’t a driving force behind the team’s disappointing season. Still, there are a few areas where the Blue Jays haven’t helped themselves during a time when they could use all the help they can get.