Blue Jays Happy Hour

The Blue Jays have lost five straight, their power output has somehow been worse than expected, and they don't have a lot of levers to pull. The vibes? They're bad. And this week we talk about our confidence levels of the big three at the top of the lineup turning things around, where solutions beyond their best four starters and relievers will come from, and a whole lot more!

The Blue Jays couldn't afford to dig themselves an early hole this season, and they've managed to avoid doing exactly that. Chris Bassitt, Jeff Hoffman, and Yimi Garcia pitching like the best starter, closer, and setup man in baseball will certainly help in that regard. But whether their success will prove durable—whether enough offence will come, whether the rotation will hold, and whether the bullpen can continue to live up to an impossibly high standard while being relied-upon heavily—remains to seen.PLUS: Putting an over/under on Max Scherzer's innings pitched, figuring out the roster once Nathan Lukes returns (a conversation we had before Davis Schneider was optioned down to Buffalo), check-ins on Barger, Wagner, Clement, and more!

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is now under contract with the Toronto Blue Jays for the next 15 years, and all it took to make it happen was a mere half-a-billion dollars. Everybody gets what they want except the pocketbook of a rich weirdo who couldn't spend all his money in a thousand lifetimes anyway. That's a win-win-win in my book!

The Blue Jays split a four-gamer with the Orioles to start the 2025 season, and then swept the Nationals at home. Max Scherzer may be out, but with performances like we've been seeing from the likes of Andrés Giménez, George Springer, and Easton Lucas, his absence has barely been felt so far. And so for this week's episode, knowing precisely what the answer would be, we went for a quasi-traditional Vibe Check. And folks, the vibes are good. (For now.)

The 2025 MLB season is nearly upon us, and the Blue Jays have a fighting chance in an ultra-tight American League in which every team still has the same record. But merely meeting their projections won't be good enough, and succeeding will rely on some good stories from a group of position player prospects older than Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and health from a starting rotation with an average age of 34. This week we talk about what it will take for the Jays to have a successful season and how an unsuccessful one might play out, why the team chose Roden over Barger and parted ways with Ryan Yarbrough, the reasons to really like Alejandro Kirk's contract—plus predictions for the season and more!

We start this one off with an obligatory check-in on the Vladdy circus—and circle back on it at the end because of Mark Shapiro's surprising admission of optimism on still getting an extension done—and some of the goings-on in Dunedin, before heading full on into Food Talk. That's right, it's our annual review of the Jays' newly announced ballpark food offerings!