Where the Blue Jays stand in the Soto sweepstakes

This story was excerpted from Keegan Matheson’s Blue Jays Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

TORONTO -- Oh, yes, we’re doing this again.

It’s Juan Soto season in Major League Baseball and the Blue Jays want to dance. Of course they do. It’s Juan Soto.

The great heartbreak of Shohei Ohtani an offseason ago has left so many Blue Jays fans hesitant to lean into the madness again -- understandably so -- but the Blue Jays are on the short list of teams with the ownership buy-in and recent spending habits to put them in conversations for players of this caliber. They’re not the old Blue Jays anymore, a big-market team pretending to be from a small town.

Having a dollar and spending a dollar are two very different things, though. With ESPN’s Jeff Passan reporting that the Blue Jays will meet with Soto this week, there’s clear interest, but this isn’t about which organization likes Soto the most … It’s about which organization is most willing to do something about it.

While many in the industry still view Soto’s free agency as the battle of New York between the Mets and Yankees, there is still an opening for anyone else to step in and make an impression.

The head vs. the heart
If the Blue Jays ever get down the road with Soto and generate a level of genuine interest from the young star and his agent, Scott Boras, this is what it will all come down to.

Modern front offices are a beehive on information and projections. A good front office doesn’t marry itself to those numbers, though, and knows when to let the reality of their circumstances have a seat at the table. At some point in the Soto negotiations, one team will need to break from their projections and make an emotional decision to say: “Whatever. We want this guy.”

That hasn’t always been the Blue Jays’ way of doing business. For nearly the past decade, we’ve seen this front office spend freely and bring in Hyun Jin Ryu, George Springer, Kevin Gausman and Chris Bassitt while also extending José Berríos. Toronto’s big swings have, for the most part, played out well. The Blue Jays lean heavily on their own valuations of players, though -- the result of a thousand meetings that are surely happening while you’re reading this -- and Soto is a player who transcends any typical free-agent approach.

The Blue Jays wouldn’t be up against the money of the Mets or the money of the Yankees, they’d be up against more human forces. The pride of the Yankees, who just fell short in the World Series and know they can’t take a step backwards, will likely push them beyond their comfort zone. The aggression of Mets owner Steven Cohen, who has already spent an incredible amount on that roster, could be on full display. It’s New York versus New York, ego versus ego as much as dollar versus dollar.

Are the Blue Jays really going to be the team that, in the home stretch of these negotiations, chooses to break away from the pack? Will the disappointment of eight seasons without a postseason win be enough to force this front office to break away from what we’ve seen and do something bolder?

What it would look like
We just saw what it looked like with Soto batting in front of Aaron Judge. Imagine the same with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. It’s a terrifying thought for pitchers.

The baseball side is obvious. Soto is on a Hall of Fame track, a truly elite hitter who has looked just as dominant in the postseason. He would instantly -- all by himself -- turn the Blue Jays into a legitimate contender in 2025, but any conversation involving Soto requires a broader view of what this would mean to the organization.

As it stands today, the Blue Jays have an off-ramp available to them after 2025 and an even clearer one after 2026. With Guerrero and Bo Bichette due to hit free agency after this coming season and others the year after, including Gausman and potentially Berrios (opt-out), there’s a world in which the Blue Jays take a step back and retool if things don’t go well.

Landing Soto -- or, much more realistically, extending Guerrero -- suddenly flings that window back open. If the Blue Jays spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a superstar, that represents a commitment to spending similar dollars or even more in the years to come. It would be a fresh start of sorts, or a reset, for the entire franchise.