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AL champs battled identity crisis all year. Will deadline break them up?

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AL champs battled identity crisis all year. Will deadline break them up?

WASHINGTON — The go-ahead run was driven home on a 58.2 mph ground ball. Victory was preserved only when the All-Star closer made a rare two-inning appearance. A happy flight back to Canada ensued, but the runway to it was bumpy.

It might be oversimplifying matters to say the 2026 Toronto Blue Jays can be summed up in a 5-2 victory over the Washington Nationals on Wednesday, July 29, a conquest that more than one player described as “grindy.”

Then again, sometimes a smaller scene within a vaster canvas tells an entire story.

With just three games remaining before Major League Baseball’s Aug. 3 trade deadline, the Blue Jays are still riddled with an identity crisis.

In name, they are the defending American League champions, returning with a different but highly similar team.

By record, they are just 50-59, maddeningly inconsistent given the great expectations that greeted this season.

On the balance sheet, they continue drawing overflow crowds from across Canada to Rogers Centre – yet their superstar slugger has yet to hit a home run there this season.

Kevin Gausman has struck out 123 batters in 121 2/3 innings this season for the Blue Jays.

And according to the AL standings, they are just five games out of a wild card berth, albeit with six teams to vault to get into playoff position.

It is an unenviable predicament, one that the Blue Jays of a year ago could’ve scarcely imagined when they won 94 games and the AL East, performed brilliantly and brazenly through the playoffs all the way to World Series Game 7, where their hearts were ripped out by the Los Angeles Dodgers two outs shy of a championship.

Little did they know something even tougher was around the corner.

“It just came easier last year,” reliever Jeff Hoffman tells USA TODAY Sports. “It’s a very similar group to last year, and it was so easy. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we have to fight to get to this identity as a team.’ It was just us.

“This year, it feels like it’s a little bit of a battle to be us.”

Now, the team searching for something resembling its old self could be breaking up. Baseball orthodoxy says the 12th – place team in a league where only six reach the playoffs should sell off assets and plan for a brighter day.

Yet a variety of factors could conspire to make these Blue Jays different. At least the fellows in the clubhouse hope so.

1 / 25

Ranking the top 25 MLB trade deadline targets for 2026

1. Luis Arraez, 2B, Giants There he is, the perfect trade deadline candidate: A man on an expiring contract playing for a terrible team and enjoying a career year. What’s not to love? While Arraez noted he would not like to move off second base after doggedly improving to Gold Glove caliber this year, his tune might change once he realizes he has plenty of equity to take into the offseason. The three-time batting champ has, thanks to his viability at second, amassed 3.1 WAR and has a 136 adjusted OPS despite just four homers. Immediate lineup punch for a team in need.

(Steven Bisig, Imagn Images)

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if we added’

George Springer and Kevin Gausman were the free agent bell cows for this generation of Blue Jays, signing $150 million and $110 million deals in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Now, both are on expiring contracts, with some control over their futures.

Springer, with more than 10 years’ service time and five in Toronto, can block any trade, and Gausman can block trades to eight teams. Both are in wait-and-see mode and, by many accounts, so too is the Toronto front office.

The baseball industry widely expects this deadline to pick up in the last possible hours, due to the preponderance of contenders and the uncertainty facing many teams in the final days. And the Blue Jays have several complex factors to consider.

Gausman’s been here before, dealt in a deadline deal from Baltimore to Atlanta eight years ago, before he realized superstardom.

“I’ve been doing this long enough to know you never really know what will happen,” says Gausman, who has pondered retirement after this season, even as he still strikes out more than a batter an inning, and has a 4.51 ERA in an AL-best 22 starts. “A couple days that could possibly be crazy. Everybody can kind of play GM and speculate who’s going to add and not add.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we added.”

Say, what?

If nothing else, Blue Jays fans have earned as much. They’ve drawn at least 40,000 fans for 43 of their 56 home dates, with no crowd smaller than 35,000 as a $500 million Rogers Centre renovation makes the old yard a destination.

Parent company Rogers Communications has been thrilled with baseball revenue, according to earnings calls, showing a significant return on investing in the on-field product.

“We helped the Blue Jays stock a lot last year. I know that,” says Gausman. “Viewership’s up and I think a lot of people kind of jumped on the bandwagon last year – and they’ve stayed. For good reason – we have a fun, exciting team to watch and the majority are back.

“We’ve always drawn exceptionally well at home, but with the new expansion to the stadium, the bars – it’s not just about the game, whereas before it was. Now it’s a partylike, social thing.

“More people are coming and more from around Canada are traveling to Toronto, to see the Blue Jays. I think it has been good for everybody.”

Yet through 109 games, the on-field product has yet to match the fervor.

Jeff Hoffman: ‘I expect to be here’

Perhaps this year was cursed from the jump, when starter Shane Bieber was shut down with arm fatigue, and promising right-hander Cody Ponce tore his ACL three innings into his Blue Jays debut after pitching in Japan.

A loss that hit on an everyday basis was All-Star catcher Alejandro Kirk’s fractured and dislocated thumb, which required surgery in April. He missed 62 games.

His absence certainly had a downward effect on Guerrero, who perhaps tried to compensate for the hitting savant’s absence. Yet that still can’t fully explain Guerrero’s six home runs and career-low .702 OPS.

Not that it’s stopped him from playing hard; Guerrero can still be seen hustling singles into doubles, diving headfirst with abandon and, the other night, suffering a hamstring hiccup when he busted it to first beating out an infield single.

But Guerrero’s woes are just part of the suboptimal sequencing dogging the Blue Jays.

“We’ve been kind of fighting to find that traction as a group, it seems like,” says Hoffman, who yielded Miguel Rojas’s game-tying ninth-inning homer in World Series Game 7, got off to a rough start this season but has been dominant in his last 18 outings.

“It just hasn’t lined up for us. It’s the whole, collective process of everything, from pregame to batting practice to team dinners – all that stuff, that all matters. It’s just been difficult to get on a little bit of a roll.

“Maybe we’ll do that.”

Hoffman blew three saves in his first nine appearances, ceding closer duties to Louis Varland, but has thrived in a set-up role, with a 0.96 ERA over his last 19 games as he’s leaned even more heavily on his elite slider. His run of excellence makes him an attractive trade option for a contender, but Hoffman says he expects to be with Toronto for the duration of his contract, which runs through next season when he’s owed $11 million.

“It’s there, obviously. It’s no secret,” says Hoffman of the deadline. “Your head can’t be anywhere else. While you’re a part of the Blue Jays, you’re committed to the Blue Jays and that’s it. I love it here. I expect to be here for the duration of my contract.

“This is one of the best organizations in the league. Obviously, it sucks that we’re in this position. But it is what it is. We just gotta take it day by day and see what happens.”

It don’t come easy

It helps when right-hander Trey Yesavage locks in the form that made him a postseason darling a year ago. Wednesday, against Washington’s best-in-class offense, he turned in one of his finest starts of the year – 6 ⅔ innings, three hits, one earned run.

It ended a bleak stretch where he gave up 10 earned runs in three starts, failing to get out of the second inning in one of them.

“I needed this. And the guys needed this,” says Yesavage.

Not that it was easy. The Blue Jays were shut out into the sixth inning, grabbed a 2-1 lead on Daulton Varsho’s RBI infield squibber and finally established some breathing room with a three-run eighth – after which Varland entered for a six-out save, two runners on, and stranded both of them.

It was arduous, and very 2026.

“At the end of the day, you gotta find a way to win, whether it’s one of those easy ones or a hard one. It just seems like we have a lot of hard ones these days,” says All-Star infielder Ernie Clement, who tied the game 1-1 with a sixth-inning double.

“We’ll take any one we can get.”

Gausman, the 35-year-old veteran of 14 seasons, believes that’s just the way it’s going to be in the big leagues. Liberal revenue sharing and a cycle of teams not tanking has led to nearly two dozen teams still clinging to contention as July turns to August.

As the Blue Jays won 94 games a year ago, the Chicago White Sox were completing their third consecutive 100-loss season. Now, the White Sox lead the AL Central.

“Unfortunately, that easy part is never going to come anymore. Which is great for baseball,” says Gausman. “The collective competitive balance in the game right now is really good.

“We’re seeing teams like the White Sox and Pirates, a handful of teams every year surprising everybody.”

A few years back, you might have placed the Jays in that bucket. Yet the arrival of Guerrero and since-departed Bo Bichette and significant investments in Gausman, Springer and now ace Dylan Cease has made Toronto something of a powerhouse.

Even if they haven’t played like it. They can only hope they’ve won enough to stay together beyond the weekend, challenging as it’s been.

“I love this group,” says Clement. “I would love to see the chance to keep grinding with these guys and try to get on a roll.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: AL champs battled identity crisis all year. Will deadline break them up?

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