Which team can emulate the 2025 Jays in '26?

Baseball can be a copycat sport, and everyone seems eager to take a lesson from the stunning Toronto run to the seventh game of the World Series, which goes something like this: Make more contact and wins will follow. Sounds great, in theory.

That might be the wrong lesson, though, or at least not the completely right one. It’s not that making contact is bad, obviously. It’s great if you can do it well. It’s just that if you think that’s all the Blue Jays did, to simply not strike out and then ride a wave of success, then you’re sort of missing what actually happened.

It’s true that Toronto had the lowest strikeout rate. It’s also true that the three teams with the next-lowest strikeout rates – Kansas City, San Diego, and Miami – were no one’s idea of top-flight offenses. In 2024, the Blue Jays themselves still had one of baseball’s lowest strikeout rates, but they were also a last-place team that finished 22nd in runs scored.

If success was simply about making the most contact, then the Royals and Brewers would be in the World Series annually (they’re not), and Luis Arraez would be the best hitter in baseball (he’s not). The key to what Toronto did was to maintain that low strikeout rate while also adding bat speed and slug, to the point that they had one of the most powerful postseason slugging offenses on record. They scored more of their runs via the homer in October than during the regular season.

It’s that, and it’s the other stuff, too – some of it. The Jays barely stole bases (third-fewest), and were below-average on the bases (tied for fifth-worst), so that’s surely not it, particularly when you saw some high-profile baserunning gaffes in the World Series. They were roughly average or slightly below in most every meaningful pitching metric, both in the regular season and the postseason, so while the arms had their moments – yes, we see you, Trey Yesavage – it wasn’t the mound or the basepaths pushing them to success.

Some of it simply can’t be repeated or planned for, like Ernie Clement hitting .411/.416/.562 in October. That’s not who he really is, because that’s not who anyone really is. There’s always going to be a little “things went your way” in a run like this, and that’s one of them.

Let's look at three important things the 2025 Blue Jays actually did – and who might be best positioned to follow them in '26.

1) Start with good contact and add bat speed, not the opposite.

A decade or so ago, we saw a real sea change in pitching strategy. For generations, the best path to success was thought to be starting with a live-armed pitcher and teaching him a curveball or how to throw strikes, since he already came pre-equipped with velocity. That worked sometimes, but often it didn’t, and eventually it became clear that you could teach velocity through better training methods, and so it became more appealing to find a pitcher with some idea of what he was doing and help him up that heat.

(Ironically, one of the best outcomes of this method was now-Blue Jay Shane Bieber, who was mostly throwing in the high 80s in college before adding the velocity that helped him become a star in Cleveland.)

Hitting is always reactive to pitching, and so years later, it’s starting to feel like that’s how hitting is about to go. Instead of trying to get a massively overpowered slugger to recognize a curveball and make more contact, as has long been the (very difficult) case, what if you could get a player with good contact skills to do more damage? This is exactly what happened with the Blue Jays, because every single one of their regular hitters who had been there over the past two seasons added bat speed in 2025, with the exception of Bo Bichette.

This is what the Red Sox appear to be doing, and they’re surely not alone. Remember what the Blue Jays really did:

There’s a little more to it than this – they were tied for the flattest swings on fastballs in the top third of the zone, for example – but it’s a good place to start. Contact first, then bat speed.

2) Play strong defense

The Blue Jays had elite defense (the best in baseball, by Statcast metrics), and outstanding catching (tied, defensively, for best in baseball). They had only two meaningfully negative defenders, and it’s worth noting that neither one was playing the field regularly in the playoffs.

George Springer, who rated minus-8 in Fielding Run Value, played outfield early but was the team’s regular DH by the second half and didn’t touch his glove once in October. Bo Bichette, at -10 FRV the weakest qualified shortstop, was replaced by Andrés Giménez after Bichette’s Sept. 6 knee injury, and after missing the first two rounds of the playoffs, was limited to 2B/DH duty in the World Series.

Depending on how you choose to define such things, we’d argue that Toronto had five plus-plus-to-elite defenders in Kirk, Clement, Giménez, Daulton Varsho and Myles Straw. And while Vladimir Guerrero Jr. rated as just OK in the regular season, he surely showed the ability to up that part of his game in October. (Plus: Addison Barger might have the game’s strongest throwing arm.)

It might not be easy to put together a great fielding team, but it’s not that hard to know how to do it, either. Anyone can do this.

3) Have a generational superstar on a heater and one of history’s greatest rebound seasons

OK, we’ll admit this one’s a little harder to pull off. The Blue Jays had Guerrero, a superstar who had more homers (eight) than strikeouts (seven) in October, and that’s not exactly something you can just tell your hitters to do. They were also the beneficiaries of a nearly unprecedented comeback from the 35-year-old Springer, who had been just average in 2023, well below in 2024, then was the third-best hitter in the Majors in 2025.

The Blue Jays don’t get where they got without these two. Stars are stars for a reason. You’re not going to make this journey without them.

So which teams are potentially set up to follow in those footsteps?

This isn’t easy, and it’s not supposed to be, because there surely wasn’t much reason to think a year ago that the Blue Jays we’d seen finish last in the AL East in 2024 were going to do what they did. It’s possible that we just saw the 99th-percentile outcome, the year when most everything went right. (Not everything, though; most of their free-agent additions from last winter didn’t really work out.)

Setting aside teams that are simply coming from too far back, unlike that 88-loss Jays team, we think these five hopefuls might fit the profile best.

Royals (82-80)

• Do you have the contact ability? You better believe it, finishing second to Toronto in strikeout rate.
• Do you have the defense? They were ninth in Statcast’s team fielding. Good enough.
• Do you have the superstar? We’d say Bobby Witt Jr. certainly counts.
• How about the rebound candidate? “Rebound” implies Salvador Perez ever fell as far as Springer did, and he did just hit 30 homers, but at 36 years old, he’s also coming off a league-average 100 OPS+. One more great season would go a long way, both for the team and his eventual Hall of Fame case.

So why – or why not? There are a lot of similarities here, and it’s worth noting that maybe we’ve already seen the start of it, because the 2025 Royals went from baseball’s fourth-weakest offense in the first half to 11th-best in the second half. It wasn’t about strikeouts, which mostly held steady. It was about better swing decisions, as the Royals walked a lot more, chased a lot less, and saw their damage increase.

There’s also still some low-hanging fruit here, in that this team just had the absolute worst outfield in baseball and the third-weakest second basemen, ratings which shouldn’t be hard to improve upon. They seem likely to do something about second, and while an outfield addition would be welcomed, it’s not exactly a high bar to not be the worst in 2026, especially given the likelihood of Jac Caglianone taking a step forward after a rough debut.

Like Toronto, which hired David Popkins as hitting coach last year to great acclaim, the Royals have made some changes to their hitting coaches this winter, too. Tell us some of these quotes don’t sound a whole lot like what we heard coming out of Canada after Popkins came aboard?

“When you’re early swingers and make a lot of contact, like we did and have done for a number of years, you may not give yourself a chance to do [damage],” said general manager JJ Picollo, adding that “sometimes just a little different message may unlock that thing that any particular hitter is looking for to get into those counts and really do some damage when they get in those counts.”

Marlins (79-83)

• Do you have the contact ability? Yes! Miami finished with the fourth-lowest strikeout rate, tied with Milwaukee.
• Do you have the defense? Sort of. Miami finished as an almost exactly average fielding team, though they were dragged down mostly by their poor catchers (26th), while the rest of the team was quite good (tied for eighth). Prospect Joe Mack may help behind the plate, but Agustín Ramírez was one of the weakest defenders in baseball in 2025.
• Do you have the superstar? No. Not yet, at least. If Kyle Stowers or Jakob Marsee can repeat what they showed in 2025, then let’s talk. This answer could change pretty early in the season, potentially.
• How about the rebound candidate? Not really. Like Cleveland, this is a team built on youth.

So why – or why not? The Marlins have made a concerted effort to improve their contact skills, and going from 2022’s fifth-worst strikeout team to 2025’s fourth-best is quite noticeable. Quietly, this team has really leaned into the experimental side of the game, whether it’s having coaches call pitches from the dugout, changing the way traditional bullpen sessions are handled, or hiring the MIT physicist behind the torpedo bat, as befits a club that’s made dozens of organizational moves in the past year, replacing the entire 2024 coaching staff. “Being weird and experimental” isn’t the same thing as “being good,” but it does at least show a capacity for new ways of thinking.

Like Kansas City, this winter has seen the arrival of two new hitting coaches. These aren’t the Jeter Marlins anymore, to be sure, and they did improve by 17 games over 2024’s 100-loss catastrophe to get back to nearly .500. If having the 18th-best bat speed doesn’t stand out, it’s at least better than 24th, as they were in 2024. Only three teams added more bat speed year over year, and they already had the shortest swings and the flattest swings. They’re going to need some external lineup help, particularly at first base. But there are some signs of life here.

Giants (81-81)

• Do you have the contact ability? Good enough. Like Cleveland, they were an exactly average strikeout team in 2025.
• Do you have the defense? Sure. Finishing 10th is good, yet almost undersells how good Patrick Bailey and Matt Chapman were. Fixing some of the obvious weak spots in the outfield corners would help a lot.
• Do you have the superstar? Maybe. Rafael Devers certainly has the talent and the track record of being a very, very good player, but he hasn’t quite had that year that makes you stand up and gawk, either. (He’s never finished in the top 10 in MVP voting, for example.) At 29, with the turmoil of last year behind him, he’s still capable of it.
• How about the rebound candidate? Not really. The older players on this team, like Willy Adames, Chapman and Devers, haven’t really had the decline yet before the rebound.

So why – or why not? In addition to the waves made by hiring manager Tony Vitello right out of the college ranks, San Francisco made moves to learn exactly what Toronto was doing by hiring Hunter Mense off of the Blue Jays staff to become the team’s new hitting coach. Mense, who was coached by Vitello at Missouri two decades ago, couldn’t have a more different background than outgoing hitting coach Pat Burrell, a classic whiff-and-slug masher who hit 292 big league homers.

It’s at least a little bit concerning that no team lost more bat speed last year than the Giants did, and presumably that’s a focus for the new staff. Chapman and Adames were two of the six biggest decliners there, but we’d point to Jung Hoo Lee, who would have been the biggest bat speed decliner if he’d qualified. His Major League career as a hitter has been just-OK to date, and even a small rebound could be difference-making; Lee, in his career, has a .289 average and .481 SLG when swinging at 70 mph or faster, compared to .251 and .314 when it’s below that.

A team tied for second-slowest swings, ahead of only the White Sox, ended up with the fourth-weakest hard-hit rate and sixth-lowest slugging percentage. To some extent, their pitcher-friendly home park will always have something to say about that. Moving the bat faster to get the ball moving faster surely wouldn’t hurt, though. At Tennessee, Vitello oversaw a transition to a more modern approach, with far more velocity on both sides of the ball. He’ll have the chance to do that in San Francisco, too.

Guardians (88-74)

Yes, they won their division. No, outscoring only the Pirates and Rockies is not good enough. They were actually outscored by six runs.

• Do you have the contact ability? Surprisingly, not as much as you’d think, with a league-average mark, but a lot of the swings and misses were by batters who aren’t likely to return or get as much run in 2026, like Lane Thomas, Nolan Jones and Jhonkensy Noel.
• Do you have the defense? Absolutely, finishing as a top-four fielding team by the metrics.
• Do you have the superstar? For sure. José Ramírez just keeps on adding to that all-but-guaranteed Hall of Fame plaque.
• How about the rebound candidate? Not really. Other than Ramírez, there’s barely anyone over 30 on this team.

So why – or why not? To some extent, it feels like if it were going to happen this way, it would have happened by now, because Cleveland’s lineup has been built on this same shape for years. It works when enough balls find grass, and it doesn’t when it doesn’t.

Still, we know that the Guardians are at least trying to increase bat speed, as noted by rookie CJ Kayfus, who recently discussed the team’s offseason bat speed clinics, and the entire origin story behind 2024 No. 1 overall pick Travis Bazzana was how he used science and technology to improve the speed and path of his swing. You’re not really seeing it in practice, yet, as the Guardians have merely gone from 30th (2023) to 27th (each of the last two seasons) among the 30 teams. Maybe you will if younger players like those two and Chase DeLauter get more time – though an external add, likely in the outfield, is an absolute necessity.

Orioles (75-87)

We’re obliged to put the current holder of last place in the American League East on this list, since this is where Toronto was last year, particularly since it’s universally agreed the Orioles have the talent to do a lot more than that.

• Do you have the contact ability? Absolutely not. Only Colorado and the Angels had worse strikeout rates. Not a great start.
• Do you have the defense? It’s not great. Only five clubs had weaker fielding than Baltimore’s -22 fielding runs.
• Do you have the superstar? Probably. Gunnar Henderson sure looked the part in 2023-’24 before a good-not-elite 2025. He also won’t even turn 25 until next June.
• How about the rebound candidate? It would be too on-the-nose to say Tyler O’Neill, right? Let’s go with Adley Rutschman, instead.

So why – or why not? OK, the contact-and-defense part of this doesn’t really play, but a lot of the lower-rated defenders like Gary Sánchez and Cedric Mullins won’t be back, and Heston Kjerstad hit so poorly that his spot in 2026 is hardly guaranteed. A defensive improvement from Jackson Holliday, who was one of the weakest second basemen in baseball, would help. He only turns 22 in December, so it’s easily possible. More health from outfielder Colton Cowser would be welcome, defensively, as trade acquisition Taylor Ward will add power, but not contact or defense.

This doesn’t really seem to be a follow-the-Jays situation, except for this: It might have been a year ago. The 2024 Orioles had a slightly better-than-average strikeout rate, and a somewhat rare combination of fast, short swings, which didn’t persist into 2025. They are, for what it’s worth, considered to be relatively forward-thinking in how they train their hitters. Will we look back at 2025 as a weird disappointment – or the new normal? You’ll be stunned to know that they’re completely turning over their hitting coaches.

That, maybe, is the real Toronto parallel here. The Blue Jays had made the playoffs in 2022 and ‘23, before an unexpectedly disappointing 2024. The Orioles made the playoffs in 2023 and ‘24, before an unexpectedly disappointing 2025. For a team with plenty of young lineup talent, maybe the one bad year isn’t enough to write them off forever.