Blue Jays in April: Fancy new seats and a sense of dread

It's easy to imagine a scene in a Rogers boardroom several years ago in which Toronto Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro mapped out the high-level plan to his bosses.

There are whiteboards and charts on easels. One shows the team's payroll climbing steadily, another shows the planned expense of two years of stadium renovations. Another one, in this scenario, would depict a steady increase in wins, a result of those payroll increases coming as the Jays' talented young core aged into its collective prime.

And at the end of it all, in big letters, maybe circled in red: PROFIT.

Much of it has even come to pass, except, you know, all the winning.

It is, one hastens to add, early. The 2024 Blue Jays haven't even played 20% of their games. But that was a grim April. The Jays finished the month at 15-16, good enough for fourth place in the loaded AL East and nowhere near good enough if the team wants to return to the playoffs. May didn't start any better, a flat 6-1 home loss to Kansas City.

Did I mention it's early? Despite that fact and the possibility there's every chance the Jays will turn into the team the front office imagined as the season dawned, the striking thing about the club's performance is the general sense of malaise it's brought. It's like the fan base is collectively sitting in one of those fancy new lounge chairs behind home plate at the Rogers Centre, arms folded across chest, ready to harrumph disappointment at every fly ball. The Toronto Blue Jays 2024: Feel the Ennui!

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what caused the drop in Jays-related enthusiasm. Not counting the mild overachievement of the COVID-shortened 2020 campaign, the Jays have three straight seasons of promise that ended in some degree of disappointment. Two consecutive postseason appearances also resulted in the shortest of possible playoff runs, the last of which ended with manager John Schneider yanking Jose Berríos early from a dominant start and no one really owning the decision. That fans booed Schneider at Toronto's home opener was perhaps a sign that patience levels were low. You, sir, are no Gibby.

There was also the aborted excitement of the offseason. The Jays let it be known they were serious suitors for Shohei Ohtani and his imagined half-a-billion-dollar contract, only for the Japanese star to spurn them for Los Angeles, at which point the Toronto front office stopped being aggressive completely. There's a cold logic to assembling stacks of cash for Ohtani, with his unique two-way talent and international megastar profile, and then shoving the money back into duffle bags once that opportunity passes. But Jays fans could be forgiven for thinking the team was really Going For It when, in fact, it was just Going For This One Particular Guy. That stings.

But the biggest problem is likely one of familiarity. After long stretches last year in which the offense underperformed relative to expectations, it's back to doing the same again this season. The Jays are 13th in the 15-team American League in runs scored, 12th in hits, and tied for 12th in home runs. Second in walks, though, so let it be said that they have good eyes at the plate. Put that on a T-shirt.

And at the root of that anemic performance are the cold starts for the top of the batting order, with George Springer, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and Bo Bichette all hitting significantly worse than their career averages. This is a particular problem when Shapiro and his general manager, Ross Atkins, repeatedly stated that after the Ohtani pursuit failed, they decided to count on internal improvement as the key to generating more runs. They bet that several Jays who had down years offensively in 2023 would perform more like their old selves this season. But instead of regression to the mean, they just got plain old regression.

It has brought a curious dichotomy. The Rogers Centre has finally been turned into more of a ballpark, and the payroll is the eighth highest in baseball, according to Spotrac. It should be the makings of an entertaining product, but all it's produced is an exceedingly tough watch so far. Rogers Centre per-game attendance is third highest in the American League despite the ballpark's smaller capacity, which isn't terrible, but it's almost 4,000 off last season's April attendance average. That's almost certainly not what was expected when ownership spent $400 million to spruce up the place.

This leaves someone like Schneider in a precarious spot. If the Blue Jays don't break out of their hitting funk soon, as the division lead gets further and further away, the front office's simplest move would be to change the manager. However, the most obvious replacement, bench coach Don Mattingly, is operating under the title of offensive coordinator. Shake up the offense by promoting the guy responsible for the weak offense? It isn't a bulletproof strategy.

More likely, Shapiro and Atkins will stick with the hoped-for improvement from within. But if it was a confident plan a couple of months ago, now it's a more desperate one.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.