Hopefully the Rogers bean counters recall recent history as to not make the same mistakes again.

With the last Anthopoulos championship run teams, attendance, which tends to lag a year for current team performance, peaked at 3.4 million in 2016 with the 1st Atkins year and the second playoff team in a row.

Attendance remained strong in 2017 at 3.2 million for an awful Jays team with most of the same core that turned into pumpkins overnight. Quite similar to 2026. I recall at the time that ticket resale prices were slashed on the secondary market as there were lots of presold tickets that couldn't be given away.

However, attendance would plummet the next year in 2018 to 2.4 million. And further still to 1.8 million in 2019, the Vlad & Bo debut seasons. Ticket sales were nearly halved not 3 years after their last ALCS appearance.

The following attendance trends get detailed by the next 1.5 seasons of COVID. But attendance rebounds somewhat to 2.6 million in 2022, the first full season with a competitive team with the Vlad & Bo core a year after the Marcus Semien-2021 with the team being eliminated on the final day of the regular season.

TL; DR - The Toronto baseball market is fickle and only comes out for winners. The front office gets a one year hangover to right the ship before midweek shoulder season 10-15k crowds return.

Best fits: White Sox, Braves, Twins , Rays, Cubs, Brewers, Orioles

Oh the irony after all the flak that Minnesota received not a year ago for having a complete firesale (including sending a pre-arb Louis Varland middle reliever to the Jays) that their front office is now potentially poised to pick the carcass of the 2025 World Series runner-up for spare parts.

Surprised BBRef only has Kirk worth 6 WAR over the last 3.5 seasons.

Fangraphs has Moreno & Kirk at essentially a dead heat around roughly 10 WAR over the same period. I would imagine that the difference is that fWAR includes framing runs, which Kirk was previously elite.

With the new ABS system, framing runs have been somewhat devalued. But framing skills do still have value in an ABS system, as teams become very hesitant to challenge any egregious calls once they are down to a single challenge.

• post 26: Springer, Gausman, Bieber, Varsho, Garcia, Scherzer, Corbin, Straw (team options for '27 and '28)
• Post 27: Sanchez, Hoffman
• Post 28: Berrios, Rogers (option), Ponce, Yariel Rodriguez

Either way, I expect the Jays to absorb whatever tax penalties that come this year. They won’t sell enough to get under a threshold.

They haven't developed any SP between Manoah & Yesavage. And Manoah imploded sooner than most predicted. While Yesavage was likely rushed for the needs of the 2025 run.

The Jays were fortunate that most of their expensive, older SP FA signings have worked out during this window. Gausman & Bassitt were both healthy and productive. Berrios was cromulent for the first few years of his extension before he became ineffective, pouty & hurt. Kikuchi was wild, but led to a great trade deadline return in his walk year during a down 2024.

The Scherzer signing was more about vibes. Seems like they may have finally got snakebitten with Ponce via a freak injury.

The other cheap young guys have been picked up from outside the org like Bowden Francis & Spencer Miles.

The problem is that it's very expensive (and risky) to try to fill out your entire rotation with old FA pickups at market rates. As we see with the 2026 Jays, it leads to bloated multiyear payrolls and less salary space left over to fill the other holes in the rest of the lineup.