Can Blue Jays withstand baseball's inherent randomness?

A Toronto team embarks on an ambitious rebuild around a core of young stars. The club adds some veteran help but struggles to get over the playoff hump. One of those young stars departs in free agency. And then the whole thing falls apart.

I'm referring, of course, to the Maple Leafs.

However, there's a version of this story, not long ago, that could've been about the Blue Jays.

At around this time last year, it was the baseball team, not the hockey team, that appeared to have the bleak future. The Jays had just come off a dreary, last-place season, with multiple regulars slumping at the plate and their two homegrown stars, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette, entering the final year of their contracts.

They had also tried and failed, again, to land an all-world free agent, with Juan Soto replacing Shohei Ohtani in the pangs-of-regret department.

The prevailing sentiment, barring a remarkable bounce-back campaign, was that the Vlad-Bo era was on the verge of a grim end with little to show for it.

And then the Jays had a remarkable season for the ages.

As they defend their AL East crown in 2026, a key question looms: which Jays team will fans see this year? The version that struggled through 2024 and early last season, or the one that suddenly put everything together and came agonizingly close to knocking off the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 7 of the World Series?

The reasons for concern are simple enough. Two members of the starting playoff rotation aren't yet healthy. Given the youth and inexperience of Trey Yesavage and the fact that Shane Bieber returned late last year after a long-term arm injury, there's a decent chance that both will miss significant time. (The front office says the recoveries are progressing well.)

Offensively, Bichette's departure for the New York Mets leaves a void, and the Jays will look to new addition Kazuma Okamoto, a 29-year-old slugger from Japan, to help fill the gap. Even if that works out, last season's run-scoring explosion had a lightning-in-a-bottle feel about it, with everyone from George Springer and Ernie Clement to Nathan Lukes and Addison Barger coming up huge at various points. Can Toronto's high-contact hitting philosophy - which largely flies in the face of today's baseball orthodoxy - survive another year of opposing pitching staffs trying to solve it?

Maybe it can. There are certainly reasons for optimism. If Guerrero carries anything like his playoff form into this season, the Jays will finally have the kind of power bat in their lineup that's been missing since his breakout 2021 campaign.

Dylan Cease, signed in free agency, is a proven top-of-the-rotation major-league arm. Cody Ponce isn't, but he was so good last year in Korea that he could end up being a free-agent steal. And Max Scherzer might actually be healthy.

Beyond those tangible additions, there are still the things we can't measure: the benefits from the wild roller coaster that took Toronto to the edge of World Series glory. The Jays became something of a baseball phenomenon, admired around the league as they traded haymakers with the Dodgers. Will that experience have any lasting effect? Can the team's newfound swagger help them eke out a few more wins?

Vibes shouldn't necessarily matter, but anyone who argued the Jays didn't have the right ingredients for postseason success, citing their meek playoff exits, must concede that the narrative no longer holds.

Which brings us back to the Maple Leafs. In recent years, Toronto's hockey team was often considered more of a preseason championship favorite than any Jays squad of the past decade. But the Leafs kept stepping on rakes come playoff time, and usually in the seventh game of a series. Now the whole thing is in tatters. They're on their third coach and second general manager of the post-rebuild era, and they'd be on their second president if MLSE had bothered to replace the last one. Another coaching and general manager change might also be just around the corner.

Meanwhile, the Jays, after long stretches of struggling to become a real contender, have transformed the entire perspective around the organization with last fall's electrifying run. The manager signed an extension, and the oft-reviled front office is signed up for the next decade. Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins have outlasted everyone in Toronto: Masai Ujiri, Brendan Shanahan, Kyle Dubas, and almost certainly Brad Treliving. Also, countless Toronto FC executives. Everyone but Pinball Clemons, basically.

A year ago, as the 2025 season began, who could have imagined the Jays would find themselves here now?

Baseball's unpredictability remains undefeated.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.