In the post-Bo Bichette era, the Toronto Blue Jays’ offence will have no choice but to score runs in ways they haven’t over the last six-plus years — and Addison Barger’s bat may offer their best solution.

The 26-year-old slugger is perhaps one of the organization’s most important and purest power hitters, with his combination of elite bat speed (75.9 m.p.h. in 2025, 93rd percentile) and quality-of-contact metrics, which saw his 51 per cent hard-hit rate place in the 91st percentile last season. Now, after logging a career-high 502 plate appearances, he’ll also look to help fill the void of the injured Anthony Santander — as will the additions of Kazuma Okamoto and Jesús Sánchez — entering his second full major-league season.

Without Bichette and Santander, with the latter expected to miss approximately 5-6 months following shoulder surgery, the Blue Jays aren’t dealing with the same lineup that came within one win from capturing the World Series last November. Almost everything clicked the way it was supposed to a season ago, as several hitters enjoyed career years — including Barger, who accounted for 2.2 fWAR.

That’s a difficult formula to replicate, though it’s one of many factors this team is banking on to ensure the offence doesn’t take a significant step back in 2026.

Among the things that need to go right, the Blue Jays’ brass is hoping for little to no regression and consistent health from last season’s key contributors, including George Springer, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Alejandro Kirk and Ernie Clement. They’re also betting high on a full season’s worth of the impressive power that Daulton Varsho displayed across his limited 71-game sample size in ’25, and a successful NPB-to-MLB transition from Okamoto.

Then there’s Barger, who undoubtedly still has plenty of room for additional growth as he inches toward the three-quarter mark to 1,000 career big-league plate appearances. He, too, remains a pivotal piece of Toronto’s new-look lineup this season. But it’s his runway for more that sets him apart here.

For the group of hitters mentioned above, preserving their offensive production from a season ago will be key for the Blue Jays throughout this summer. With Barger, though, rather than betting on replicating his floor, they can shoot for the stars with his ceiling.

Having Barger take that next step in his development is the variable that could drastically alter this entire equation. He is, without question, this lineup’s biggest X-factor heading into the ’26 campaign. As such, the sky is the limit for what these next six-plus months could hold for Toronto’s budding star.

We received a glimpse of Barger’s superstar potential as he elevated his offensive craft last season, blossoming into a formidable left-handed-hitting force, featuring a .281/.333/.551  slash line with 16 home runs, 50 RBIs and a 141 wRC+ in 73 games from May 7 to Aug. 1. That span also included a stellar 57.5 per cent hard-hit rate, trailing only Corey Seager (58.8 per cent) and Kyle Schwarber (60.9 per cent) on the major-league leaderboard.

Despite getting off to a slow start this spring, as Barger entered Monday’s exhibition contest against the Boston Red Sox just 1-for-12 without any extra-base hits, the young thumper’s light-towering, 399-foot grand slam reminded everyone about the insignificance of spring training results.

Nothing truly begins to matter until the curtain rises for Opening Day.

Overall, Barger finished his breakout ’25 campaign with a promising 21 home runs and 74 RBIs, along with a .243/.301/.454 slash line and 107 wRC+ — putting him seven per cent above the league-average score of 100. All things considered, it was a massive swing — quite literally — from the .197/.250/.351 line and 69 wRC+ that he submitted over 69 games during his underwhelming 2024 season.

However, given his diminishing second-half returns, most projection models appear rather conservative with his ’26 output and expect it to mirror last season’s figures. For example, FanGraphs’ ZiPS model projects him to hit .244/.313/.441 with an identical 21 home runs, finishing with a 109 wRC+ and 2.2 fWAR — also matching last season’s rating — across 15 additional plate appearances from a year ago.

That’s certainly a respectable floor for Barger, although the Blue Jays know his undetermined ceiling likely resides at least a few levels higher than that. He’s more than capable of delivering a much greater output; he proved as much with last season’s surge. Under the guidance of hitting coach David Popkins and assistants Lou Iannotti and Cody Atkinson, the top priority will be helping him sustain his full potential over an entire season, in place of a two-to-three-month surge.

So, how do they take Barger’s craft to the next level? More than anything, there are three main areas they’ll need to prioritize: making better swing decisions, improving against left-handed pitchers and finding ways to endure the 162-game grind more successfully.

The last part is particularly notable, as the organization’s sixth-round selection from 2018 ran into a fatigue wall around the midway point of last season, causing his average bat speed to drop to 75.5 m.p.h. in July before ticking back up by a full mile per hour in September, allowing him to catch his second wind in the playoffs.

After ranking well below league average with his strikeout (24.1 per cent), whiff (26.1 per cent) and chase rates (31.1 per cent) during the regular season, Toronto’s hitting department will be closely monitoring whether Barger can carry over his plate discipline improvements from last fall and apply them as a consistent strength in his tool belt.

There’ll always be a considerable amount of swing-and-miss to Barger’s game. It’s crucial to allow him to be at his best without restricting his explosive power too much. At the same time, the Blue Jays can’t have him striking out close to a quarter of the time, or more, if he’s to provide reliable middle-of-the-order support behind Guerrero this season.

The main objective will be to find a happy medium with the left-handed slugger’s swing decisions.

On top of that, the only other major obstacle that threatens Barger’s pursuit of becoming an everyday player is left-on-left matchups — more specifically, his woes associated with them. Last season, he mustered only a .217/.270/.337 slash line and 69 wRC+ in 89 plate appearances versus southpaws, striking out 30.3 per cent — 12th-highest clip of 88 qualified major league lefties (min. 70 plate appearances) — of the time against them.

Barger struggled mightily to make contact of any kind in those matchups. But he also found it incredibly difficult to make hard contact, as just three of his 45 total barrels (regular season and post-season) came with a lefty on the mound — including his pinch-hit, 106.2-m.p.h. grand slam off Dodgers left-hander and former Blue Jays reliever Anthony Banda in Game 1 of the World Series, serving as the first of its kind.

Barger’s can’t-hit-lefties narrative will be put to the test this season. Considering the Blue Jays’ outfield overflows with left-handed bats, they don’t actually have much choice other than to provide him with ample runway to prove he can separate from the “platoon hitter” label.

Plus, with Bichette no longer around, Toronto requires a new go-to clean-up hitter. Those won’t be easy shoes to fill, after the now-New York Mets third baseman led his former team in plate appearances (180) from the No. 4 hole in ’25, and his 180 wRC+ trailed only Dodgers catcher Will Smith (182) for the major-league lead.

Having said that, Barger, who compiled 100 plate appearances as the Blue Jays’ clean-up hitter last season, likely represents the club’s best option to assume that responsibility moving forward. While it still may be a bit early to jump to any lineup conclusions from this spring, that job might already be his to lose if we’re to read the tea leaves from the first few weeks of camp.

And if Barger’s bat does indeed elevate to another level this season, full-time opportunities in right field — up for grabs following the failed pursuit of Kyle Tucker over the off-season and Santander’s extended absence — will be his for the taking.

Of course, there’ll also be instances when Barger returns to the hot corner again, as he has this week with Okamoto away from the team to play for Japan in the World Baseball Classic. The club could decide to sub him in for the Japanese slugger during games started by a right-handed pitcher, at least occasionally, if the latter falters in those matchups early on.

Either way, if the bat plays, the Blue Jays will do everything possible to keep Barger in the lineup on an everyday basis — the same for Okamoto, too, if he hits the ground running — as they adjust to this new normal post-Bichette.