For the first time in a long time, the Toronto Blue Jays have some serious starting pitching depth. After reportedly signing Cody Ponce to a three-year, $30 million contract earlier this week, the Blue Jays now have seven legitimate starting pitching options in their arsenal.

As Ben Nicholson-Smith at Sportsnet noted in one of his latest pieces, the biggest contenders need at least seven or eight starting pitchers to weather an entire regular season and postseason run. The Blue Jays are lucky to have an embarrassment of riches in the starting pitching department.

They could’ve stopped at signing Dylan Cease to a seven-year, $210 million deal, but then the front office kicked it into an extra gear and signed this past season’s KBO MVP in Ponce, who authored a monster comeback season in Korea. The Blue Jays are not messing around when it comes to hoarding starting pitchers.

With seven potential starters and only five spots in the rotation, that’s led many to believe there could be a trade or two on the horizon to shed some of the starting pitching surplus. If anything, the Blue Jays should clutch onto their starting pitching depth as tightly as possible.

There’s a chance that Ponce slots in with a hybrid role on the Blue Jays, but it sounds like he signed in Toronto to start games. He hasn’t pitched in relief since 2021 with the Pittsburgh Pirates, and spent the last four seasons in Japan and Korea as a starting pitcher, so there’s no sign Ponce is about to become the next version of Yariel Rodriguez.

After Kevin Gausman, Shane Bieber, Trey Yesavage, Cease and Ponce, that leaves Jose Berrios as the odd man out. While some have practically packed his bags for another destination, there are a few things at play here. Although he had a weird year in 2025, Berrios is still a valuable starting rotation piece, and moving his contract isn’t so simple.

It would be one thing if it were just the $19 million remaining on his contract, but the player opt-out clause with another two years and $48 million throws a wrench into any plans the Blue Jays might have had to find Berrios a new home.

It depends on how his 2026 campaign goes, but it would be foolish for Berrios to activate that opt-out and head into free agency next winter. That guaranteed $48 million for the 2027 and 2028 seasons looks mighty appetizing for any player out there.

In terms of durable starters, there are few better options than the trio of Cease, Gausman and Berrios. Since 2020, they rank 1st, 2nd and 4th among all MLB starters in games started. Berrios may have ended the season by going on the injured list for the first time in his career, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s one of the league’s most dependable iron men and should be healthy to start the 2026 season.

Beyond those three starters, there is still some uncertainty in the rest of the starting rotation. Bieber is a fantastic pitcher, but he’s still coming back from Tommy John surgery. That he opted in to his player option may have turned some heads about whether he had questionable medicals, but regardless, he still isn’t quite 100 per cent.

And as electric as Yesavage was down the stretch and performing on the biggest stage under the bright lights in October, he’s hardly a sure thing to stick in the Blue Jays’ starting rotation. He will be given every opportunity to prove the Blue Jays otherwise, but this is somebody who has nine big league starts under his belt.

I’m sure the Blue Jays are approaching Yesavage’s development with optimism, but we’ve seen this movie before for highly touted pitching prospects in Toronto. Remember how Nate Pearson and Alek Manoah were supposed to lead the Blue Jays to the promised land?

I’m not saying Yesavage will suffer the same fate as those other first-round picks, but keep in mind that, especially with young pitching prospects, development is rarely linear. Guys like Pauk Skenes — who hit the ground running and banked a Cy Young in their second season — are baseball unicorns in today’s game.

On paper, the fit of seven starting pitchers for the Blue Jays seems a little awkward, but for one reason or another, chances are one of those arms will land on the injured list at some point in the season, will go through a dry spell, or they may excel in another role on the team.

After the last few years, hopefully, the Blue Jays have learned their lesson to hoard starting pitching options like they’re going out of style. They were caught last year after Max Scherzer went down with an injury during his first start of the season, which led to them running a three-man rotation for a while.

Thankfully, guys like Eric Lauer stepped up to fill that void, but without contributions from players like him, the Blue Jays could have been in danger of plucking yet another unenviable option from the minors to fill a starting rotation spot.

The club was in a similar position in 2023 when they arguably only had four starting pitchers for a while and kept running a volatile Alek Manoah out there every five days because they didn’t have any suitable depth pieces in the minor leagues. That wore down the rest of the team’s starting rotation, working on four days of rest instead of five.

If we count Bowden Francis as another depth piece, that makes for eight starting rotation pieces for the Blue Jays heading into spring training. Just because they have a surplus doesn’t mean they should sell off those starting pitchers. They’re indispensable for a team trying to survive a 162-game regular season campaign, plus the postseason.

I’ve never heard of a team complaining about having too many starting pitchers. If anything, teams can never have enough. And the Blue Jays have plenty, but that doesn’t mean they’ll have them all season. Subtracting one of them from the depth could come back to bite them in the end.

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