While it’s disappointing to see the Blue Jays miss out on the Juan Soto sweepstakes, putting all your eggs in one basket was never wise. We were burned in that way last year with the Shohei Ohtani pursuit, and after that experience I feel like many Jays fans learned a lesson in getting their hopes up too high.

If that’s the lesson that the fan base has taken with them, then hopefully the front office took that experience to heart as well, especially in terms of making a backup plan. Now that Soto has signed with the New York Mets for a staggering 15 years and $765 million dollars (including escalators that could take the contract over $800 million), it’s officially time for Ross Atkins and his team to turn to Plan B.

Last year, their Plan B was pretty underwhelming, and that’s putting it lightly. After missing out on Ohtani the Jays re-signed Kevin Kiermaier to a one-year deal, brought in Isiah Kiner-Falefa on a two-year pact, and added a veteran bat to DH in Justin Turner. It felt like a disappointing outcome at the time, and after the Blue Jays won just 74 games in 2024 and ended up trading all three of these players, it’s hard to dispute that it was anything else.

So what can Ross Atkins and the front office do this time around? I would humbly suggest there are at least three paths that they should consider.

There’s a good argument that this should have been the Blue Jays’ strategy all along, however, we can hardly fault them for pursuing Soto if ownership was willing to put up over 700 million dollars across a decade and a half. Now the question is- how much are they willing to spend on players not named Juan Soto?

It would be foolish to assume that we’re talking about 700+ million being available, but maybe it’s not so nutty to think that the AAV of a deal like that, around 50 million, could still be in the cards. We’ve heard various reports about what the Blue Jays might have available to spend, but it’s really hard to sift through those numbers without knowing the variables behind them. For example, deferring salary is an option for every team, not just the Los Angeles Dodgers, and if the Jays want to keep next year’s luxury tax bill in check, they could offer that kind of deal to the other top hitters on the market.

To give a purely hypothetical example, that could take that 50 or so million and do something like this:

As I said above, this is just a hypothetical path the Jays could take, and I recognize that it would be very difficult to line up all three of these players exactly the way that it works for you. It also doesn’t reinforce the bullpen a whole lot, which is arguably their biggest need. However, the bigger point is that Atkins and his team can still improve this roster if they have this kind of money to work with. Will it be enough to fill all the holes from the 2024 team? That’s another question altogether.

We know the Blue Jays have money to spend, especially in the right circumstances. They’ve been a serious suitor for the top free agent in each of the last two classes, which means they’ve been willing to talk about 600-700 million dollars in contracts. We know that ownership is serious about staying competitive and continuing to fill the newly renovated Rogers Centre, and spending the money required in order to do that.

With that in mind, I would suggest that there’s very little reason to let Vladimir Guerrero Jr. or Bo Bichette reach free agency. That’s easier said than done of course, and definitely oversimplifying the situation on my part, but hear me out here.

I genuinely believe that remaining competitive is the desire of ownership right now, and why we’ve seen them seriously pursue the likes of Ohtani and Soto over the last couple of seasons. They wouldn’t have done a massive ballpark renovation if there was a full-on rebuild in the cards for the near future, or at least I have a hard time seeing them moving forward with the plans the way they have. I do think they expected to have a more competitive team than they do now, but that’s beside the point in a lot of ways. That money has already been spent, and there’s little reason to stop now.

As a fan, I would be very pleased if the Blue Jays responded to missing out on Soto by locking up their two homegrown stars for the long term, and it wouldn’t cost them as much as signing the former Yankee slugger. It’s hard to project exactly what Guerrero Jr. and Bichette would command right now, but I think we can at least ballpark it. In fact, Willy Adames’ new contract with the San Francisco Giants for seven years and 182 million might be a great comp for Bichette and the Jays to work with.

Adames is 29 years old and has earned 21.5 bWAR throughout his 7-year career, making him a roughly 3-WAR player on average in that time. He’s a bat-first player with some pop and is a bit below average defensively at short. I know I’m oversimplifying again here, but doesn’t that sound familiar? Bichette has been worth 17.5 bWAR over the course of his 6-year career, leaving him just behind Adames’ average bWAR mark, but he’s also a bit younger at just 26 years old (he turns 27 in March). He’s also a bat-first shortstop who is a little below average defensively, and like Adames, may eventually have to move to another position later in his career.

It’s not a perfect comp, but I think Adames’ AAV of 26 million could be right in the ballpark of where the Blue Jays would need to be in order to extend Bichette. That comes with some risk after the struggles Bichette faced in 2024 when he had the worst season of his career, but he also battled injuries throughout the campaign as well. For that reason, the 2-time All-Star may prefer to play out the 2025 season to re-establish his value, but I wouldn’t rule out a willingness to stick around for the right contract. Would something like 8 years/200 million be palatable for both sides? It seems reasonable to me.

As for Guerrero Jr., I think we’re looking at a bigger figure, and probably a longer term as well. Looking back on some comments that ESPN’s Jeff Passan made over the summer, we might be talking about $300 million being “more the floor than the ceiling” for the Canadian-born slugger. After his performance in 2024, I tend to agree with that statement, although I don’t know how much further beyond $300 million things would go. The market for first basemen is never as kind as it is to other positions, and even Passan initially argued that it was hard to see another first baseman getting a $300-million-dollar deal before changing his mind.

Three factors help Guerrero’s case, at least in my mind. One, he’s only 25 years old, and that youth will play extremely well if he reaches free agency, just as we’ve seen with Soto this year. Two, he can play some third base as well, and I’m sure he and his camp will be pushing for more opportunities at the hot corner in 2025 to further push that narrative. But the third argument, and one that I think is the strongest, is Guerrero is one of the truly elite hitters in the game, and those guys get paid. No one is going to be giving Soto a Gold Glove award any time soon, and Guerrero Jr. already has one of those on his mantle. Does it really matter that he’s primarily a first baseman? To some degree it does, but I’m not sure that $400 million is out of the question if he reaches free agency in a year. Time will tell, and his performance in 2025 would be crucial in establishing that kind of value, but I don’t think it’s out of the question.

All of that is to say, I think there’s a reality that the Blue Jays could spend 500-550 million over the next 8-10 years and have their homegrown duo locked up for the long term. It takes two to tango, and there is no guarantee that either Guerrero Jr. or Bichette is ready to sign right now, but I believe that this is a path the Blue Jays could consider. They obviously know a lot more than I do about how those extension talks have gone to date, but I believe there are numbers, and feasible ones for a team with payroll possibilities like the Blue Jays, that could get the job done.

Let me be clear from the start that I’m not rooting for this scenario, nor do I think it’s the one that the Blue Jays will ultimately take. That said, it’s something that I believe we have to keep in the back of our minds, even if we’re just kicking the can down the road to the trade deadline.

Let’s imagine a scenario where the Blue Jays miss out on the majority of their upgrade targets just as they did a year ago. No Juan Soto, no Anthony Santander, and no Max Fried under the tree. If the Blue Jays are left to sift through the bargain bins again, would it make more sense to start tearing things down?

They could do something like this in levels as well, and it wouldn’t necessarily mean they have to trade Guerrero Jr. and/or Bichette. Chris Bassitt’s current contract expires in a year, and Kevin Gausman’s a year after that. José Berríos could opt out of his current contract at the end of the 2026 season. Any of those starters could command a solid return if the Blue Jays decided to hit the reset button, and there was a time earlier in the year that I thought they would consider this path, at least in part.

What makes this path feel the least likely is the fact that Ross Atkins is still the general manage of this team, and I can’t imagine many others have a seat as warm as his at the moment. I’ll admit that I was surprised when the Blue Jays didn’t shake things up after their disastrous 2024 campaign, but I will give ownership some credit that the willingness to spend continues after that disappointment. All that said, I can’t imagine that this front office team will be the ones allowed to start a full rebuild in Toronto. I could be wrong of course, but it feels far more likely that a change could be made later on if things aren’t going well again, and that a new face would lead rebuilding this roster.

Whatever the Blue Jays decide to do, the picture should start to become a lot more clear in the coming days now that Soto has picked his new team and decided not to come north of the border. I expect the market will move quickly from here, and here’s hoping that the Jays have a better back-up plan than they did a year ago.