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The 2021 Blue Jays deserved better
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Photo credit: © Nick Turchiaro-USA TODAY Sports
Cynthia Ryley Delaney
Oct 29, 2026, 07:00 EDTUpdated: Oct 27, 2026, 22:06 EDT
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The Toronto Blue Jays have had a handful of special seasons over the past decade or so.
Everyone knows the 2015 and 2025 seasons, and for good reasons. Both teams had a fun offence, solid pitching, big deadline acquisitions, and deep playoff runs. You could also argue that both teams deserved better than the outcome they got.
One iteration of the Blue Jays that deserved so much better were the 2021 Blue Jays. What a team that was.

The backstory of the 2021 Blue Jays

The Blue Jays’ rebuild was a quick one. After back-to-back trips to the American League Championship Series in the middle of the 2010s, the exciting core of Edwin Encarnación, José Bautista, Josh Donaldson, and others aged out or outright departed in the case of Encarnación.
Aside from the 2015 and 2016 seasons, the closest they came to making the playoffs was the 2017 season, but they collapsed late. They had a good start in 2018, but by the summer, it was clear a rebuild was needed, and that’s exactly what happened in 2019.
The 2019 season also marked the beginning of the Vladimir Guerrero Jr. era, and the Blue Jays went out and signed Hyun Jin Ryu during the 2019-20 off-season. That was a game-changing signing for the Blue Jays.
Expectations were that the Blue Jays were going to rebuild for a couple of more seasons, but then the global pandemic hit.
With an expanded playoff, the Blue Jays snuck into the playoffs with a 32-28 record, a winning percentage that would have resulted in an 86-76 record over a 162 game season. That run was a short one, falling in two to the Tampa Bay Rays, who won the American League pennant.
But that season laid the groundwork for what was to come in 2021 on multiple fronts. The pandemic, the expanded playoffs, their big off-season acquisitions. Really, the 2021 Blue Jays deserved so much better.

The 2021 Blue Jays’ offence was unforgettable

By making the playoffs in 2020, the expectations for the Blue Jays changed. Even more so when you factor in that they signed George Springer during the off-season, then added Marcus Semien and Robbie Ray on pillow contracts.
We all know the 2025 Blue Jays’ offence was one of the best in baseball, but it paled in comparison to the offence of the 2021 team. They smacked a MLB-best 262 home runs while also managing to strikeout just 20.1 percent of the time, the second-best mark in the league. Only the Houston Astros had a better wRC+ than the Jays.
Up and down the lineup, the Jays received contributions. To this day, the 2021 season is Guerrero Jr. best season in the big leagues, slashing .311/.401/.601 with 48 home runs in 698 plate appearances, good for a 6.3 fWAR.
He finished as a finalist for MVP voting, finishing only behind Shohei Ohtani. The other finalist? Semien. The second baseman’s 2021 season was unforgettable, slashing .265/.334/.538 with 45 home runs in 724 plate appearances, winning the Gold Glove for second base. It was legitimately one of the best seasons for a second baseman ever.
In 2026, Kazuma Okamoto led the team with 33 home runs, followed by George Springer with 15, and both Alejandro Kirk and Nathan Lukes with 10 each. On top of the 45+ home runs hit by Guerrero Jr. and Semien, five other players hit 20 or more home runs. Teoscar Hernández hit 32, Bo Bichette hit 29, Randal Grichuk hit 22, an oft-injured George Springer hit 22, and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. hit 21.
While neither Danny Jansen nor Alejandro Kirk hit 20 home runs, they combined for just 394 plate appearances and hit 19 home runs. Eight of the nine spots in the lineup saw a player hit 19 or more home runs, just incredible.
The offence alone should have carried this team to a deep playoff run.

Starting pitching was shaky at first, but got significantly better

The Blue Jays had an interesting Opening Day rotation, to say the least. In layman’s terms, it was pretty bad.
Hyun Jin Ryu was their Opening Day starter, and he was coming off a 2020 season where he was a finalist for the American League Cy Young award. After that, the early season rotation wasn’t great. Ross Stripling started the second game of the season, T.J. Zeuch the third game, Steven Matz the fourth, and Tanner Roark the fifth. They played .500 baseball through April, with starting pitching sitting in the middle of the pack. 
So what happened to those five starters? Well, Matz bounced back in 2021, owning a 3.82 ERA and 3.79 FIP in 29 starts, or 150.2 innings, a perfectly reasonable performance from a #5. 
Ryu’s performance dipped from the year prior, ending the year with a 4.37 ERA and 4.02 FIP, though a large reason for that was his final four starts where he gave up 17 earned runs over 13.2 innings of work. Before those four games, he carried a respectable 3.77 ERA and 3.70 FIP.
Of any starter in the 2021 rotation, Stripling had the weirdest season. The start was downright horrific, posting a 7.20 ERA and 5.45 FIP over his first six outings, culminating in six earned runs given up to the Boston Red Sox on May 19th. Then he started to pitch better, posting a 3.29 ERA over his next 14 outings before suffering an injury out west.
Both Zeuch and Roark were off the team after five and three appearances respectively. That’s thanks in part to Robbie Ray returning on April 12th. Then Alek Manoah forced the team’s hand by dominating Triple-A, forcing them to call him up in late-May.
It was helped by Robbie Ray returning on April 12th. Then in late-May, they called up Alek Manoah. How’d they do? Let’s start with Manoah.
Manoah’s debut will go down as one of my favourite games in team history. Making his debut in Yankees Stadium, the righty pitched six scoreless innings, giving up two hits, two walks, and seven strikeouts. 
His emergence, I’d argue, is the biggest reason why the Blue Jays were even near a playoff spot by the end of the season, finishing with a 3.22 ERA and 3.80 FIP across 111.2 innings of work. It’s worth noting that Manoah only had 35 innings of minor league ball under his belt at this point.
Then you have Ray. Acquired before the 2020 trade deadline, Ray had shown glimpses of brilliance before (namely 2017), but regressed over the next three seasons. Then he became the Blue Jays ace in 2021, authoring a 2.84 ERA and 3.69 FIP over a MLB-leading 193.1 innings of work. Thanks to leading the American League in strikeouts, as well as MLB in ERA, he won the AL Cy Young award.
By July 29th, 2021, the team had just a 51-48 record. The following day was one of the most important days of the season for the Jays for a few reasons. Chief among them was the acquisition of José Berríos, a deadline move that saw the Jays give up two top 100 prospects.
By the end of the season, the Jays rocked a rotation of Ray, Manoah, Berríos, Ryu, and Matz, a formidable rotation.

The moments

A special season needs some unforgettable moments. The two other special seasons mentioned earlier, 2015 and 2025 had countless moments.
In 2015, Troy Tulowitzki’s three hit-game in his Blue Jays’ debut stands out as he hit a home run in just his second plate appearance after the trade. David Price, their other big acquisition, struck out 11 over eight runs of one-run ball. Marco Estrada threw a near perfect game in June, with Donaldson making an outstanding catch. This doesn’t even mention the playoff moments. You know, the Bautista home run.
Then you have the moments from the 2025 season. Springer’s grand slam on Canada Day and the entire four-game series against the Yankees. Another one was Bo Bichette’s two-run home run in the ninth in late-May, which really kick-started the run. What about Kevin Gausman’s complete game shutout against the Astros in September, or Kirk’s grand slam in Game 162 to clinch the division? Of course, the 2025 playoffs had so many moments that are fresh in our minds.
But what about 2021? Well, I can think of a few off the top of my head, including the aforementioned Manoah debut.
The most memorable moment for me came in their first game at Rogers Centre, also on July 30th, 2021. Up 6-4 with two outs in the top of the ninth, Santiago Espinal made a terrific barehanded catch to end the game and give the Jays a three-game winning streak. It was the third win of a 12-3 stretch that put them in position to push for a playoff spot.
Another moment that stands out is actually the final two innings of a game on September 3rd. Hosting the Oakland Athletics for a three-game series. Entering the game, the Jays had a 71-62 record and were five games back with three teams to jump over, including the Athletics.
It wasn’t going well, as the Rays carried a 8-2 lead into the bottom of the eighth. Then the 2021 Blue Jays did 2021 Blue Jays things, scoring six runs to tie it, capped off by a Lourdes Gurriel Jr. grand slam to tie it. The Athletics responded with two runs in the top of the ninth, but never fear, former Athletic Marcus Semien was here, hitting a three-run blast to walk it off.
This win was the fourth in a stretch where the Blue Jays went 19-5, ending the night of September 21st in a playoff spot with 11 games to go.

The downfall of the 2021 Blue Jays

But there was no storybook ending to the 2021 Blue Jays’ season. By the end of the season, the Jays finished with a 91-71 record, one game back of the final wild card spot. There were a few reasons why the 2021 Blue Jays didn’t make the playoffs, and it comes down to rotten luck.
Their bullpen let them down early in the season, due in part to injuries, but also because of blown games. By the end of the season, the bullpen was much improved thanks to trades for Trevor Richards, Adam Cimber, and a few others.
As good as the team was, the team struggled with injuries. Kirby Yates, their big off-season acquisition for the bullpen, had his season end before it even started. A.J. Cole, Julian Merryweather, David Phelps, and others missed time. Even Springer, who at that point had the largest contract in team history, only appeared in 78 games. Kirk and Jansen both played fewer games than Reese McGuire.
There were a few factors out of their contract as well. Had the Blue Jays had this type of season the following season, they would have been a playoff team. In the 2020’s, the 2021 season is the lone season where there were only two wild card spots, with the postseason expanding to three wild card teams in 2022.
Another aspect to a special season is the atmosphere of Rogers Centre. Even watching games on the television, you felt the energy of the 2015 and 2025 teams. But because of the pandemic, the 2021 Blue Jays didn’t get that. Hell, they didn’t even play in Canada until late July.
There’s no one moment that cost the 2021 Blue Jays a playoff spot. You can point to Yates’ injury before the season began, a Semien error that would’ve capped off a win against the Detroit Tigers, Brad Hand’s 11 appearances, Ray’s final start against the Yankees, or even the Washington Nationals blowing a lead against the Red Sox in Game 162.
The 2021 Blue Jays were special, it’s just a damn shame they couldn’t show it in the postseason.
Cynthia Ryley Delaney is a Nation Network writer for Blue Jays Nation, DFOEdmonton, and DFOCalgary. She can be followed on Twitter @CynthiaRDelaney.
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