TORONTO — Seasons and baseball go past July 30th, Trade Deadline, as hard as it is to see through the thick fog to these things.

The majority of these debates will remain where they belong—down the road—but they will all be influenced by what we observe at this precise moment.

After their terrible series came to an end on Thursday with their third loss in four games against the Astros, there is no great realization or bright spot to be found.

With only 20 games remaining until the deadline, the Blue Jays are currently 39-48. While it appears obvious that they will have to sell, they also need to recover some of their lost assets.

Since the beginning of the previous campaign, Toronto’s rotation has been resilient despite suffering significant injuries to Alek Manoah and Hyun Jin Ryu.

With a 3.83 ERA during the previous season, this team was third in baseball. They have a 4.03 ERA this year and are ranked 14th, demonstrating similar talent albeit more inconsistently.

Kevin Gausman, Chris Bassitt, José Berríos, and Yusei Kikuchi are four excellent veterans, but their durability is just as crucial. They have repeatedly prevented the Blue Jays from losing games due to their shallow pitching depth because they are skilled pitchers, which is more than merely throwing a baseball hard.

Manager John Schneider remarked, “They’re right at the spot of being old-school enough and open-minded enough to evolve a bit.” Consider how much Yusei has changed throughout his stay here.

With his durability, José is a bit of a different beast than Chris and Kevin. That’s something we want to teach all of our pitchers.

The Blue Jays must continue to include this in their rotation for the upcoming season and beyond. Beyond that, the Blue Jays have ownership over Bassitt through 2025, Gausman through 2026, and Berríos until 2028 with an opt-out after 2026. Kikuchi is an apparent contender to be sold before the Trade Deadline.

it’s a solid rotational core, and considering how few choices the Blue Jays have established to back this bunch, it has been really important. These signings and trades have been so strong that they have hidden an organizational vulnerability.

Consider Bassitt, who struggled to start and gave up four runs in five innings versus Houston, but entered the game with an ERA of 1.47 after eight starts since his mid-May comeback. Even though he has completed a career-high 200 innings, at 35, he still seems like a rubber man.

“He is aware of his physique. To put it mildly, he’s not the tightly wound, muscular guy that José is,” Schneider remarked. He truly is aware of his workload between starts, and he is reluctant to leave his current location. As the season progresses, he has learned how to maintain and then grow. He is a unique breed in the modern game.

Schneider depends on all the traditional commendations. He claims that Bassitt is a different breed of bulldog. In the best conceivable way, he is retro. Schneider continued, “That pitching style is, I believe, coming back.”

While youthful guns capable of throwing 100 mph and lighting up a computer with their sweeper data are flooding the baseball field, experienced pitchers such as these four are getting harder to find. The Blue Jays were expected to thrive off of them, especially the previous season.

In two, five, or ten years, when the Blue Jays have a strong offense but unreliable starting pitching, the heartbreak will happen again. When we look back, we’ll ask ourselves: What if they had that starting lineup from 2023–2024?

There’s just so much Bassitt and the starting Blue Jays players can say for the time being. Despite Yariel Rodríguez, who made his series debut on Monday and pitched 6 2/3 innings of one-run ball, giving Toronto the greatest outing of his young career, he was still left with the loss.

“Succeed tomorrow. That’s all,” Bassitt declared. It doesn’t help at all if you start thinking about everything else. There’s no use in giving it any thought. Just triumph tomorrow. Make it easy. I believe that anything else is simply the incorrect response.

Top prospect Beyond that, the Blue Jays have few prospects with more depth than Ricky Tiedemann, especially if he makes a lot of progress in Triple-A and if Kikuchi is traded. The Blue Jays need to maintain this rotational approach going forward for whatever reason. The remaining parts require fixing.