The Blue Jays have won five of their last six games, but still sit below the .500 mark with a 28-30 record, putting them a few percentage points behind the Rays for last place in the AL East. As Darragh McDonald put it in a piece for MLBTR last week, some tough decisions will await the club heading into the trade deadline, and perhaps in the bigger picture entirely if the Jays don’t start heating up in a hurry.
Trading either of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. or Bo Bichette would be the most seismic moves Toronto could make if the team did decide to sell at the deadline. The duo have been the faces of this era of Blue Jays baseball, but since both are scheduled to become free agents after the 2025 season, it isn’t yet clear if either player will truly be in Toronto for the long term — whether due to the Jays’ overall struggles, or the team’s own hesitation about making a big financial commitment to players with inconsistent performance.
In either case, Jays GM Ross Atkins pushed back against the idea of a Guerrero/Bichette trade in an interview today on SiriusXM’s MLB Network Radio, and reiterated that the Blue Jays “believe in their futures and hope that there is a way they can play here for a long time.” In regards to possible extensions, Atkins said “of course we have dialogue with them” about such multi-year deals, “and that is something that will continue.”
This belief would seem to preclude the idea of Guerrero or Bichette being moved at the deadline. Atkins said he was “disappointed” in a recent report from MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand, which featured a quote from an unnamed AL executive who said Toronto wasn’t “opposed to” moving one of their two cornerstones, and have “talked to teams about it,” though “the asks were ridiculous.”
Atkins didn’t deny that some conversations had taken place with other front offices about Guerrero and Bichette, but in the sense that that the other teams were floating the idea of a trade, not the Jays themselves. Trading Guerrero or Bichette “just doesn’t make any sense for us…There will be occasional times as you’re talking to other executives, that they’ll ask if we’ll consider, and we just say it’s not something that we have spent any time on. Because they are so talented and such great teammates, they are attractive to other teams, so [others] will call.”
It is common practice for executives to check in on all sorts of players, simply out of due…
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