The 1st-place Jays are fun again. Were Shapiro and Atkins right all along?

The 2025 season of the Toronto Blue Jays has, narratively speaking, changed from month to month.

April: Still can't hit.

May: Wait, maybe they can hit a little?

June: Hold on. Are the Blue Jays good?

July: Get the guy who hangs the pennants in the Rogers Centre on the phone!

OK, that last one is probably overstating it. But after completing a four-game sweep of the New York Yankees on Thursday night, for the first time ever at the dome, Jays fans can be forgiven for dreaming big. From eight games behind New York in the American League East standings in late May, Toronto sits alone in first heading into a weekend series against the Los Angeles Angels.

And while a series in early July is, after all, just a series in early July, the strong showing against the Yankees should, at the very least, allow the Jays to avoid a repeat of last season, when they were forced to raffle off serviceable pieces at the trade deadline and play a bunch of kids in September.

By the time that season ended, after it began with the false promise of the hunt for Shohei Ohtani, everyone had spent months mocking the front office's assertion that the Jays would count on "internal improvements" to revive what had been a moribund offense.

But, funny thing: Those internal improvements are, somewhat improbably, here now. It turns out that team president Mark Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins were right. They were just off by a year.

There is probably no single answer for why some of the same Blue Jays who were desperately poor at the plate in 2024 are comparatively clobbering the ball in 2025, but the evidence, so far, speaks for itself.

George Springer is having his best offensive season since 2021, his first in Toronto, after his production dropped significantly two years ago and then fell off a cliff last year. At one point during the 2024 campaign, he was among the worst regular hitters in the league before a late recovery left his final numbers, including a 91 OPS+, looking merely below average. This season, he's back up to an OPS+ of 145, buoyed by 15 home runs, including four against the Yankees this week.

Alejandro Kirk was on a similar track, which was alarming because he's almost a decade younger. The catcher was an All-Star in 2022, with a 127 OPS+, before dropping to a 92 in that statistic in each of the last two seasons. Now he's back up to 116, with more home runs already (7) than he had all of last year (5).

The list of guys having bounce-back seasons is long and varied. Bo Bichette is leading the team in total bases. Ernie Clement looks more like the hitter that the Jays hoped he would be when they handed him the third base job before the start of last season. Addison Barger, who struggled as a part-time player last year, has forced his way into the everyday lineup. Davis Schneider, who showed great promise in his 2023 debut but then fell down to earth in a full-time role last season, has been extremely productive since returning as a part-timer in 2025.

Internal improvements: not just a misguided sound bite anymore.

Is this all the David Popkins effect? Has the team's new hitting coach worked some kind of magic to turn so many of last season's struggling batters around? Probably not. But they're collectively doing something right. With more than half of the season completed, Jays hitters have the fewest strikeouts in the American League, the second-best batting average, and the fifth-best OPS. They still aren't blasting home runs at a significant rate, just 11th in the AL, but they've scored the fifth-most runs. Last season, the only AL teams to score fewer runs than the Jays were the White Sox, Athletics, Angels and Rays — and the first three weren't even trying to win games.

The other notable thing about Toronto's internal improvements is that they come in the absence of external improvements. Max Scherzer has missed almost all of the 2025 campaign, though he's in the rotation now. Anthony Santander has been out for more than a month, and he started poorly even when he was in the lineup. In other words, the front office's attempts to improve last year's disappointing roster didn't even work, and yet the Jays are still leading the division and have about an 80% chance to make the playoffs, according to projections.

Will it last? Probably not at this level. They probably won't go undefeated in July. But they've just ripped off a five-week stretch to rival any in what might be called the Vlad era, a period that has mostly been known for falling short of expectations.

The Jays are exceeding them now. Perhaps more importantly, they are fun to watch again. It's funny how scoring runs will do that.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.