Will the Blue Jays' front office receive yet another chance?

You've probably heard the anecdote about the frog and the boiling water. It's the one where the water temperature increased slowly enough that the poor frog didn't even realize it was being cooked alive.

It's a metaphor to illustrate how even gradual change can be dangerous. It also feels a lot like the last half of the Toronto Blue Jays season.

A team that had World Series aspirations couldn't hit a lick in the early months, and by the time the offense had woken from its slumber, the pitching staff slumped, especially in the bullpen, where things went from bad to calamitous.

Given that the Jays were smack in the middle of what was supposed to be their championship window, and given the vast sums spent gussying up the Rogers Centre for what was intended to be many nights of meaningful baseball, it seemed like some urgency was in order. A big roster shake-up. A managerial firing. A front office overhaul.

Would any of these things have solved the problems of the 2024 season? Quite possibly not. But still, usually when a team underperforms this spectacularly, some kind of drastic action is taken.

But not this time. The general manager voiced his support for the manager. The team president gave his backing to the general manager. And ownership backed the president - not that anyone at Rogers Communications said anything explicitly, because ownership prefers not to say much publicly about the team unless it's on earnings calls.

And all the while, management has gone about an extensive gutting of the roster. That's where we get back to the part about the boiling frog. A couple of months ago, the question was whether the Jays would do something dramatic to try to save their season. And, on a related note, whether the management team in charge should even be trusted to do something dramatic. After all, these were the same figures who built this dreary mess.

A couple of months later, that question was answered not by one big move but by a bunch of smaller ones. Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins turned over almost a third of the roster in eight separate deals that returned a boatload of prospects, a couple of whom are highly touted and most of which are magic beans.

The question is no longer whether ownership is going to let Shapiro and Atkins blow it up and rebuild. They already did, just in a series of smaller, controlled demolitions.

To what end all that work was undertaken is less clear. The 2025 roster now has three positions players who would seem locked in as starters: Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., George Springer, and Daulton Varsho. Add Bo Bichette in there, unless something weird happens, and Alejandro Kirk, because someone has to catch, and that still leaves all kinds of uncertainty. The starting rotation has three solid arms and a bunch of question marks, especially with the long-term injuries to Alek Manoah and Ricky Tiedemann, who were supposed to be the next vanguard. And the bullpen raises the intriguing question of whether it's possible to replace an entire relief corps in one winter. Can you get bulk discounts?

That's an incredible amount of work for a management team to accomplish between now and April - and, not to beat a dead horse here, but this particular management team hasn't exactly been stacking up Ws.

But as the smoke clears from all of Toronto's deadline jackhammering, it seems most likely that this is the plan. One can only assume that the Blue Jays have no intention of tanking next season, not when they kept controllable pitchers like Kevin Gausman and Chris Bassitt while getting a relative prospect haul for the out-of-contract Yusei Kikuchi.

And one can only assume that the front office will stay intact at season's end, otherwise, why let it oversee the firesale of all of Toronto's pending free agents?

It remains possible that major changes will come after the 2024 season, but if so, this was a bafflingly odd way to end the Shapiro-Atkins-John Schneider era, by selling off anything that wasn't nailed down and just leaving the rest of the ghost-ship Blue Jays to drift toward the finish line.

As it stands, the Blue Jays have more wins this season than the following teams: The Athletics, White Sox, Marlins, Nationals, and Angels. None of them were trying to win games this year, and the first three don't seem to be trying to win ever. Toronto, a would-be playoff team, ended up selling off serviceable parts to teams like Boston and Seattle, both of which finished behind the Jays in the standings last season. The Jays were sellers to Houston, a team that started 12-24 and was the subject of more what-went-wrong stories than Toronto, with the key difference that the Astros were able to improve. The Jays got worse.

Atkins, in his media appearances after the trade deadline passed on Tuesday, called the Jays' season "disappointing." I'm not sure that goes far enough. Given the aspirations, the payroll, and the fancy new stadium, this was one of the worst seasons in franchise history. It wasn't a disappointment; it was a humiliation. Are they really going to keep the management band together after that?