3 Blue Jays Players Who Should Become Coaches After 2026: Scherzer, Springer and Taillon
I don't think Max Scherzer's most useful day for the Blue Jays next year happens on a mound.
Think about how teams actually buy experience. They hand a 41-year-old starter a one-year deal, or keep a veteran bat around past his prime, because those guys know things a 23-year-old doesn't. Then the contract runs out. The player leaves, and whatever was in his head leaves with him. Maybe he signs somewhere else. Maybe he ends up on a pregame show in a nice jacket. What almost never happens is the team that paid for all that knowledge finding a way to keep it.
Toronto is about to watch three of those players reach the end of the line. Scherzer is 42 and finishing a one-year, $3 million contract. George Springer is playing out the last year of the six-year, $150 million deal he signed back in January 2021. Jameson Taillon is headed for free agency with an elbow that shut down his season, and he's said himself he wondered if he'd thrown his last pitch.
I'd hire all three. Tomorrow, if the rules let me.
Why Toronto Should Turn Its Veterans Into Coaches
Go back through this season and ask what really went wrong. The Jays had used fourteen different starters by the middle of August. Dylan Cease held the whole thing together while half the rotation lived on the injured list. Talent wasn't the issue. Durability was, and so was knowing how to adjust when your body stops doing what it used to.
That's what these three know better than almost anyone on the roster.
This isn't some radical idea, either. Craig Counsell went from playing to a front office job in Milwaukee to managing the Brewers. Aaron Boone jumped from the ESPN booth into the Yankees dugout. The move works. It just rewards whoever makes the call first, and the team that waits usually ends up with a nice tribute video on the scoreboard and nothing else.
Max Scherzer, Pitching Coach in Waiting
You could stop at the numbers. 224 wins. A 3.28 career ERA. 3,543 strikeouts, three Cy Youngs, two rings, and a 19th big league season that's still going.
The numbers aren't really why, though. Scherzer's basically been coaching for two years already.
When Toronto brought him back in March, most of the chatter was about what he'd do for Trey Yesavage. If you watched the Jays at all in 2025 you saw it constantly, Scherzer in the dugout walking pitchers (and a few hitters) through something. He also sat on the players' union executive subcommittee, so he's spent real time across the table from owners, which is more negotiating experience than most coaching staffs have combined.
And then there was ALCS Game 4 in Seattle. Schneider walked out to talk to him and Scherzer yelled at him. On national TV. He stayed in the game, went 5 2/3 with two runs allowed, and picked up his first playoff win since 2019. Knowing when to push back on your boss takes most coaches about a decade. He handled it in one mound visit.
I wouldn't give him the pitching coach title right away. Call him a senior pitching advisor. Have him in Dunedin for spring, around for home series, and on speed dial for Yesavage and the rest of the young arms. The travel stays light, which matters for a guy with a family, and his family seems to like it here. His eight-year-old daughter wrote the Blue Jays a letter last December asking them to bring her dad back. I'm not sure a front office has ever received a better scouting report.
Honestly, the danger isn't that he turns Toronto down. It's that a network gets to him first.
George Springer and the Comeback Nobody Else Can Teach
Springer turned 37 on Saturday, and his 2026 has been fine. Just fine. By mid-August he was at .235 with 12 homers and a 103 wRC+, playing mostly DH.
2025 was a different story. At 35 he hit .309 with a .399 OBP, 32 home runs and a .959 OPS, the best average and on-base numbers of his 12 years in the league. He also hit the three-run shot in Game 7 of the ALCS that sent Toronto to its first World Series in 32 years, which I'm pretty sure you remember exactly where you were for.
That season is the resume.
Lots of hitting coaches can explain what an adjustment is supposed to look like. Hardly any of them made one at 35 and turned it into a career year. Springer rebuilt his approach at the exact point where most hitters get told, politely, to start thinking about the next chapter. You can't fake having done that.
There's another piece that won't show up in any box score. Springer has talked openly about his stutter for years and has done a lot of work with the Stuttering Association for the Young. I spent a long time coaching, and the best communicators I ever worked with weren't the smooth talkers. They were the people who knew how hard it can be to get a message across and who were willing to slow down until it landed.
The clubhouse is his, too. When Daulton Varsho and Kevin Gausman were traded at the deadline, Springer cried saying goodbye. Ross Atkins kept him around for a reason.
He probably still wants to play, and I get it. Keegan Matheson at MLB.com thinks there's more baseball in him, and with Anthony Santander locked in at DH long term, Toronto isn't the obvious fit. So give him something nobody else can. A one-year deal to play part time in 2027, with a coaching and special assistant contract already signed for 2028. Outfield work, baserunning, a chair in the development meetings. Finish here, start here.
Jameson Taillon Knows Rehab Better Than Anyone
Taillon's career reads like a medical chart. He's 34, 35 in November, and he's had two Tommy John surgeries and beaten testicular cancer. He went second overall in the 2010 draft and has spent a painful amount of the years since rehabbing instead of pitching.
This year was rough. The Cubs designated him for assignment in late July carrying a 5.92 ERA and 25 home runs allowed in only 76 innings. Toronto got him on August 2 for cash, and he posted a 3.60 ERA over three starts before leaving his September 4 outing after two innings with elbow discomfort. He says his season's over.
The thing that makes him a shaky bet as a player is exactly what makes him valuable as a coach. Toronto's most expensive problem in 2026 was pitchers who couldn't stay healthy, and Taillon has more hard experience coming back from that than nearly anyone active. He knows the rehab. He knows the second opinions and the waiting and what it's like to rebuild your stuff around an arm that's been rebuilt twice. That's worth a lot more in Dunedin than one more year of league-average innings somewhere else.
It doesn't hurt that he's Canadian-American. Front offices tend to underrate how much that means in this market. Fans don't.
If the elbow news is bad, offer him a pitching development or rehab coordinator job before he's had a week to think about TV. If he wants one more shot, a minor league deal with a spring invite and a coaching clause keeps him in the building either way.
Which of These Blue Jays Veterans Retires First?
My money's on Taillon, because the elbow may not give him a vote.
Scherzer's next. He's said he'll keep going as long as he can start for a contender, and at 42 that gets a little harder to prove every spring.
Springer's the least likely to walk away. 2025 gave him every reason to think he's got more.
Which creates an odd little puzzle for the front office. The guy most likely to retire is the one you could hire soonest. The guy least likely to retire is the one you'd have to wait on the longest. You'd want to be working on all three timelines at once, starting about now.
What These Hires Could Mean for the Next Decade in Toronto
This September has been a scramble. Fourteen starters, bullpens covering the fourth inning, a wild card race that's come down to who drew the softer schedule.
You don't fix 2036 with a trade deadline deal. You fix it with teaching. Pitchers who know how to stay on the mound, hitters who've actually adjusted when age said they couldn't, and a clubhouse that remembers how the last good team was built.
None of it costs a draft pick or a prospect. It costs a phone call, and somebody else is going to make it if Toronto doesn't.
