SportsCage MLB analyst Arash Madani wasn’t surprised when Bo Bichette left the Toronto Blue Jays in free agency.<\/p>\n
“I think it was inevitable,” Madani said on The SportsCage. “Everybody said all the right things, even though nobody meant it, from the end of the season through the off-season. Bo didn’t want to come back; the team didn’t want to have him back. It was like that awkward moment at the dance where everyone’s looking around\u00a0waiting for something.”<\/p>\n
The Blue Jays selected\u00a0Bichette in the second round, 66th overall\u00a0during\u00a0the 2016 MLB Draft. He\u00a0made\u00a0his debut with the team in\u00a02019. The\u00a027-year-old stayed with the club\u00a0through the 2025 season and left in free agency to sign with the New York Mets, it’s a three-year contract\u00a0totalling\u00a0$126 million. <\/a><\/p>\n Toronto finished the 2025 season first in the American League\u00a0with a 94-68 record, winning the AL East Division title and the AL pennant. The Jays\u00a0faced the defending champion\u00a0Los Angeles Dodgers\u00a0in the World Series but lost in seven games. Last year with the Blue Jays, Bichette played 139 regular season games,\u00a0hit\u00a018 home runs, totalled 94 RBI, and\u00a0produced a\u00a0.311 batting average in 582 at-bats.<\/p>\n \u201cHe’d been around the organization for 10 years.\u00a0I was around Bichette in 2019, 2021, 2022. Bo is a hard personality,\u00a0Bo has high expectations of the people around him. I don’t think he was ever aligned with the front office; the front office was never really aligned with him,” Madani explained.<\/p>\n “It\u00a0never felt like a fit. There was an element of him being sour at times. There was an element of the front office questioning things with him at times. There was always a disconnect there, that’s what I mean. No time did I think that Bichette was returning because I don’t think he wanted to come back and I don’t think the team wanted him back.”<\/p>\n MLB spring training started on Friday, February 20\u00a0and Madani knows the long grind when it comes to baseball.<\/p>\n \u201cThe amazing part is it’s seven weeks of spring training,\u00a0then 162 games and\u00a0a month of the postseason,\u201d Madani said. \u201cEvery single day to get to game seven and now you start all over again. You don’t pick up where you left off, everybody starts at zero.\u201d<\/p>\n During MLB free agency, the Blue Jays\u00a0added depth to their\u00a0pitching staff by signing\u00a0Dylan Cease<\/a>, Cody Ponce<\/a>, and Tyler Rogers<\/a>. Meanwhile, the team\u00a0re-signed Max Scherzer <\/a>and\u00a0Shane Bieber<\/a>\u00a0opted back in.<\/p>\n “The Blue Jays went out and spent money on starting pitching, which everybody’s happy with because of the emergence of some of those kids, I don’t know if it’s sustainable,” Madani said.<\/p>\n “I’ll be honest with you,\u00a0[Ernie] Clement and [Addison] Barger and [Nathan] Lukes, they’re going to give them a run. They’re going to see what they have there and then take stock of whether or not that’s sustainable. The Blue Jays believe it is. We shall see.”<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SportsCage MLB analyst Arash Madani wasn’t surprised when Bo Bichette left the Toronto Blue Jays in free agency.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518582,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[49,48,462,204884,82],"class_list":["post-518581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-mlb","tag-mlbtoronto-blue-jaysbo-bichettearash-madani","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}