Arden Zwelling

So once he's doing that, you know, like we are 24 to 48 hours from him being back with the big league club.

it's at the letters for wednesday june the 3rd 2026 arden's welling here with ben nicholson smith and our producer christian chenidi thanks so much for listening ben we are both

in Atlanta and we are both witnessing what I suppose Kevin Gosman would refer to as the two steps back portion of the four steps forward, two steps back cycle that he described to us after Tuesday night's loss to the Atlanta Braves.

A one run loss in a game in which the Blue Jays had a bunch of base runners.

They had four hitters with multi-hit games and just could not

Cash them against Bryce Elder and some really, really strong relief pitching from the back end of the Atlanta Braves bullpen.

So how do you feel about that summation that Gosman gave us that the Blue Jays season has essentially been oscillating between four steps forward and two steps back?

Yeah, I think not to be pedantic, but I think it's probably more accurate to say three steps forward, three steps back.

Because if you went four forward, two back, and you just kept doing that over the course of the season, I think you'd actually have a really, really successful season, right?

I think you'd probably win like over 100 games.

so that's like if that's what they're doing keep doing it because that's going to work out over time but yeah that's not what they're doing it's probably more so like 3.1 forward 2.9 back but look this is the I think the important thing to keep in mind here this team is just forever going to be compared to the 2025 team and we're just always going to because it's so similar and 2025 just happened and a lot of the

protagonists remain unchanged and we're constantly going to be comparing these players to what they did last year and the team to how it performed last year and all season long we've been saying hey blue jays got out to a slow start yes last year you know they didn't really get going until they were about 60 games in and we've seen them like this before and then we've seen them put it together and go on a run uh but this is the point right now when the blue jays really took off last year i mean they got up to five games above 500 about a week into june

And then they never looked back.

So if we're going to continue the comparisons to 2025, then this is the point where the Blue Jays need to get things going and they need to bear down and start winning a lot more than they're losing rather than just winning a little bit more.

then they're losing.

And we'll see if that's possible in a really difficult stretch of schedule when it's not only like the Atlanta Braves who you're playing right now who have been the best team in baseball this year, but it's going home for a homestand against Baltimore, Philly, and the Yankees, and then going back on the road for Boston and Chicago.

It's really a difficult stretch right now.

Wins, particularly with the current state of the roster, it figures will be hard to come by.

to me like the most appropriate comparison to 2025 if we're going to do this all year is just the comparisons of the seasons that Vlad and Springer have had and to like a lesser extent Kirk but like Kirk's it's kind of obvious he just hasn't been available so like of course he hasn't produced like he did last year it's been injury but Vlad and Springer have been generally available Springer took a little bit of time off when he fractured his toe but he's

um he's he's mostly been in the lineup and i mean right now he's been a negative war player he's a negative 0.3 f war player uh last year he was a five win player so that's just a massive difference in terms of like producing um and contributing to wins and losses and then vladimir guerrero jr who as of today is on pace for eight home runs