Ben Nicholson-Smith

Well, I think it's really interesting, and you make some good points there, because you want your identity to come from wins.

You don't want it to come from losses, obviously.

And the Jays just haven't won that much.

So with that, you have fewer chances to find that identity.

And last year, to your point, they did such a great job of –

doing those little things well and having those players step up.

And look, if Lenine Sosa had come in and gone yard four times, if we had seen Eric Lauer step into the rotation and post a three ERA, if we had seen Tyler Heineman do what he did last year instead of struggling so badly, then I think it would be easier to point to that identity and say, hey, they've really continued it.

They've built on it.

They are still that team that

that you don't want to face because they're so deep and they pick each other up.

And one through 26, they are just finding ways to contribute.

But on this roster, it's just not the case.

So when players are performing below their potential, it's really hard to forge an identity just because there aren't enough good things happening to point to and say collectively, this is what we do.

Right.

And I think like end of the day, you can find an identity pretty late in the season for the Blue Jays in 2025.

It was probably like I would put it around Canada Day when they end up taking that series from the Yankees and asserting themselves atop the American League East.

From that point on, I felt like they had a clear identity as a team.

You go back further to 2015, I feel like the identity of that team only emerged once they had David Price and Troy Tulewitzki and Ben Revere and Latroy Hawkins.

And that was August and September and October that that team found its identity.

Now, we don't talk about the identity of the 2017 Blue Jays because they never found one.