2025 could be Mark Shapiro's last year with Toronto Blue Jays

For many Toronto Blue Jays fans, the 2025 campaign is viewed as a make-or-break season.

With uncertainty around the future of players like Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette, the entire core of the roster could be flipped on its head if the team doesn’t have a successful campaign.

And one man who might have more pressure on him than any player is Jays president Mark Shapiro, heading into his 10th year with the franchise, though he’s now in the final season of a five-year extension made official in 2021.

While he didn’t divulge much, Shapiro offered up some thoughts on his future in an interview with the Toronto Sun’s Rob Longley,

“I never think about that,” Shapiro said about his long-term future in Toronto. “Honestly, I never really do that. The best answer I can give you is I was in Cleveland for 24 years. This is my 10th season here. I’m clearly not someone that jumps around. I’m only focused on what I can control.”

General manager Ross Atkins (whose own contract expires after 2026) and Shapiro joined the team’s front office after the 2015 season.

While they returned the team to the American League Championship Series in their first year on the job, they haven’t been able to win a single playoff game in the nine years since, getting swept out of the first round on three separate occasions in 2020, 2022, and 2023.

Fan sentiments for the front office duo haven’t always been positive throughout the years, but Atkins and Shapiro have stuck around through some of the most turbulent times in franchise history.

Their tenure has overseen Toronto splitting their time in the 2020 and 2021 seasons with home games in Dunedin and Buffalo and games at the Rogers Centre while also undergoing an approximately C$400 million renovation of the ballpark built in 1989.

But the duo’s also garnered a reputation as the “close, but no cigar” franchise in recent offseasons, famously striking out on big-name free agents such as Juan Soto, Shohei Ohtani and Roki Sasaki despite going deep into negotiations with all three.

With cautious optimism heading into today’s Opening Day for much of the Blue Jays fanbase, Toronto’s president has much on the line as he heads into what could be his final year with the team.