Culture at heart of Blue Jays’ World Series run

TORONTO – Whether it was at the draft, the trade deadline, or during free agency, Ross Atkins has always emphasized the importance of values during his decade as general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays.

Every time there was a potential addition to the team, Atkins never failed to mention their “high character.”

He believes that policy has paid off in 2025, with the Blue Jays reaching the World Series for the first time in 32 years in large part thanks to their cohesiveness and dedication to each other.

“I’ve always been taught and learned and believed strongly that hiring and identification of — whether it be players, coaches, scouts, anyone that’s helping support the organization — that hiring’s the most important thing we do,” said Atkins during a news conference on Friday before Game 1 of the World Series. “If you do that with values that are important to you, then over time, that’s going to pay off for you.”

Atkins said that centring the team’s personnel policy and the resulting atmosphere is something that he and manager John Schneider actually spoke about earlier in the week.

“The thing that I think about the most is the relationships, the people that we have hired and the people that we have grown with together,” said Atkins, who was hired as the team’s GM in December 2015. “I’ve always felt there’s a big group of people here that I’m working with that will, for sure, be lifelong relationships and lifelong friendships.

“This success — albeit we’re not done, with work to do — not just this year, but well beyond, I think just emboldens that feeling of how powerful these relationships will be.”

Toronto led all of Major League Baseball with 49 come-from-behind wins in the regular season, with 12 of those victories coming when the Blue Jays trailed by at least three runs.

They also rallied from a 2-0 deficit to the Seattle Mariners in the best-of-seven American League Championship Series. The climactic Game 7 in Toronto was capped by George Springer’s three-run homer in the seventh inning, undoing Seattle’s early 3-1 lead in that series finale.

“I think that’s what forms a good team. It’s talent and it’s players, but it’s people,” said Schneider before the World Series began. “I think that we’ve done such a phenomenal job of creating a culture where people are just welcome.

“It’s what we’ve grasped on to, the standard we’ve set. Not just the type of player we want, but the type of people we want in here, too.”

Schneider has been with the Blue Jays organization since 2002 when he was drafted in the 13th round of that year’s draft. He retired from playing after the 2007 season due to three concussions suffered that year, then became a minor-league manager for the rookie-level Gulf Coast League Blue Jays in 2008, working his way up through the franchise’s different levels of ball.

He said that the relationships that have been built in Toronto during Atkins’s tenure has helped create the culture that made the Blue Jays (94-68) playoff run possible.

“I think that when you’re trying to establish a winning environment and a winning organization that can do it repeatedly, that people come into play,” said Schneider. “People that are going to push things forward and not be satisfied.

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“Even this year, when we acquired (infielder Andres Gimenez) and signed (Anthony Santander) and signed Max (Scherzer), we were talking about what that would do for people around them too and where the people that we had already were in their career and in their lives.”

Schneider said it was also a factor in July as Major League Baseball’s trade deadline approached and the Blue Jays were gearing up for a deep post-season run.

“It was cool to have those conversations with Ross, understanding what we were doing at the time, and not trying to disrupt that,” said Schneider. “You want to try to add people that are going to help.

“So Seranthony (Dominguez), who is about as selfless as there is, Louis Varland, Ty France, they’re good pieces for what we already have, too. We made it a point to be really aware of it this year and, again, it’s been a couple years in the making to get to this point.”

Varland and France were traded to Toronto by the Minnesota Twins on July 31 for Alan Roden and Kendry Rojas. Varland, who has become a fixture in the Blue Jays bullpen in the post-season, said that the strong culture on his new team was immediately apparent.

“From the coaching staff to the players to the support staff to the chefs, like everybody’s great, everybody’s friendly, welcoming,” he said. “I saw this the other day, ‘the Glue Jays.’

“That’s, like, a perfect way to sum it up. Everybody’s so close and everybody’s a great guy or girl.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 26, 2025.

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