With Juan Soto off the market, can GM Ross Atkins do enough to fix last-place Blue Jays?

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Not only is Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins in the most critical off-season of his tenure in Toronto, it may be one of the most complicated.

With baseball’s winter meetings launching with a massive bombshell on Sunday night in Dallas as the New York Mets signed Juan Soto to a landmark 15-year, $765-million US contract, the stakes jumped even higher for the beleaguered Blue Jays front office.

For the second year running, the Jays went hard for the top prize on the market and just like a year ago when Shohei Ohtani went to the Dodgers, Atkins and team president Mark Shapiro once again struck out.

Yes, not even the roughly $1 billion Canadian dollars of Rogers Communications cash the Jays were reportedly willing to offer to one of the sport’s best hitters was enough.

So it’s on to the next for the Jays brass and such a seemingly muddied route to get the team where it needs to be.

The Jays may have been in the mix monetarily for Soto, but once again they were merely at the lure of the big fish, helping force the Mets to go to record levels to land the former Yankee, much as they helped raise the price that L.A. paid for Ohtani.

I suppose the Soto pursuit was admirable, if unrealistic, but it always felt like it was going to be a long shot and it was merely the high-profile topper of Atkins lengthy to-do list.

So why is this year more profoundly important for Atkins and the front office than previous editions? Let us count the ways:

Start at the top, where team president Shapiro is reportedly only under contract through the 2025 season, while Atkins has only two more years on the Rogers payroll. Surely company CEO Ed Rogers must have them on the clock in some form.

Then there is the fractured state of the team’s farm system, ranked 23rd in MLB by Baseball America. The front office would have you believe it’s nowhere near as grim as that, but the reality is that almost any meaningful improvement will have to come externally, which further exacerbates the urgency of the coming weeks.

Next, the matter of the organization’s reputation. It’s become no secret that extreme top-end free agents look hard at the winning potential as a pairing to the riches courting teams offer. As recently as two years ago, the Jays were far more attractive in that regard. Now? They are a last-place team in which the cornerstone of the previous optimism — Vlad Guerrero Jr. — is less than 12 months away from being a sought-after free agent.

Perhaps most concerning is the breadth of improvement needed on a roster suddenly leaky throughout. After historic lows in runs scored and home runs, the Jays certainly need some offence.

But beyond that, there is plenty to extend Atkins workload beyond Wednesday when the winter meetings wrap up in Dallas. The bullpen needs a near complete rebuild after the team non-tendered closer Jordan Romano and is at least a couple of impact arms away from building a formidable group.

Offensively, the team will be hoping for a return to form (and health) of former all-star shortstop Bo Bichette, but will also need at least one more impact bat. Yes, despite the GM’s protestations to the contrary, there is still a clear need to add power.

Finally — and we may be wrong on this given that fancy outfield bars and $1 hotdogs intoxicated enough of the fan base to keep buying tickets last season — there is certainly a growing sense of unrest among the Jays faithful. There are increasingly expensive tickets to be sold and some day this franchise may not be the cash cow it has been for the better part of the past decade.

It wasn’t that long ago when Jays management boasted of a scenario where the team would bask in a competitive window that would remain gloriously open for years. Instead, it’s this close to slamming shut in a loud way.

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So what to expect from down in the heart of Texas this week?

Given recent history, I wouldn’t anticipate a great deal of earth-shattering news from the Jays at the meetings themselves, although with Soto no longer in the mix, the rest of the market could move quickly. That will be an added test for Atkins’ whose preferred style is to move slowly during the off-season while operating under a cloak of vagueness and revealing little of substance about his plans for the team. In part the nature of the meetings in recent years and in part the GM’s own operating style during his tenure, he’s done little impact business at the winter meetings.

Whatever feeling of defeat the front office has over failing once again to land the big prize, there’s no time to lament the loss. It will be interesting, then, to see how the GM responds as the market opens wide. The failure to successfully pivot post-Ohtani is partly what got the team into the last-place mess it’s currently in.

None of it will be easy, of course. The assignment is a stout one: Turning a last-place team into one that can return to contender status in one off-season.

The winter meetings tend to be the unofficial opening to baseball’s off-season. We’ll see what the Blue Jays’ GM has in him.

rlongley@postmedia.com

X: @longleysunsport