TORONTO — An off-season that started with a whole lot of excitement and drama and airplanes and big-game hunting is likely to end in exact opposite fashion — very quietly.

By design or by accident is a very fair question at this point, but despite a quiet winter on the roster building side, the Toronto Blue Jays are still a very good baseball team.

Across baseball, rival clubs and analytics-leaning front offices have the Jays projected as a top-five team and view them as a serious threat.

That’s a much better barometer of reality than social media takes and the disappointment that was initially fuelled by expectations, which were set by Mark Shapiro and the front office group back in October.

Fans expected more splashy acquisitions and rightfully so, given the competitive window talk and the failures of the past two postseasons.

But this free-agent market never aligned with the Jays’ team needs, and it was always a murky picture of exactly how GM Ross Atkins would go about improving an offence that fell short of expectations in 2023 in just about every way imaginable when it mattered most.

It was apparent at the start of the winter that without major core-swapping trades or something unforeseen, internal positive regression was always going to be a huge factor in how this team improved offensively in order to navigate its way through the toughest division in baseball.

The number of down years from key Jays hitters last year is still quite stunning.

No one could have predicted Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Alejandro Kirk, George Springer and Daulton Varsho all failing to meet expectations at the exact same time.

That foursome alone went from 15.8 fWAR in 2022 to 6.9 last year. Their home run output dropped from 98 to........

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