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“He’s still going to be a couple of weeks away from hitting,” manager John Schneider said before the Jays opened a three-game series against the New York Yankees with a 4-1 win Monday night. ”(We’ll) evaluate him week by week to see when that does start.”

In other words, it’s going to be a long time before the Jays get the switch-hitter back. Though, to be fair, they haven’t missed him at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Santander suffered a subluxation of his left shoulder when he went into the wall in Anaheim, chasing a Jo Adell fly ball in an 8-5 win over the Los Angeles Angels on May 8. He missed three games, watching the Jays sweep the Seattle Mariners, then returned to go 5-for-41 with one home run and 19 strikeouts before shutting it down on May 29.

With the 30-year-old slugger on the injured list, the Jays have gone 31-13, the best record in the American League.

Still, the Jays say they can’t wait to get him back.

“We want to have the option of having him, obviously. It’s just worked out to where it hasn’t been as quick as we, or he, had hoped” said Schneider. “You feel good about the contributions of guys that have been here, but a player like him and what he can add, you don’t want to slow-play it. You want to try to get it fixed as quickly as you can.”

Before Santander got hurt, he was hitting just .196 with five home runs in 36 games. He was starting to come around, though, with multi-hit games in three of his last five, posting an .875 on-base-plus-slugging percentage over that span. The shoulder injury dulled whatever momentum was starting to build for a player who is a notorious slow starter.

Trying to play through the injury didn’t help, either. And as Santander continued to struggle while playing hurt, he tried to do more physically — more work in the batting cage, more out on the field to try to snap out of it — and that likely made things a lot worse.

Coming off a career-high 44 home runs in 2024 with the Baltimore Orioles, Santander was supposed to be the power bat the Jays had been sorely lacking pretty much since Teoscar Hernández was traded away following the 2022 season.

He only hit four home runs in April, but didn’t hit his fifth home run last year until May 5, so it didn’t seem like that big a deal. As the weather heats up, so does the big slugger, but this year he never got the chance.

Addison Barger did, though.

When Santander hurt his shoulder, Barger was hitting .171 and scuffling for playing time, starting about every other day. 

The injury opened the door to more playing time and young Bam-Bam barged right through it by going 6-for-13 with three doubles and a home run in the Seattle sweep. Since then, the 25-year-old has belted 13 dingers and posted an .878 OPS, providing everything the Jays had hoped Santander would with the bat and doing much more defensively, in right field and at third base.

In addition, Barger’s emergence has allowed George Springer to spend a lot of time off his feet. Springer started at designated hitter 16 times before Santander went on the injured list, or 31 per cent of his games. Since Santander has gone down, Springer has been the DH two-thirds of the time (27 of 41 games). No doubt that has kept the 35-year-old fresh in this resurgent season in which he leads the Jays with 17 home runs.

The Jays aren’t saying Santander is done for the year, though he hasn’t swung a bat in over a month and there’s still inflammation in his shoulder. If he can get healthy, he could help down the stretch, but they’ve been more than fine without him.