If Guerrero Jr. delivers Toronto’s 1st World Series in 32 years, he’s worth whatever Blue Jays are paying him

One problem with trying to calculate, dollar for dollar, a return on the Blue Jays’ $500 million US  investment in Vladimir Guerrero Jr.: hardly anyone can access the team’s actual revenue figures, and even fewer of us have the math skills to make sense of all those numbers.

The other problem is, it doesn’t matter whether, at the tail end of the last season before Guerrero’s 14-year deal takes effect, money is coming faster than the Jays can spend it on their 26-year-old superstar. 

You can assign a price to a ticket –  as of Wednesday afternoon, a seat in section 116 for Friday’s game at the Rogers Centre cost $4,070.43 Cdn, taxes and fees included. But, until advanced AI software masters monetizing our memories and emotions, you can’t put a dollar value on the feeling that came with watching Guerrero launch a Shohei Ohtani breaking ball over the left field fence to put the Jays ahead in Game 4. It’s another remember-where-you-were-when-it-happened moment in a post-season full of them.

So if Guerrero leads the Blue Jays to a World Series title this weekend, you can already call it even on his half-billion-dollar contract.

Ticket sales, TV ratings, value of the brand – they’ll all climb. Vindication for a long-suffering fan base, in a city where few people younger than 40 can remember a World Series winner, and where the most recent Stanley Cup is nearly old enough to qualify for CPP payouts, is worth something, too. And it’s all unfolding in a pro sports industry where teams routinely pay out lavish sums for long-shot rewards.

In that context, in 14 years, the $500 million the Blue Jays committed to Guerrero Jr. might look like a bargain.

Consider that the 2025 season began amid uncertainty about Guerrero Jr.’s