The Blue Jays are leading their divisional rivals as the baseball season enters its final regular-season stretch, giving the team a chance to claim a leading playoff spot for the first time in a decade.
But there’s still a lot of baseball to play, and the team will have to fight their way through 34 more games before the playoffs begin.
Currently, the Blue Jays sit in first place in the American League East, with the Yankees and Red Sox trailing Toronto.
If Toronto can stay ahead of those rivals, the club could be looking at its first division title since 2015, meaning they would make the playoffs without having to qualify for a wildcard spot.
For playoff-hungry Toronto baseball fans, the time to jump on the bandwagon has come.
Lesley Mak, a noted Blue Jays superfan, says this is a team that’s already exceeded expectations ahead of any potential playoff run.
“A few of my friends refer to this as the ‘Team of Destiny,’ ” she said.
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Ahead of Friday’s games, Toronto’s win-loss record stood at 74-54.
That puts them slightly ahead of the pace of the José Bautista-led Jays squad of 2015, which was at 72-56 through the same number of games. The Jays won games at a torrid pace as that season closed and went on to won the division title, though they eventually lost the American League Championship Series to the Kansas City Royals, who became World Series champs.
Likewise, the Blue Jays were at 70-58 through 128 games in the 2022 season; and at 67-61 the year before. Both of those teams won at least 20 games more than they lost.
Don’t talk like that. But try not to think about the 1987 season, when the soaring Jays squad lost the last seven games of the regular season and missed the playoffs.
The Jays get eliminated in 1987
As a team, the Jays have the highest batting average in all of Major League Baseball. They also have the highest on-base percentage.
Mak says there are a lot of players — not just stars like Bo Bichette, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and George Springer — who are proving to be capable hitters.
“We just know anybody who goes up to that plate can hit a single, or a double, or occasionally, a home run,” said Mak.
Toronto Star baseball columnist Mike Wilner agrees that this a team with serious depth on its bench.
“It does feel like a lot of the time this is a team that has a different hero every night,” said Wilner, who also hosts the Deep Left Field podcast, noting they’ve managed to put together an offence that’s not completely reliant on long balls to generate runs.
“They’ve forged this identity of a team that puts the ball in play,” he said, noting the team has fewer strikeouts than any other team in the league.
A core group of veterans anchor Toronto’s staring rotation, though Mak says these familiar hurlers — José Berríos, Kevin Gausman and Chris Bassitt — aren’t having an easy time on the mound.
“None of them are having their best seasons,” she said. “But they’re reliable, they’re experienced, they’re smart, they know how to recover from tough spots.”
The Blue Jays currently also have two past Cy Young Award winners on their pitching staff — Max Scherzer and Shane Bieber.
Bieber will make his season debut on Friday, having recently landed in the Toronto organization via a trade-deadline deal with Cleveland. He also hasn’t pitched in the majors since last year as a result of season-ending surgery.
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At 30, Bieber is younger than Berríos (31); Gausman (34); Bassitt (36); and Scherzer (41). In the world of professional baseball, Wilner says this is a pitching staff that qualifies as “old.”
But overall, he says they’ve been doing “enough to keep them in games and let the offence do the job.”
Mak and Wilner aren’t the only Jays observers with questions about how the pitching staff may fare as the 162-game season — and eventually the playoffs — roll on.
If Toronto can win half the remaining games, the team would end up with at least 90 wins — a benchmark that, when reached, tends to result in a playoff berth. (Though, as the 91-game-winning Blue Jays found out in 2021, that’s not always the case.)
Veteran baseball writer Richard Griffin believes the Blue Jays have a “realistic” chance at making the playoffs, writing on Substack that a 90-win total is “a modest goal” for a team with strong camaraderie and the pitching talent needed to keep them competitive.
Wilner says that “no matter how good you are” during the regular season, the post-season is unpredictable.
Anything can happen, and that could lead to disappointment for fans who waited too long to start following the action if a potential playoff run ends up being short, which is why he says it’s “well past time for people to get on the bandwagon.”
And Jays fans are thirsting for some post-season success, having seen past rosters rapidly eliminated from the playoffs in 2020, 2022 and 2023.
Toronto hasn’t had a deeper playoff run since the Blue Jays made it to the American League Championship Series, first in 2015 and again a year later.
Mak, meanwhile, is keeping the faith. She’s already secured playoff tickets and is ready for a fresh post-season adventure.
“Life is short, the world is challenging,” she said. “Let’s go Blue Jays!”
