The Blue Jays are leading their divisional rivals, since the baseball season enters their last regular season stretch, which gives the team the opportunity to claim an outstanding playoff place for the first time in a decade.
But there is still a lot of baseball to play, and the team will have to break through 34 more games before the playoffs begin.
Currently, the tiles feel first in the East American League, with the Yankees and the Toronto Red Sox.
If Toronto can be kept ahead of those rivals, the club could be looking at its first division title since 2015, which means that they would arrive at the playoffs without having to qualify for a wildcard.
For Toronto-Shrew Baseball fans of Playoffs, the time has come to get into the car.
Lesley Mak, a prominent Superfan of the Blue Jays, says that this is a team that has already exceeded expectations before any possible playoff career.
“Some of my friends refer to this as the ‘Destiny team’,” he said.
It has been an exciting season for the Toronto Blue Jays, who currently lead the East division after the MLB trade deadline. Tyler Cheese of CBC has more in the resurgence of the team.
Are they really so good?
Before Friday’s games, the victory record in Toronto loss was 74-54.
That places them a little in front of the José Jays team led by José Bautista, which was 72-56 through the same number of games. The Jays won games at a torrid pace when that season was closed and then won the title of the division, although they finally lost the American League championship series against Kansas City’s reais, which became champions of the World Series.
Similarly, the Blue Jays were 70-58 to 128 games in the 2022 season; and at 67-61 of the previous year. Both teams won at least 20 more games than they lost.
Couldn’t there be a collapse?
Don’t talk like that. But try not to think about the 1987 season, when the Jays Soaring team lost the last seven games of the regular season and lost the playoffs.
The tiles were eliminated from the playoff dispute on the last day of the season in 1987.
What are Jays doing well?
As a team, the Jays have the highest batting average in the entire major league baseball. They also have the highest percentage based on.
Mak says there are many players, not only stars such as Bo Bichette, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and George Springer, who are demonstrating to be capable batters.
“We simply know that anyone who goes up to that dish can hit a single, or a double, or occasionally, a homer,” Mak said.
Toronto Star baseball columnist Mike Wilner agrees that this is a team with great depth in his bank.
“It seems that many times this is a team that has a different hero every night,” said Wilner, who also organizes the Deep Left Field podcast, and said they have managed to put together an offensive that does not depend completely on long balls to generate races.
“They have forged this identity of a team that puts the ball at stake,” he said, pointing out that the team has less strikeouts than any other team in the League.
How about the launch?
A central group of the veterans rotation of the presenter of Toronto, although Mak says that these family pitchers, José Berríos, Kevin Gausman and Chris Bassitt, are not having an easy moment in the mound.
“None of them are having their best seasons,” he said. “But they are reliable, they have experience, they are intelligent, they know how to recover from difficult points.”
The Blue Jays also have two winners of the Cy Young award in their team of pitchers: Max Scherzer and Shane Bieber.
Bieber will make his debut in the season on Friday, after having recently landed in the Toronto organization through a commercial mortification agreement with Cleveland. Nor has he launched in the largest since last year as a result of the end of the season.
The Toronto Blue Jays were occupied on the day of the trade deadline, adding the former winner of the Cy Young Shane Bieber award as emotion grows in a city with the hope of a long playoff race.
At 30, Bieber is younger than Berríos (31); Gausman (34); Bassitt (36); and Scherzer (41). In the world of professional baseball, Wilner says that this is a team of pitchers that qualifies as “old.”
But in general, he says they have been doing “enough to keep them in the games and let the offensive do the job.”
Mak and Wilner are not the only Jays observers with questions about how you can go to launch staff such as the 162 games season, and finally the playoffs arrive.
How far can you go?
If Toronto can win half of the remaining games, the team would end at least 90 victories, a reference point that, when it is reached, tends to result in a position in the playoffs. (However, as the winning Blue Jays discovered 91 games in 2021, that is not always the case).
The veteran baseball writer, Richard Griffin, believes that the tiles have a “realistic” opportunity to reach the playoffs, writing in Sustack that a total of 90 victories is “a modest objective” for a team with a strong camaraderie and the necessary launch talent to keep them competitive.
Wilner says that “it doesn’t matter how good you are” during the regular season, the postseason is unpredictable.
Anything can happen, and that could lead to disappointment for fans who waited too much to start following the action if a possible playoff race ends up being short, so it says it is “a long time for people to get in the car.”
And Jay fans are thirsty for a postseason success, after having seen lists that are rapidly eliminated from the playoffs in 2020, 2022 and 2023.
Toronto has not had a deeper playoff race since the tiles arrived at the American League Championship series, first in 2015 and again a year later.
Mak, meanwhile, keeps faith. She has already secured playoff tickets and is ready for a new postseason adventure.
“Life is short, the world is a challenge,” he said. “Let’s go to Blue Jays!”
