Hey: hey.

 

hey.

Hey. Hey. It's the final Thursday of the 2025 regular season—the very last one! for real! no more Thursdays!—and the Blue Jays are still in first place not just in the AL East, but in the whole great big American League itself (and it really is a lot of teams when you check). That the season, alas, stubbornly—some might say foolishly—runs through Sunday is, I grant you, a bit of a drag, given that this looks likely to the be last day of the Blue Jays' truly remarkable and super enjoyable run atop the division that began, you may well recall, with a four-game sweep at home over the Yankees that occurred both on and around Canada Day, and really a good chunk of that whole first week of July. Remember all that? George Springer's Canada Day grand slam? Wasn't that the greatest? Things have of course gone less great this last little bit, with just one win in our last seven (we won six in a row right before, so who knows man), and yet that one win, I'm sure you will also recall, was the Blue Jays ninetieth of the season (such a crucial number [in terms of my enjoyment, if nothing else]), the playoff-clinching 8-5 Sunday afternoon win in Kansas City, and so there is a very real limit to just how badly we can crash out of this thing over these final four games. Imagine being the Tigers, whose fifteen-and-a-half-game-lead over the Guardians has somehow proven insufficient (haha I can tell you "how"), and who may very well miss the playoffs entirely; or the Astros, recently overtaken by the AL West-clinching Mariners (first division title since the incredible 2001 team, Ichiro's first year), who currently sit a game behind those same sad Tigers heading into play today. It's looking very much like all three teams that led their AL divisions to start September are going to have to settle for wild card spots or worse (and the "worse" is of course much worse). It's been pretty brutal! Given that brutality, we're actually getting off fairly light(ly) here, I think, as the prospect of a slide from holding the best record in the league and the top playoff spot to having the second-best record in the league and the fourth playoff spot looms large(ly) over these final four games. It remains very much the case that if the Blue Jays "win out," they cannot be caught or surpassed or exceeded in any way, as we have winning records against both the Yankees and Red Sox, and so hold those tiebreakers, but that prospect seems . . . let's say unlikely? Things sure would feel a whole lot different had the Yankees, down to their last strike against the White Sox the other night, not tied the game on a wild pitch and walked the Sox off moments later; even just that one more game in the standings would be massive for us with so few remaining. It might make today's bullpen game—featuring Louis Varland as the opener!—seem a little less grim? But enough! I banish all such thoughts! And instead I will say simply: let's get through the weekend without anybody getting hurt; let's forget about running Kevin Gausman out there on the final day of the season trying to clinch anything; and let's just give him the ball on Tuesday and see if we can't win a Wild Card series. I continue to feel that it is totally possible that we can, and also that things are actually, on the whole, good?  "It feels like the sky is falling right now," John Schneider said after the game, "and it’s fucking not. We’ve got ninety wins, we’re in the playoffs, and if the season ended today, we’re winning the AL East." I like it when John Schneider and I are on the same page. I feel that we are stronger as an organization when that it is the case.   

KS