Rays 12, Blue Jays 2: And Just Like That, We're Free

 

touch 'em all, Vladdy

This feels better, doesn't it? Now that there's no more worrying to be done about the shape of things to come? The 2025 Blue Jays, you will recall, followed their last-place 2024 season with a miraculous, ninety-four win run to the AL East title, an all-timer of a routing of the New York Yankees in the ALDS, a stirring, improbable comeback against the Seattle Mariners to win just the third American League pennant of their now fifty summers, and played the Los Angeles Dodgers and their historically great roster of future Hall-of-Famers, including the greatest baseball player who has yet lived, to extra innings in Game Seven of the best World Series I have ever seen (a view shared, as we have discussed previously, by several prominent baseball people even older than me, in some cases by significant margins [which is getting harder to do {glory to each of them as they grow super old}]). In 2026, though, it's all gone pear-shaped, friends, and that's really all there is to it. A baseball team that we expected to be very good has turned out, quite to the contrary, to not be very good at all. Such things, I think you will agree, happen all the time. It's no big deal.

 A month ago—to the day, actually—the Blue Jays' record stood at thirty-nine and thirty-nine, and it's easy to imagine things having unfolded differently from there, and much better than they have (in the primary world of our experience): our subsequent seven-and-sixteen would not have had to have been totally flipped to sixteen-and-seven for us to have remained very much in the thick of things, even with several other American League teams finally figuring it out (I did not necessarily see the Red Sox winning fourteen in a row [and counting!]). But the margins between good baseball and bad baseball, or even between great baseball and really very poor baseball, though they can present as glaring on the day-to-day, I-can't-believe-they-kicked-another-one level, are often slimmer than you'd think when approached in the aggregate. If we take the widest lens, and just look at runs scored and runs allowed (which, I would remind you, is how it all goes down), the 2025 Blue Jays allowed 4.5 per game, while scoring 4.9. And they were great! So much so that, late in the season and into the postseason, overly-excited pundits across baseball were speculating that the Blue Jays' approach under hitting coach David Popkins may not just have worked out remarkably well for them, specifically, but might actually offer all of baseball an excitingly new, contact-oriented model in contrast to the all-or-nothing, slug-heavy approach of recent seasons that many bemoan for æsthetic reasons (never mind that the Blue Jays were slugging the heck out of the ball all postseason, as the fine writer Mike Petriello noted repeatedly but to no avail as this narrative took hold). The Blue Jays weren't just good; they had figured out a new (old) way to play baseball that was not just successful, but good for the game. But in 2026, through the Blue Jays's first hundred games, though they've allowed the same 4.5 runs per game (despite being down like a million arms due to injury), have scored 4.0 rather than last year's 4.9. That difference of less than a run per game—you could fairly call it a tenth of a run per game from each spot in the batting order—is the difference between winning the pennant with a thrilling new approach, and being a great big mess nobody can figure out. So it goes.

Last night's game was as good a time as any to turn the page on the season in that sense, I think. I do not view this as a surrender to hopelessness so much as a return to the small pleasures of baseball unencumbered by the weight expectation. What remains to be enjoyed of this season are the kinds of thing that are to be enjoyed of any season, really, and I intend to enjoy them. It doesn't even take "intention," honestly, in that they're just things that I genuinely enjoy, and are why I have spent such a weird proportion of my life watching or thinking about baseball (it's the thinking about it, in my experience, that will really get you ["Hence it is that the sense of sublimity arises, not from the sight of an outward object," Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote one time, "but from the beholder's reflection upon it"]). For instance, last night we had the beloved Kevin Gausman making perhaps his last start in Toronto as we near the end of his five very strong years as a Blue Jay, and we saw a bases-empty, two-out walk turn into a three-run, thirty-eight-pitch top of the first inning, which was an obvious and fairly weighty drag. And yet how about, a little later, his slick little shovel pass to Brandon Valenzuela to cut down the impossibly fast Chander Simpson at home on a safety squeeze? That was really something! I'll take as many of those as you've got! And even littler things, like people chanting the slumping Kazuma Okamoto's name to cheer him through a hapless at bat once the rout was already well and truly on; or the crowd singing "Mr. Brightside" a few bars more after Myles Straw's walk-up song faded; or, still with Myles "Kilometres" Straw, how about the crowd coming to its feat when Straw, pitching the ninth to get through the back-end of this enormous blowout (unintentionally inelegant phrasing; I see that now), having just swapped gloves on-field with Ernie Clement as Clement went out to left in Straw's place (what is this, ソフトボール天国/Softobōru Tengoku/Softball Heaven? [Urias into the game at second, Patrick Corbin to the showers]), got the final batter to a three-two count? The crowd went nuts! Baseball is fun! Normal baseball is fun! And after the emotional intensity and excess of all last season, and the ways in which that could not help but carry over into the early parts of this our present season, I welcome this return to truly normal baseball. What happened? We stunk, that's what happened. We've stunk, and we stink. Let's go.  

KS