Blue Jays beat Rays to clinch first AL East title since 2015

TORONTO – Six months of grinding to qualify for the meaningful games of the seventh are over and this Toronto Blue Jays season spent walking through a dream continues, with the chance to push back the awakening deep into October. 

An American League East title, the club’s first since 2015, secured Sunday by Alejandro Kirk’s two home runs in a 13-4 win over the Tampa Bay Rays, helps clear that path, advancing them directly to the division series after a 94-68 finish, a 20-game jump from a year ago, when all this seemed so far away. 

The seeds of 2025’s success, however, were planted amid 2024’s ruin, surviving some early-season tumult before taking hold May 28, when Bo Bichette’s pinch-hit two-run homer in the ninth inning at Texas gave his team a 2-0 win, the start of a 68-40 run to the finish line.

Still, the past week-and-a-half threatened multiple times to veer from dream to nightmare, a four-game losing streak on the heels of six straight wins, allowing the New York Yankees to creep back into the picture, after a K.C. post-season berth clinch, two losses to the Boston Red Sox stripped away what little margin for error remained. 

But Daulton Varsho’s grand slam in Thursday night’s 6-1 win over Boston helped key a last weekend flourish, which set up a dramatic Game 162 to decide whether the Blue Jays or the Yankees claimed the AL’s top seed and first-round bye, or played in the dreaded wild-card round against the Red Sox. The Yankees, 3-2 winners over Baltimore, handled their end of the matter, forcing the Blue Jays to win to claim the East.

“These things don’t happen very often,” Kirk said in the maelstrom of celebration on the field afterwards. “It’s really hard to build this type of team that we have right now from one year to another. We’re just having fun. We come here every night and we fight for each other. And this is what you get, right? You win the division.”

Four straight wins after losses in six of seven outings got it done.

“I just think it’s so important not to panic in hard times – we leaned on each other and that’s kind of what we’ve done all year,” Ernie Clement said after Saturday’s 5-1 win. “When things get tough, it’s easy to panic and start begging for stuff to go your way. But I think we did a really good job of weathering the storm. And our pitching staff has just picked us up in a huge way. Every guy in there has been amazing and the last couple games, they’ve continued to do their job.”

The swing from one road to the other is a massive one for the Blue Jays, who, after using ace Kevin Gausman versus the Rays, would have been in a challenging spot with their pitching had they needed to play Tuesday, instead of Saturday, like they will now. 

With five days to rest now, they can reset their heavily worked pitching staff, line up as they see fit to face the Yankees-Red Sox winner, be able to activate both Chris Bassitt and Ty France from the injured list, and buy more time to heal for the sprained PCL in the left knee of Bichette, who wouldn’t have been ready for the wild-card round.

Still, there’s a balance to be struck between too much rest and keeping sharp that needs to be managed.

“You can’t turn it all the way off,” said closer Jeff Hoffman, who went to the past two post-seasons with the Philadelphia Phillies, entering with a bye last year. “Even though you’re not playing in a series that’s happening, the more you can keep it on, but idle it a little bit, the better off you’re going to be. You can’t take yourself out of your schedule, getting up at a decent hour, getting to sleep at a decent hour, all that good stuff for recovery. If we can keep it idling and get some competition against each other, and we’re going to be great.”

Sunday’s victory, before a raucous and energetic crowd of 42,083, was more difficult than the final score suggested, as Gausman battled through 3.2 innings of heavy traffic, as the Rays worked him for four runs on eight hits and two walks. Only a crucial Mason Fluharty strikeout of Jonathan Aranda with the bases loaded to end the fourth kept the Blue Jays’ lead at 5-4, whittled down by a three-spot that inning. 

Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s RBI single in the first inning had tied the game 1-1 before Kirk’s grand slam opened up a big lead, and the Blue Jays restored some breathing room in the fourth, when Clement singled, was sacrificed to second by Myles Straw and brought home by an Andres Gimenez sac fly. Kirk’s two-run shot in the fifth made it an 8-4 game before a five-spot in the seventh, featuring two-run homers by Addison Barger and George Springer around a Straw RBI triple, gave team staff time to prepare for a champagne shake-and-spray.

Schneider joked before the game about being “hour-to-hour with tummy troubles,” but at the same time, “the anxiousness right now, today, comes from 365-days-worth of stuff that comes down to one day.”

By the time the seventh was over, only counting outs to the celebrations amid rolling “Let’s go Blue Jays” chants remained.

“They never doubted each other they never doubted themselves,” said Schneider. “To know that you probably have to win four games in a row to win the division, they were up for it. They made it look a little bit easier than it is and it was like that all year. So I had all the confidence in the world in them and they have all the confidence in the world in themselves.”

The process of building toward this began last September, amid the wreckage of a lost year, when the Blue Jays began an examination of anything and everything they did.

“Taking a step back and saying like, hey, to a man, where did we (expletive) up?” is how Schneider put it.

By the time spring training arrived, that work showed up in a renewed approach to game-planning, defensive alignments and in-game processes. Every team talks about renewal and change and the like during the spring. 

With the Blue Jays, it stuck.

 “We’re all together,” said Guerrero. “That’s the only thing I can say. Everybody is together and we do a lot of stuff together. To me, that’s good … it helps a lot. We think about our team, we don’t think about ourselves. We think about our teammates and believe in each other. That makes your job easier.”

Added Bichette: “There’s one goal in mind, to win, and nobody was going to let anything else distract us from that. It’s pretty simple. You always go into every season with that being the goal, but there are things that get in the way. This year, we’ve kept it to one thing and good things happened.”

A 12-8 opening to the season was undone by 12 losses in 16 games stretching from April 19 to May 7, when the Blue Jays sat a season-worst four games under .500 at 16-20. Still, another nadir followed, when the Blue Jays got swept in three games at Tampa Bay during what was their worst series of the season, being outscored 19-2 while managing only 14 hits. 

The rebound in Texas capped by Bichette’s homer followed, then the Blue Jays gained further momentum by a four-game sweep of the Yankees in Toronto June 30-July 3, and they just kept going from there.

“That was a big moment where everybody was like, all right, we can do this,” said lefty Eric Lauer, who stabilized the pitching staff upon his late April arrival, contributing in a number of roles, including handling the ninth Sunday. “That was a big one. But it’s been a running thing where collectively, we all just feel like we’ve got it, you know? There’s never a downturn. Even if we struggle for a few games, there’s never, woe is us, sad, oh no, we can’t do this anymore. No. It’s always, screw it, move on, we’re good, let’s go get the next one.”

Added Bichette: “Every team’s going to face adversity, but just how we’ve fought back from everything, there’s a lot of fight in this group, and that’s pretty cool.”

Rebound seasons from Bichette — who finished second in the majors with 181 hits and 44 doubles despite missing the final three weeks — and Springer — who hit 32 homers and finished with the AL’s second-best OPS at .959 — along with another all-star campaign from Guerrero, helped underpin an offence that finished second in the AL with 798 runs. But it was the 20-homer pop of Varsho and steady contributions from the bottom half of the lineup by the likes of Clement, Nathan Lukes, Barger, Straw, Davis Schneider and Tyler Heineman that kept the lineup productive. The rotation managed through early-season injuries to Scherzer and Bowden Francis, while a bullpen that crashed and burned last year improved to middle of the pack.

Along the way, the Blue Jays displayed two traits Varsho identified as key: “Resilience and trust. Everybody contributed. There wasn’t one person on this roster throughout the season that didn’t contribute. To be able to do what we did this year and be able to win the division is awesome.”

Awesome enough for a champagne party in Kansas City last Sunday and another in Toronto this one, putting them in position to enjoy more along the way.

“Every year can unfold in any which way,” said Scherzer. “The way this season played out, how this clubhouse came together, the way we played in the middle of the season when we all clicked and fired on all cylinders, you got that taste of it. I’ve been here before, seen things like this. It’s that type of feeling where you’re on a great team, you’re know you’re going to get the results that you want. These are the moments you play for. You love this. It never gets old. You look forward to the next time you’re out there.”

That’s when the walk through a dream continues, next Saturday in Game 1 of the ALDS, versus an opponent TBD.