TORONTO — If you wanted evidence that Fox MLB play-by-play announcer Joe Davis was slightly out of his element on Sunday afternoon, start with his United States passport, which sat on the counter of Fox’s broadcast booth inside the Rogers Centre. Davis has called 16 World Series games, works with Greg Olsen on the No. 2 NFL team at Fox and is the television voice of the baseball team Vin Scully made famous. The broadcast booth is a very familiar place for Davis, but his working office at the Rogers Centre was not.

Before this weekend, Davis, now in his fourth year as Fox’s lead MLB broadcaster, had never called a Blue Jays game for a national audience. The last (and only) time he had visited Toronto was nine years ago, when the Dodgers had a series in the city. So, two hours before the start of Toronto’s 13-7 Game 2  win over the Yankees, Davis hit up a local on the ins and outs of Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport as he double-checked his passport and a plane ticket sitting alongside it. (It’s a great airport, by the way.)

The weekend in Toronto presented something unique for Davis and his fellow Fox Sports employees who crossed the border — the opportunity to introduce a team to its audience. Fox’s networks aired zero Blue Jays games during the 2025 regular season, and now here they were broadcasting the Blue Jays in the American League Divisional Series. (For context: The Yankees, Mariners and Tigers all had eight appearances during the regular season between Fox and FS1.)

So how does a broadcast get up to speed with a team it rarely sees (and in a country not its own)? Well, you find the people who know what you want to know.

Davis set up a one-on-one phone call with Blue Jays manager John Schneider before the start of the series and also spent a lot of time peppering questions of Dan Shulman, the voice of the Blue Jays for Canada-based Sportsnet. Analyst John Smoltz did the same with Buck Martinez, who works alongside Shulman.

“I probably did a little more prep than normal just because of my lack of familiarity with the Blue Jays,” Davis said. “But it’s also one of the things that I love most about the job — the chance to just plunge in headlong and dive as deep as you can to try to master the stories. There are so many good stories to tell about the Blue Jays, whether it’s new for us or not.”

What makes this Yankees-Blue Jays series unique, as far as broadcast distribution, is that Canadians can watch the same home country broadcast during the postseason that they do during the regular season. That’s not something that exists for U.S. teams and U.S. fans, because the postseason rights are held by national outlets such as Fox, ESPN and TNT Sports.

The reason? Since the Blue Jays are the only MLB team in Canada, their home television territory is the entire country.

Sportsnet, owned by Canadian media conglomerate Rogers Communications, is the Canadian rights-holder for all Blue Jays games, as well as being the Canadian rights-holder for a substantial package of MLB regular-season games and the entire postseason. In Canada, MLB also has a national deal with TSN for regular-season games and two French-language deals with TVA and RDS.

“The (Rogers) agreement is negotiated by the department that handles our international media deals,” said an MLB spokesperson. “We have international media agreements that will bring the postseason to more than 200 countries and territories around the world.  The international media deals are not competitive with Fox because FOX’s rights are for the U.S. only.”

It’s an arrangement that has been lucrative for Sportsnet, given the Blue Jays’ success this year. The network set a single-game regular-season viewership record on Sept. 26 when 2.36 million viewers watched Toronto clinch the American League East. The average audience for the full season for the Blue Jays broadcasts was 906,800 per game, up 51 percent versus last season. Sportsnet said 60 games averaged over 1 million viewers. (Keep in mind the entire population of Canada is 41 million.)

During the first two games of Toronto’s postseason, the numbers have skyrocketed: Game 1 of the Jays’ series with the Yankees on Sportsnet drew an average of 3.6 million viewers; Game 2 averaged 3.5 million.

Said differently, more than 8% of the entire country of Canada was tuned in for those playoff games this weekend. (To put that into perspective: If 8% of the U.S. tuned in for a baseball postseason game, that would be nearly 30 million people, more than any World Series average in more than 30 years.)

Pete Macheska has different things to worry about. As the longtime lead producer for Fox’s MLB coverage with 21 World Series and many Sports Emmys, Macheska’s baseball contacts run incredibly deep. But even Macheska had never met the current Blue Jays manager before a production meeting with Schneider this weekend.

“This series is broader strokes for us,” said Macheska. “Who are these Blue Jays? You may know Vlad Guerrero, but who are some of these other guys? So, we are learning about them, and we have to go out of our way to approach it as such. We had to do that a couple of years ago (2023) when we had Arizona in the World Series.”

“We are always reminded by our bosses that the postseason is a new audience watching,” said Fox MLB director Matt Gangl, who will direct his ninth World Series later this month. “We know from doing this for many years that we have to introduce some people in a series that the audience might not know.”

Smoltz played against the Blue Jays during his Hall of Fame career and was famously part of the Atlanta Braves team that lost to the Blue Jays in the 1992 World Series. He’s much more familiar with Toronto than Davis — Smoltz played in the Blue Jays’ division with the Red Sox during his final season in 2009 — but said because of the frequent changes in how a team is performing, you can feel your way into a playoff series as a broadcaster after prepping deep for Game 1.

“Whether I have seen a team all year or for just three weeks, baseball changes so much,” said Smoltz. “This is what I love about the postseason. You do all of your work for Game 1, and then you follow how the series goes. I know this ballpark because I played here 100 years ago, and my last year of playing was with the Red Sox. I can tell you baseball is a little more relevant when Toronto is in the mix.”

The Blue Jays are well in the mix now. They lead the Yankees 2-0 in the series and have outscored New York 23-8 over two games — the most runs the Yankees have ever given up in consecutive postseason games. If they keep this up, Davis and his passport are going to be well-acquainted with Toronto this October.