Buck Martinez is a baseball lifer. His nearly 60 years in the game includes playing winter ball in Puerto Rico in the early 1970s for Cangrejeros de Santurce, a star-studded unit that featured Frank Robinson as manager, Don Baylor as the starting centerfielder, and someone named Reggie Jackson in right field.

Martinez can regale you with plenty of baseball stories, including witnessing Hall of Famers Ted Williams and Joe Gordon arguing on the field at RFK Stadium in 1969 about the merits of swinging up versus swinging down. (That story includes the Splendid Splinter repeatedly dropping a 10-letter word not suitable for a family publication.)

It has become cliche to describe people of a certain age in sports as having forgotten more about a sport than you will ever know, but Buck Martinez has forgotten more about baseball than most of us will ever know. So when he makes a definitive statement about a team, you take notice.

“I think this Blue Jays team has the best chemistry of any team I’ve seen in franchise history since I’ve been here,” said Martinez, who has broadcast Blue Jays games for the past 16 seasons and managed Toronto for 215 games between 2001 and 2002, after a 17-year MLB career with the Royals, Brewers and Blue Jays.

“It reminds me of our teams in Kansas City in 1976 and 1977 because we all grew up together before free agency and everybody was like family. This team is like that. Pitchers get along with position players. Starters get along with relievers. Everybody gets along with the coaching staff. They have dramatic chemistry, and it has a lot to do with this team’s success.”

Dramatic chemistry would also describe the relationship between the Blue Jays and its fans this year. As someone who has watched every game in 2025 and most of the team’s games since our family moved from New York City to Toronto eight years ago, no Blue Jays team in recent vintage has thrilled the fan base more than this one. They lead the majors with 47 comeback wins — one more than the glamorous Dodgers — including five ninth-inning comebacks. Unheralded players such as Addison Barger, Ernie Clement and Nathan Lukes have provided as many signature moments as perennial All-Stars Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette.

What makes the Blue Jays unique among all MLB teams is that they represent a country as opposed to a single city. You see that in the viewership numbers. Canadian telecommunications giant Rogers owns the team and per a Rogers Sportsnet spokesperson, the average Blue Jays audience season-to-date through Wednesday was 884,000 viewers per game. That’s up 46 percent versus the final week of the season last year. Games on Sportsnet have averaged 1.17 million viewers since Canada Day (July 1) and 56 games have topped one million viewers including the most-watched game of the season (Sept. 16 against Tampa Bay: 1.63 million viewers). The company said female viewership is up 36 percent over last season and up 26 percent over among adults 18 to 34.

Two things to keep in mind with the viewership data. First, the entire Canadian population is 41 million, so the average is an extraordinary number. Second, the Blue Jays can register far more television viewers than any local MLB team in the United States because its audience is not city-specific. For context, per Rob Tornoe of The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Phillies had the best local viewership number among the U.S. teams through the All Star break, averaging about 325,000 viewers per game on NBC Sports Philadelphia and NBC10.

Along with Martinez, play by play broadcaster Dan Shulman (the voice of the team from 2016 to present day and from 1995 to 2001), field reporter Hazel Mae (who has been the team’s field reporter since 2011) and “Blue Jays Central” host Jamie Campbell (who has been with the Blue Jays broadcast team in various capacities since 2005) all have long tenures with the organization. Mike Wilner, now a writer for the Toronto Star, hosted “Blue Jays Talk” pre-and post-game shows for the Sportsnet 590 The Fan from 2002 to 2018, and he also called games on the radio over various seasons between 2003 and 2020.

I interviewed the group this week to get some perspective on what the experience has been like covering a team with such unique, come-from-behind success.

Campbell: This team is remarkably entertaining based on what I call their relentlessness. People always ask me how different are they from the 2015 or 2016 teams. Well in 2015, they were kind of riding a wave of mediocrity with a bunch of power-hitting stars and then made trades for Troy Tulowitzki and David Price and started clobbering people. This team really doesn’t do it. When they clobber people, they do it with bleeder singles and going first to third on a base hit up the middle. It’s incredible the way they achieve success and so different than what we saw 10 years ago, which makes it entertaining. It’s like the “slap-and-run” days of the 1970s on those lightning-fast turfs at Exhibition Stadium, Olympic Stadium or when everybody had those Astroturf fields that were like bowling lanes.

Shulman: This is the most likable group I’ve ever been around. We’re not privy to a lot of the details that happen in the offseason, but one of the changes we noticed when we went into the clubhouse this year was that it wasn’t starting pitchers, relief pitchers and position players sitting separately together, which is the way it was last year. They’re split up all over the place now. The leadership group of the team on the player side wanted a mix and mingle between older and younger and pitcher and hitter.

Mae: The likability of the players is huge, and I say that because in speaking with fans there’s something deeper this year. They know Ernie Clement is a Bills fan. They know George Springer loves the Hartford Whalers. They know Clement, Davis Schneider and Joey Loperfido are roommates in Toronto. Maybe we have done a good job relaying the information to fans so they feel a bigger connection to the players.

During an off day in August right before a series in Miami, Chris Bassitt, Miles Straw, Clement, and Jeff Hoffman went to the Florida Keys together just to kind of recharge. I found out they went snorkeling off Straw’s boat in the middle of the Florida Keys and that there was a video of it. I thought to myself, it would be great if I could get a hold of this video of Miles snorkelng. So I said to Chris Bassitt, “Bass, hey I understand there’s a video and he started laughing. He said, “Who had the big mouth?” I asked him if he would give me the video so I could show it and he said, yeah, no problem. We aired it during a game. It had nothing to do with baseball but they were okay with fans seeing a little bit of their off day. It’s the kind of thing why these guys have made such a connection with the fan base.

Wilner: Fans always love scrappy players who get dirty and players who show emotion, and the Jays have a ton of them. I think the career resurgence of Springer who plays every game with his hair on fire and emotions on his sleeve really embodies that. It’s the scrap that fans have fallen in love with. Last year, what was expected to be a playoff team just didn’t hit at all and wound up in last place. It’s hard to fall in love with that.

Martinez: The Bo Bichette pinch-hit home run in Texas (on May 28) was when the season changed. He obviously hasn’t pinch hit much in his life. The Blue Jays were really kind of dismal at that moment (26-28 heading into the game) and you’re going, ugh, this is going to be another long season. But that sparked them. It’s incredible how many times they’ve come back. There have been times where we will say there’s no way they’re winning this one tonight, and sure enough they figure out a way. Somebody will get a broken bat hit, somebody will get a flare to right field, somebody will run into one.

Shulman: I would offer up the George Springer Grand Slam on Canada Day (July 1) against the Yankees as one of the signature moments too. They were in their red jerseys and they only wear those once a year. What is unique about our jobs is that we broadcast for an entire country. The market is 41 million people from coast to coast. It’s just a tremendous fan base, passionate beyond belief. It unites people across the country. Buck played here, managed here, and has been here forever. Hazel is from here. Jamie’s is from here. April 7, 1977 is one of the big days in my life. That’s the first day the Blue Jays played and I remember playing in the snow as a 10-year-old with family and friends. We’re not imports, and I think the fans like that. All you want to do is broadcast games that matter to people, and boy is it obvious that the games this year matter to the people.

Martinez: I came here kicking and screaming in 1981, thinking, what the hell am I going to do in Toronto? I figured this was the end of my career. I’ll play here in 1981 and be done. But I played here for six years and then got the chance to broadcast and manage. I was at Exhibition Stadium when Blue Jays fans were just learning Major League Baseball. I thought that was wonderful, because it was so Canadian. It was outdoors, it was on aluminum chairs next to Lake Ontario, cold as hell, and people were there, so passionate about it.

Mae: I was born in the Philippines, and we moved to the Toronto area when I was five. When my father first came to this country, he wanted to feel connected to his new community and picked up English by watching sports. My mom tells a funny story. She said someone would say, “Hey, Tito, how’s it going?” He barely knew English but he watched the Maple Leafs so he would say, “Fine, thank you. I shoot, I score.” That’s how he picked up the language. He also loved baseball, and that’s how my love of the sport came in. You don’t really wrap your head around how big this fan base is until you go to other provinces outside of Ontario and meet someone who says “I drove from Vancouver or Winnipeg or Alberta.

Shulman: I don’t want to lecture to people, but they should really enjoy this. This doesn’t happen very often, especially in this division. Externally, the expectations weren’t that high this year, so this is really special. I think there’s a little bit of PTSD from the fans from losing in the wild card round in ’22 and ’23. Not only did they lose, they lost, even by October standards, in painful games. Even if they win the division, if they go out in what for them would be the first round, that would be bitterly disappointing for the fans. I don’t think they necessarily have to win the World Series for it to be remembered fondly, but I think they’ve got to advance.

Wilner: Until this past week, this team had been unique among recent seasons. The playoff team in 2020 wasn’t really real. It was a 60-game season because of Covid, there were extra playoff spots and the Jays not only got the last one, but got drummed out in a hurry by the eventual AL champions. The ’22 and ’23 playoff teams were not fun to watch, especially ’23, fighting tooth and nail to win as many low-scoring games as possible. Even the 2016 team that got to the ALCS did it on pitching more than offense, which doesn’t make for great excitement.

The 1985 team was gripping and exciting, the culmination of four years of slow but steady improvement, with a group that fans had gotten to know and love when they were just starting out. Players like Lloyd Moseby, Tony Fernandez, George Bell, Willie Upshaw, Jesse Barfield, Dave Stieb and Jim Clancy. As much as we remember the ’92 World Series team as unbeatable champions, the Jays went into that post-season with the reputation of a team that wasn’t able to win when it counted. Losses in the ALCS in ’85, ’89 and ’91 left fans in a “prove it” mode, but the additions of Jack Morris and Dave Winfield in the off-season and David Cone in August gave them hope. Then ’93 was just a thrill ride from start to finish.

This year, expectations were low after a last-place finish last year. A quiet first six weeks of the season didn’t have anybody hyped up. Then they started winning and started playing an incredibly exciting brand of baseball. Of course, as I write this, the Jays hav blown a cushy lead in the AL East, so even though a playoff spot isn’t at risk, it’s now feeling a lot like 1987. No one wants to go through that again.

Mae: I think they have to win at least a playoff series. I get it. They’ve gone to the postseason four of the last six years. But there’s more teams making the postseason, right? Until they win a round, I don’t know if I can specifically say this was a successful year for them. They have been here before.

Martinez: The journey has been great but it’s only going to matter if they go deep into the postseason. They’ve lost six straight playoff games, and they haven’t won the World Series since 1993. I think the longtime Blue Jays fans take pride in that title, and anything short of a World Series I think is a little disappointing.

Campbell: I’ll share a story with you that I shared with Davis Schneider and Addison Barger about two weeks ago because they were curious about it. In 1992, I was in a production role fresh out of university with CBC Sports. I was working in the mobile truck on various live productions across the country. For Game 6 of the World Series, which turned out to be the series-clinching game in Atlanta, I was on assignment at an equestrian event in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Once our day had wrapped, a bunch of us made our way down to a bar that had a big screen and that’s where we watched the Blue Jays clinch their first World Series championship.

I’m telling Barger and Schneider this story, and I said the craziest part about it is that here we were about a two-and-a-half hour flight away from Toronto and the bar erupted. Within the hour, I worked my way out onto the streets and the entire downtown core of Halifax, Nova Scotia was in an uproar.

What I said to these guys was “Imagine if the Kansas City Royals won the World Series and they erupted in Baltimore in celebration.” I tried to give them a geographical comparative. The biggest city in the province of Nova Scotia lost its mind because a Toronto team became World Series champions. So you’re not just playing for the city that’s on the front of the jersey here. You are playing for an entire country.

(Photo: Ed Zurga / Getty Images)