glory

Athletics (minor league park), Rockies (historically bad/Coors Field), Orioles (awful pitching), and Angels (nuff said). Those are the only teams who have given up more home runs than the Jays. That’s not what you want.

Finally.

Lauer is arbitration eligible after this season, so they'll have him for 2026. Beyond that, it's Gausman, Berrios, and nothing else. Manoah shouldn't be counted on until he proves he's back, and that might never happen. Yesavage is a possibility but pitching prospects are scary to count on. I definitely think they should add at least 2 SP's and then leave the remaining spot for Lauer, Manoah, Yesavage, etc, to fight it out. If Bieber is healthy and is one of the two they add for 2026, then that's a nice start.

Nice to see Hoffman have a nice clean inning after Sunday's meltdown.

Varland looked amazing that inning.

Great play but please don't stretch like that too often, Vladdy.

Unusual bad send by Febles there. France is slow as hell.

Sounds like the delay is that he hasn’t been cleared from concussion protocol, so that’s probably not a good thing. Hopefully it won’t impact his return this season or performance if/when he’s back. He’s super important to this team.

Gimenez back at 2B batting 9th. Rest of the lineup not released yet. Seems pretty likely that Clement will be the starting 3B moving forward and Loperfido will go down once Springer returns, but let’s see what they do tonight. Loperfido has been starting fairly consistently against RHP lately.

Yeah winning the division and still having to play the WC round would suck. The Jays won the season series tiebreaker against both the Red Sox and Yankees so they are in a decent spot to win the division. Avoiding the WC round is a much bigger issue. There's very little difference between winning the division and playing WC3 vs losing the division and being WC1. The bye is what's important. The Jays got swept against the Astros the only time they met, so they can't win the season series (only tie it if they sweep the Astros next time). Plus the Tigers are in the Central and without looking at the schedule they probably have a bunch of games vs the Central teams down the stretch, so Houston seems like the much bigger concern here. Seattle overtaking them would be nice (Jays won the season series against the M's).

Yeah the only team I wouldn't be afraid of as an AL playoff team is the Guardians but otherwise any of the Jays, Tigers, M's, Astros, Red Sox, Yankees, and Rangers could come out of the AL and it wouldn't surprise me. Really wide open field even ignoring the crapshoot nature of baseball.

Fluharty saved the Jays (and Schneider’s) ass there. Wow. What a relief outing from him.

Letting Hoffman walk everyone because you want to save a pitching change for Ohtani is insanity. John Schneider is absolutely clueless.

Fisher reminding me of 2015 Liam Hendriks in the sense that the manager doesn’t seem to realize how good he’s been and is using him way down in the depth chart. Ugly game. Hopefully they can salvage the series tomorrow.

Bassitt on the road is not favorable.

For me personally (started watching baseball in 1991), I'd say Carter and Bautista. One helped shape my love of baseball with the 1992-93 run, and the other brought Blue Jays baseball back from 2 decades of irrelevance. The Halladay/Delgado years were tainted by how irrelevant the teams were. I never saw the peak Fernandez or Stieb years, so never built that nostalgia for them. Alomar didn't spend enough time with the Jays.

The Jays offense was absolutely brutal in April, due to a combination of slumps, slow starts, injuries (Varsho), or fringe big leaguers with no pop getting everyday AB's (Wagner, Roden). From May-onwards, it's been a substantial increase in overall offensive performance. March/April 85 wRC+ (24th in MLB) 104 Runs (26th in MLB) .110 ISO (29th in MLB) 19 Home Runs (29th in MLB) 19.2 K% (t-2nd in MLB) 8.5 BB% (20th in MLB) May-onwards 124 wRC+ (1st in MLB) 472 Runs (1st in MLB) .174 ISO (8th in MLB) 114 Home Runs (9th in MLB) 16.3 K% (1st in MLB) 8.7 BB% (t-6th) As mentioned, a healthy Santander and a healthier Varsho probably reduce the team's contact rates over that span while increasing the power, but when you consider the main beneficiaries of the playing time in place of Tony and Varsho were guys like Straw, Clement, etc, I think I would have preferred the added pop. Or at least I'd prefer it in a playoff setting.

The Yankees were +22 after the first 3 games of the season (surprisingly against the Brewers). Run differential has value but I think people can go overboard with it. There are a lot of ebbs and flows during a long season.

Since May 1, the Jays have a MLB leading team wRC+ of 124. The 2nd best team over that span is at 111. “Low hanging fruit” was laughed at, but Boss Atkins found a way to mix the best contact rate in the league with actual damage at the same time.

Ty DeJong morphing into Ty Pearce (circa 2018).

The only area where the Jays had expendable prospect depth with value was on the pitching side, so that's what they used in trades (Rojas, JWB, Stephen). I'm not sure trading their best prospects for a reliever (which was really the only position they could have done that for in this past deadline) was a logical move to make. They got likely the highest upside SP in the market, and while we can debate the Varland trade, he's a RP with a 1 WAR (and climbing) with lots of team control. The system is clearly improved from where it was a year ago. Maybe that means it's closer to middle of the package rather than bottom 5-10, but that's still a significant bump in a year where the big league team has a chance to win the division. I don't think it would have been wise to torpedo that momentum for one season when you could argue they increased the team's 2025 ceiling with the moves they actually did make. I have no clue if this is a sustainable run or whether 2025 is the best shot they'll have in a while. it's baseball you just never know sometimes, but this wasn't a "Whit Merrfield and Anthony Bass" deadline. Bieber if he's right could start Game 1 of a playoff series, and they added significant velocity and talent to the back end of their bullpen. The one area they didn't do enough was the offense, but if Ty France is Ty DeJong just occupying space until others are healthy, then they may have felt they are fine there as is (we will see if that ends up looking smart or not).

I feel like a vomit emoji wouldn’t do the above lineup justice.

My guess is it will either be: CA Heineman, 1B Vlad, 2B Schneider, SS Bichette, 3B Clement, LF Straw, CF Varsho, RF Barger, DH Kirk or same lineup except Ty DeJong at DH (or 1B with Vlad at DH) if they want to give Kirk a full day off. Loperfido likely out, Lukes never plays against LHP, and Buddy forgot-his-last-name should never be in a MLB lineup, so choices are limited to the above.