TORONTO -- After nine rounds of Wednesday night’s heavyweight fight, the judges have scored the bout 11-9 for… the Toronto Blue Jays.
This is what American League East baseball is supposed to look like, haymakers flying back and forth in a game that had absolutely everything. After a seven-run first inning for Toronto, the Yankees nearly drew nearly even with an offensive explosion of their own, then tied things up when Aaron Judge hit a baseball back across the border. But the Blue Jays kept them moving long enough to force them to trip over their own shoelaces. It’s fitting, somehow, that a slugfest like this was decided by George Springer scampering home on a wild pitch.
Now winners of three straight, Toronto suddenly sits tied atop the AL East with New York at 48-38. It’s a new season now, but the Blue Jays are the ones with all the momentum.
“Coming off a big win yesterday, you get ahead, you take some counterpunches,” manager John Schneider said. “They’re a really good team. They can hit. I’m just really proud of the way our guys are going about it. There’s no other way to say it. They’re taking it a day at a time, but breaking it down to an inning at a time.”
The win came from the same place in this group’s collective heart that so many of their recent comebacks have. Perhaps it’s an emotional toughness, perhaps it’s a blissful ignorance. The moment can’t get too big for you if you don’t waste any time worrying about the moment.
Coming out of their series win in Boston over the weekend, Addison Barger was asked about the magnitude of this week’s series against the Yankees back home. Besides, the Blue Jays were rolling and the division race was about to heat up. Barger smiled and started to answer, but you could see the gears turning in his head.
“I think I stay level. I mean … I don’t even know if I knew we were playing the Yankees … but now I do,” Barger said.
Barger’s three-run shot felt like the moment the dam burst in that first inning, a 428-foot rocket that smacked off the batter’s eye in center.
Some players obsess over every detail. Take Max Scherzer, who could probably tell you which team each of his start days line up with for the rest of the season, along with the hometown and shoe size of every hitter in those lineups. That works for Scherzer, but this works for Barger.
“There is a beauty to that. That’s him. I love that he said that,” Schneider said the day after, laughing. “I think all he knew was what time the bus was to the airport [in Boston]. For certain guys, there’s a beauty in that.”
There’s something refreshing about the mentality, something almost emboldening about it. For too many years, the Blue Jays have been the AL East’s younger sibling. They’ve been stuck in chase mode, never quite catching whichever teams are hot in any given season in his behemoth of a division.
The Blue Jays have spent long enough thinking about everyone else. It’s time for everyone else to think about the Blue Jays, maybe even chase them in the East.
“This feels great. It feels great,” Vladimir Guerrero Jr. said through club interpreter Hector Lebron, “but the goal is to keep winning and to stay right there.”
Renaissance stories fill this roster. Tuesday was Springer’s day to launch two home runs, good for a career-high seven RBIs in a bounce-back season that has lifted this team to new heights. On Wednesday, it was Davis Schneider’s turn to double up, first with a two-run shot that followed Barger’s blast in the first, then later with an opposite-field home run that gave the Blue Jays some padding in the seventh. These are the extra power threats the Blue Jays were missing in ‘24, the bats that make them go from a decent team to a truly threatening one.
“We’re playing good ball. It feels like 2023, how we were going at the end of the year and trying to make a playoff push,” Davis Schneider said. “We just have a bunch of good guys. It starts there, in the clubhouse. We have grinders, good human beings. That goes out onto the field when we’re playing together.”
Certain wins tell you the truth about a team, and Wednesday was one of those. The Blue Jays are heavyweights again, a team capable of swinging big and taking down Goliath.