TORONTO -- The Blue Jays have swept the Yankees with a four-game masterpiece and taken over first place in the American League East.
These are words you wouldn’t have believed three months ago. But the 2025 Blue Jays continue to amaze, now 49-38 after Thursday night’s 8-5 win at Rogers Centre and sitting alone atop the division this late in a season for the first time since Sept. 5, 2016.
“That shows you who we are as a team,” said George Springer, this team’s leader and star once again. “Even with guys down, we can go out and compete with one of the best teams in the game. Obviously, they’re a great team, so for us to come out and just be us was awesome.”
The decade since those incredible teams of 2015 and ‘16 has passed without a postseason win, only early exits, heartbreaking losses and a longing for what might have been. What you’re seeing right now, though – perhaps for the first time since that “bunch of renegades” led by Jose Bautista and Josh Donaldson – is a coaching staff and roster working completely in sync. They’re not just complementing one another, they’re bringing out more. This is part of the magic, the “it” factor teams struggle to find in spreadsheets.
The Blue Jays have found small edges at the bottom of their lineup all season, but we’re starting to see it grow. Without Bo Bichette this series, manager John Schneider and Toronto’s hitting coaches have cobbled together lineups we never expected to see in 2025, but they’re all working. Thursday, it was Nathan Lukes’ turn. He got his first leadoff assignment of the season and gave the Blue Jays the at-bat of the year, fouling off nine pitches before driving home the go-ahead runs with a double on the 14th pitch he saw in the fourth inning.
“It’s kind of cool, huh?” Lukes said with a grin after the win. “At that point, I just lose track. [Yankees catcher Austin] Wells at one point was just like, ‘Dude, just put it between the two lines. Like, come on.’ So it was fun.”
It has been happening all week, all over. In the Blue Jays’ wild win in Game 3 of this series, they gave Davis Schneider a rare start against a right-handed pitcher in Will Warren. The manager pointed to some Minor League numbers and past success for Schneider in that matchup, but you could tell there was more to it. He had a hunch, and later that night, Schneider launched two home runs.
“That’s the fun and hard part of this job. Twenty-four hours ago, we were sitting here talking about [Davis] Schneider against Warren,” John Schneider said. “Myself, DeMarlo Hale and Donnie [Mattingly] were talking about that in the dugout in his first at-bat. ‘Man, it would be great if Schneids made me look good here,’ and he did. We had a good laugh about that.”
It’s coming from the veterans and stars, too. Two days after launching a pair of home runs on Canada Day, Springer hit two more Thursday, making this arguably the finest series of his Blue Jays career in the middle of his renaissance season.
This is the sweet spot teams chase every year, but few get to feel it. It’s fleeting, too, but the Blue Jays are standing in it right now, all of the messages and strategies that fell flat in 2024 finally landing in just the right spot at just the right time.
John Schneider sounded like he could talk about baserunning for hours when he met with reporters prior to Thursday’s game, spilling over with pride because some “very direct conversations” the staff had with players earlier in the season had turned the Blue Jays from one of baseball’s worst baserunning teams into a good one. He called Vladimir Guerrero Jr. “instrumental” in that, because if the $500 million man is hustling down the line, everyone else will, too.
“When the big dogs buy in, it just becomes a non-negotiable,” Schneider said.
This is why it’s all working. The right things are being said by the right people at the right time. The right decisions are being made at the right time. It sounds simple, but the past decade in Toronto has shown us all how challenging it really is at the highest level.
Now, the Blue Jays have a view from the top. It has been so long, but after their first four-game sweep of the Yankees at Rogers Centre, they just made a statement to the rest of the league that they belong there.