KANSAS CITY -- Pop the champagne, but keep a bottle in the fridge.
Finally, after a stretch of tough losses and some long days filled with complicated clinch scenarios, the Blue Jays have officially punched their ticket to the postseason. One celebration down, one to go.
“The job is not finished,” said Vladimir Guerrero Jr., standing in a lake of beer in the visitors' clubhouse of Kauffman Stadium. “We want to win the division.”
The real party will come when the Blue Jays clinch the American League East for the first time since 2015. After Sunday afternoon's 8-5 win, they hold a 2 1/2-game lead over the Yankees (plus the tiebreaker) with six games remaining in the regular season.
Every drop of this champagne has been earned, though, by one of the most surprising teams in Blue Jays history.
“I’m so happy for them,” manager John Schneider said. “It’s hard at this level for everyone to put their egos aside and play for one another. It’s so cool to see them genuinely happy for one another when they get the job done, no matter who it is. This is the most fulfilling team I’ve ever been a part of.”
Fresh off a dreadful 74-88 season a year ago, the Blue Jays’ renaissance has been stunning to witness. Even at their most generous, external projections framed the Blue Jays as a middle-of-the-road team in 2025. Maybe they’d be good, maybe they’d be bad, but surely they wouldn’t be great. This is the season that just keeps surprising, though, and when the Blue Jays popped bottles in the visitors’ clubhouse at Kauffman Stadium, they owned the best record in the American League at 90-66.
There’s some magic to this team, something that’s difficult to explain and impossible to capture with a statistic. It’s the right mix of players, from rookies to veterans to future Hall of Famers. It’s the same language being spoken from the bottom of the roster through the coaching staff and right up to the front office. It’s a brotherhood of players and coaches empowering one another in all of the right directions. This is the type of season each organization dreams of in Spring Training, but so rarely achieves.
“We get how you’re projected for X amount of wins and where you’re going to be in the standings when the season hasn’t even started, but you could feel it with this group in Spring Training,” Schneider said. “You could feel it from the first day. I know that sounds cliché, but when you’ve got a group of men committed to the same goal, you can do things like this.”
Player after player points back to the Blue Jays’ clubhouse. Every postseason team has talent, but the magic lives within those four walls. Just look at the 2024 club compared to this season. There hasn’t been a total rebuild, but something about the way these pieces fit together has changed. Bo Bichette called it the closest team he’s ever been a part of, giving particular credit to Ernie Clement and Myles Straw for “bridging the gap” between players.
“Everything this team has is what it takes to win the World Series,” Bichette said.
In Schneider’s brief speech before the bottle popped, he spoke about the way this team has come together. There are 41-year-olds, like Max Scherzer. There are 22-year-olds, like Sunday’s starter Trey Yesavage. There are stars, role players and castoffs all together.
“It’s special,” Yesavage said. “Every single one of these guys, they’re awesome. They’re team guys. They don’t care about their personal stats, they’re just worried about winning.”
Now comes the real prize: The division.
With that should come a bye to the AL Division Series, a round Toronto hasn’t seen since those remarkable runs of 2015 and ’16, powered by José Bautista, Josh Donaldson, Edwin Encarnación and a roster packed with as much attitude as talent. The Wild Card Series has been unkind to this new era of the Blue Jays, who have gone 0-2 all three times, each more painful than the last.
This is the shot this era of Blue Jays baseball has been building towards. Guerrero and Bichette haven’t won a postseason game together, and if Bichette’s left knee cooperates, they’ll have what could be their final shot after nearly a decade as friends and teammates. George Springer, brought in for his postseason experience, still needs his moment. Kevin Gausman and Shane Bieber, brought in to win big games, need their shot at that stage.
There’s still one celebration to go in September -- an even more meaningful one -- but the Blue Jays want to pop champagne in October, too.