TORONTO -- The biggest game of the Blue Jays’ season demanded their biggest player in its biggest moment.
For what already feels like the 100th time in his young career, Vladimir Guerrero Jr.. brought down the Yankees, this time with a go-ahead two-run single that would have blown the glove clean off Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s hand if he’d gotten a piece of it.
The 5-4 win captured the Blue Jays at their very best, but that doesn’t mean this was their most dominant win of the season. Toronto has won bigger and won bolder, but Monday night at a packed Rogers Centre was a snapshot of who the Blue Jays want to be. They’ve been reaching for this since those early days of Spring Training in Dunedin, Fla., when hitting coach David Popkins and the staff worked to shake off the rigid one-track identities this team has too often been stuck in.
“Great offenses don't have one way,” Popkins said then. “They have every way."
Guerrero’s 115.7 mph missile under Chisholm’s glove was the highlight, but the foundation of that inning was slower, scrappier, dirtier.
First came Myles Straw, who slipped an extra base in his pocket when Yankees shortstop Anthony Volpe tried to make a play on Davis Schneider at third and instead threw it well wide. Manager John Schneider pressed the right button at the right time, pinch-hitting Nathan Lukes for Jonatan Clase to produce an RBI single, and after Lukes eventually took an extra base of his own when a ball got away from Yanks catcher J.C. Escarra, the stage was set for Vladdy. This is exactly the type of mess the Blue Jays want the bottom of their lineup to make.
“Great victory,” Guerrero said through a club interpreter. “We all did our part right to the end. This was a great victory.”
If this were the Blue Jays’ identity every game, they’d be a miserable team to watch, but that’s not the case in 2025. This group seems capable of shifting its shape to the moment, winning games in different ways instead of wrestling with each night to make it “their” type of game. There still needs to be more power on the other side of this offense to balance things -- which will be a priority as this team approaches the July 31 Trade Deadline -- but that’s come along slowly and the eventual returns of Daulton Varsho and Anthony Santander should only help.
The crowd matched the moment, too, the liveliest we’ve seen all season in Toronto. They know what a series like this against the American League East-leading Yankees can mean. They know what the next three months -- and hopefully more -- can look like in this city if this all goes well.
“The crowd was great. You look up and you get Max [Scherzer] coming out the way he did with the place full, it felt like a very meaningful baseball game,” Schneider said. “That’s a really good feeling to have. It is June and it will be July tomorrow, so tomorrow is a very big day for us as a team and as a country [on Canada Day]. It will be fun tomorrow.”
To win this type of game, you also need it to be held on a tee for a while. Scherzer looked excellent over five innings of work on just 71 pitches, racking up seven strikeouts, with his lone mistake being a fourth-inning slider to Chisholm that went over the wall in right for a two-run shot. Trainers came out to check on Scherzer late in his fifth inning as he continues to navigate that nagging right thumb issue, but every little thing about his performance up to that point, from his velocity to his two strikeouts of Aaron Judge, was perhaps more encouraging for the Blue Jays than the win itself.
“That’s what you play for,” Scherzer said. “You play to win these games with everybody out there fighting and grinding on this. It’s awesome to have team ball. When you see the team go out there when we’re down and they grind away and get a hit, especially running the bases with Lukes taking an extra base on a deep throw? Those things that add up are the reason we’re a great team. They’re leading the division. We want to go at them and lead the division.”
They’re one step closer now, two back of the Yankees. It’s barely July, but if the Blue Jays keep playing like this, the games will only feel bigger and bigger.