Believe in something. As sports fans it\u2019s all we can really do. <\/p>\n
The idea of being a fan doesn\u2019t make a ton of sense when you boil it all down. You spend countless hours pouring emotions, energy (and money) into a team that doesn\u2019t know who you are. <\/p>\n
So why do it? <\/p>\n
There are way too many reasons to count. Ask anyone and they\u2019ll probably tell you a different answer than the person before them. <\/p>\n
But some will tell you sports are all about winning. You\u2019re either a champion or a loser. <\/p>\n
Those people will tell you the 2026 Toronto Blue Jays have no chance to make the postseason this season. Those same people also would\u2019ve told you the 2025 Blue Jays were drawing dead entering the regular season and look how that turned out. <\/p>\n
Others will tell you sports are more about the journey than the destination. At least that\u2019s what my old hockey coach used to tell us. But we were 16 years old and playing Single-A hockey, of course \u201cthe destination\u201d didn\u2019t matter. <\/p>\n
I think somewhere in the middle is the spot most fans want to end at. A place where high expectations and hope are the baseline, while also having the perspective to zoom out a little bit and appreciate the journey that led us all here. <\/p>\n
Listen, I understand, this is pro sports, where winning matters and the standard is, the standard.<\/p>\n
But just because one team wins a championship every year that doesn\u2019t mean only one team\u2019s fanbase leaves satisfied. <\/p>\n
Enter the 2025 Blue Jays. <\/p>\n
Last year the Blue Jays gave the fans an October to never forget. And it was so memorable it made us all forget about September 2025. <\/p>\n
In October, the Blue Jays, broke records on offence with Ernie Clement setting the single postseason record for hits and Trey Yesavage was doing stuff in the World Series people hadn\u2019t seen since the Brooklyn Dodgers were still kicking around. <\/p>\n
The Blue Jays weren\u2019t the team to win the final game in 2026, but that\u2019ll never take away the journey that was getting there. <\/p>\n
Do you remember September 2025? <\/p>\n
Toronto entered the month 79-59, 2.5 games up on the division and two weeks later that lead sat at five with 11 games to play. <\/p>\n
The team had virtually won the division. Then the next week happened, and suddenly the New York Yankees were one-game back with five to play. <\/p>\n
The following night Toronto lost and the Yankees won, tying the division with four games to play. <\/p>\n
It was pure panic time here in Toronto and for good reason. The offence had run dry, bodies were banged up and suddenly the team was staring down the barrel of limping into a wild-card series instead of getting a bye. <\/p>\n
But something changed with four games to play. Toronto ended the season 4-0, finishing with the same record as the Yankees and won the AL East on a tiebreaker. <\/p>\n
The division win gave Toronto a bye to the American League Division Series where the team began the best three weeks of baseball this city has seen since 1993 (My 29-year-old self is assuming). <\/p>\n
And I say all this to point out that those three weeks came at a time where most people were were writing them off, and it\u2019s also worth noting when the offence clicked, they found a way to do it without Bo Bichette. <\/p>\n
Bichette was fantastic in the World Series, but to get there it was the core of this lineup that\u2019s survived the trade deadline that had all the early October magic. <\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been wanting to write this for a few days and couldn\u2019t step on a winning streak. After yesterday\u2019s loss, the team is now two games out of the final playoff spot with four other teams to leapfrog. <\/p>\n
After the teams\u2019 betting odds on FanDuel ballooned to +780 last week, Toronto now sits at +520, a number that comes with an implied probability 16.13 per cent.<\/p>\n
TeamRecordGames backOdds to make playoffsNYY68-53-8-100000BOS65-56-5-2200DET60-610+124TEX60-620.5+164MIN60-631+350CLE59-631.5+210TOR59-642+520BAL58-633+710SEA57-653.5+330<\/p>\n
That number is higher than FanGraphs which has the Blue Jays at 11.3 per cent. <\/p>\n
There are a few reasons to believe the Jays can keep up their recent surge. For one, the offence will take off if Vladimir Guerrero Jr. figures it out, and he\u2019s talented enough where things could click at any point. Another reason for hope is the Jays\u2019 schedule. As TSN Baseball Insider Steve Phillips points out in his most recent column<\/a>, Toronto has the eighth-easiest schedule remaining the rest of the season. It may not feel like it with their next nine games against the Tampa Bay Rays and New York Yankees, but after that, the Jays won\u2019t play a single team with a record over .500 as of Friday the rest of the season.<\/p>\n At this point I\u2019ll take the 11.3 per cent chance and chose to believe in this group. You should too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Believe in something. As sports fans it\u2019s all we can really do. The idea of being a fan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168196,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[11327,148,48,1017],"class_list":["post-168195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-toronto","tag-boston-red-sox","tag-mlb","tag-toronto","tag-toronto-blue-jays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}