The Toronto Blue Jays have been here before.
Hope-filled, with time dwindling down and still enough of it to spare, narrowly on the wrong side of the line dividing who will play postseason baseball and whose off-season will be a little longer.
But climbing their way back to this place was never guaranteed this season. Recently, it looked inevitable they wouldn’t.
On Aug. 28, the Blue Jays’ chances of making the playoffs plummeted to a season-low 4.4 per cent, according to FanGraphs, a dramatic fall from grace from the 48 per cent odds they sat at a mere two weeks prior. Their wild-card hopes at that time weren’t meaningfully better, hovering at just 4.5 per cent.
Yet, here they are. Surging through September, forcing those odds to be recalculated, stretching the imagination’s boundaries on what could be possible this season.
Toronto’s chances, as of Sept. 8, to earn a wild-card spot rose to 36.6 per cent. The odds of the team making the playoffs overall rest a fraction higher, at 36.8 per cent.
Any honest reading of this dramatic upswing starts by recognizing the wild card, for the Blue Jays, remains a long shot.
The Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees, sitting at 74.8 per cent and 78.3 per cent odds, respectively, have a significantly wider margin for error down the stretch.
The Tampa Bay Rays have effectively booked their ticket to the playoffs already.
Only the Baltimore Orioles, whose chances in this race never eclipsed the one-per-cent mark, have a lower likelihood of making it.
But the Blue Jays are surging, that can’t be debated either.
Winners of six in a row, making them undefeated so far in September, Toronto is doing all it can to blur just how improbable a wild-card spot is.
The Red Sox, the team directly above them in that race, losing their last three has helped. Back-to-back dominant wins by the Blue Jays against the Yankees has, too. And pulling off the most recent of those wins without star outfielder George Springer invites the season-long possibility that, if they get healthy and hot at the right time, just maybe they could really pull it all off.
The Blue Jays won’t have to wait long to find out whether their hopes can continue blooming or if they’ll take another hit.
Trailing in the wild-card race by just two games, Toronto’s next game against an opponent they’re trying to catch is tonight in New York against the Yankees. Live coverage will begin at 7:05 p.m. ET on Sportsnet.
