TORONTO – The Toronto Blue Jays did their part to earn an extra game during one of the wildest final days of the regular season in franchise history, pummeling the Baltimore Orioles 12-4 behind two home runs from George Springer while hoping for some help.
Their fate was to be determined by the Boston Red Sox (91-71), who were at the Washington Nationals, after the New York Yankees (92-70) walked off the Tampa Bay Rays 1-0. At 91-71, a Boston loss was the Blue Jays’ only pathway to a Game 163.
The Seattle Mariners (90-71), hosting the Los Angeles Angels, could only affect where they go, not whether they advance, on a day that began with 16 different possibilities for tiebreakers and the wild-card game.
Should their season extend, it was certainly a forceful and fateful entrance, as they headed into the weekend needing a sweep of the Orioles (52-110), which they accomplished by outscoring the American League doormat by a cumulative score of 28-9, plus losses from their rivals.
Sunday was just the fourth time the Blue Jays played Game 162 with their season at stake, the most recent coming in 2016, when they ended up winning the first wild card. In 1987, they lost 1-0 to the Detroit Tigers on a Larry Herndon home run to finish two games behind the Detroit Tigers in the AL East, while in 1990, they finished with a walk-off 3-2 loss to Baltimore as Boston’s 3-1 win secured the division for the Red Sox.
There was little drama on the Rogers Centre field before a crowd of 29,942 Sunday, as Hyun Jin Ryu struck out two in a clean top of the first, Springer homered off Bruce Zimmermann to open the bottom half and the Blue Jays kept piling on from there.
Teoscar Hernandez and Santiago Espinal added RBI singles later in the inning to knock out Zimmermann, the type of fate one might have expected for Ryan Merritt in Game 5 of the 2016 ALCS against Cleveland, the last time they faced a slop-tossing lefty in a game of magnitude.
Vladimir Guerrero Jr., hit his 48th homer, a new record for players 22 or younger, in the second to make it 5-0, a Springer grand slam in the third made it 9-1, Hernandez added another two-run single in the fourth and Marcus Semien smashed his 45th homer in the fifth.
At points it was difficult to imagine how the Orioles would conjure up 24 outs.
That offence, and the way the rotation has coalesced since the trade deadline acquisition of Jose Berrios, made the Blue Jays a feared potential opponent in the playoffs. Still, significant questions await the franchise once the season ends, centred around the pending free agencies of Semien, who delivered an MVP-calibre season after signing an $18-million, one-year deal, and Robbie Ray, arguably the Cy Young Award favourite after re-signing for $8 million.
Lefty Steven Matz can also hit the free-agent market, meaning the Blue Jays need to replace their No. 2 hitter along with two fifths of a rotation that was their backbone. They’ll have to wrestle with how to improve the roster while factoring in that both Guerrero and Bo Bichette will eventually need mega-deals, and that if they hope to extend Hernandez, they only have two years of club control left so the time is nigh.
Move on or not, the Blue Jays will have several what ifs to ponder, how differently their fate would have turned out had they been in Toronto prime among them. Due to pandemic border restrictions, their season began at TD Ballpark in Dunedin, Fla., where they went 10-11 before heading to Buffalo’s Sahlen Field, where they went 12-11. (They also lost a game playing as the home team in Anaheim, making up a Dunedin rainout)
At Rogers Centre, behind a true home crowd in a big-league facility for the first time since 2019, they finished 25-11, and while they weren’t going to play .694 baseball for 81 home dates, they would have ended up better than the 47-34, or .580, they finished.
