It was June 24 of last year when the Toronto Blue Jays reached a low point.
Their much-heralded rebuild in the post-José Bautista/Edwin Encarnación era, with their construction around a whole new generation of young players, had resulted in exactly six postseason games. Every single one of them was a loss, across three fruitless trips to the AL Wild Card Series.
The 2024 season was off to a miserable start, with a walk-off loss to the Red Sox, their seventh defeat in a row, dropping them to eight games under .500 and a whopping 16 games behind the first-place Yankees. It was beginning to look like the Blue Jays might just tear this whole thing down as the Trade Deadline approached. It even reached the point where Vladimir Guerrero Jr. gave an interview in which he softened his previously stated intention to never play for the Yankees. (“No, not even dead.”) This was the franchise player, the kid who had been a part of the organization since he was 16 years old, the Canadian Baseball Golden Son.
With free agency approaching after the 2025 season, it seemed like Guerrero’s time in Toronto might be running out. This whole era of Blue Jays baseball, the one that held so much promise, looked in danger of being over before it ever got started.
The Blue Jays have indeed returned to the World Series, a place they haven’t been since Joe Carter hit that home run back in 1993. There is clearly something about postseason baseball games in Toronto that leads to otherworldly dramatic home runs. Bautista hit one 10 years ago, with the flip of a bat that I’m still not sure has ever landed, a “psychologically violent” blast that sent the Jays to the ALCS. But while Carter’s will never be topped, the one George Springer hit in the bottom of the seventh in Game 7 comes about as close as one would have thought possible.
Until that pitch from Eduard Bazardo, it sure looked like the Mariners were about to reach their first World Series. Their two stars, Julio Rodríguez and Cal Raleigh, had both homered. They had a lead, with a bullpen that was more rested than Toronto’s. And the Rogers Centre crowd — so loud, so built up to this, so ready — had been forced to scream in vain for 6 1/2 innings. Then Springer swung, and he knew it was gone so quickly he almost jumped out of his uniform right then and there.
You feel terrible for the Mariners and their fans, who have never been as close to the World Series as they were this year — you don’t know when they will be this close again. But you can also forgive Blue Jays fans if they take the time to remind you of what they went through to get here as well. After they won that World Series in 1993, they wouldn’t play in another postseason game for 22 years … an even longer drought than the Mariners went through after their 2001 ALCS loss to the Yankees.
The Jays were not usually terrible during those 22 seasons. They only finished last in the AL East three times in that span, when they also employed some of the greatest players of their era, from Roy Halladay to Carlos Delgado to Roger Clemens to Shawn Green to Vernon Wells. But they had to watch as the Red Sox and those hated Yankees, the team Vlad Jr. wouldn’t play for, not even dead, dominated their division and won a combined nine World Series titles.
The Jays watched the baseball world move on without them, while along the way, in 2005, becoming MLB’s only Canadian team. And then when they finally returned to the postseason, they lost in consecutive ALCS appearances in ’15 and ’16 … and then didn’t win another postseason game until ’25. Until this year. Until right now. Until they won seven of them. Which got them here: Back to the World Series.
The Blue Jays have a Herculean task ahead of them against the Dodgers, the defending champs who have won nine of their 10 postseason games and who look stronger at this exact moment than they have, really, during any of their October runs of the past decade. (Oh, and they’re facing a two-way superstar doing things that have never been done by anyone, in the postseason or any other time — a superstar who, don’t forget, the Jays tried very hard to sign just a couple of years ago.)
Winning the third championship in franchise history is going to be a challenge unlike any Toronto has faced to this point. But that’s a problem for this weekend. Right now, the Jays, behind their signature franchise player, the hometown kid, the ALCS MVP, the guy who is forever a Jay and never a Yankee, are going to the World Series. This team, this city, this country, have waited so long for this moment. There isn’t one of them, right now, who would say it wasn’t worth the wait.
