If not the best, perhaps the most feared
Don’t look now, but the Blue Jays might have turned into the best team in the American League.
There’s nobody hotter than the Jays, who recently went on an eight-game win streak and have won 16 of their last 19 games. The latest victory, their second in three days, was another easy one: a 6-3 win over the first-place Tampa Bay Rays on Wednesday afternoon that wasn’t as close as the score indicated.
They improved to 13-2 this month with seven innings of one-run ball from ace Robbie Ray and a monster day at the plate from shortstop Bo Bichette, who hit his 25th homer of the season and finished with five RBIs.
That record equates to an .867 winning percentage, tops in the AL by a country mile. No other team is even close. The next best entering Wednesday’s slate of games were multiple teams at 7-5 (.583). Only the National League’s San Francisco Giants, 11-2 this month, have been on a comparable run.
The Jays are thriving while the rest of the AL is toiling in mediocrity. The Red Sox are 8-6 this month, the Yankees are 5-8 and the Rays are 6-8. Fellow wild-card contenders Oakland and Seattle aren’t any better at 4-8 and 7-6. To make up ground in the standings, teams need to string together a bunch of wins and have their rivals struggle. The Jays got both.
“I think we’re a great team,” said Bichette, who became the seventh shortstop in MLB history 23 years old or younger
with at least 25 homers and 90 RBIs in a season. “I expect to win every time I go on the field. We think we’re better than the teams we play. We go out there with that confidence … I think we’re showing everybody who we are and it’s fun to come to the field every day.”
Seriously, which AL team should be considered superior to the Jays right now?
The Rays were the obvious choice, and it’s worth noting they still lead the AL with 90 wins. Barring a historic collapse, they will finish the year as the AL East champs. They were the better club over the first five months of the regular season, but are they still? That’s debatable.
The Jays clearly got the best of them at the Rogers Centre this week. They outscored the Rays 14-6 while outhitting them 27-14 across three games. All three starters — Ray, José Berríos and Alek Manoah — went at least seven innings while allowing one earned run or fewer. Despite a 2-0 loss on Tuesday, this was a master class on how to win a series, something the Jays have done six times in a row.
One caveat here is that the Jays had home-field advantage this week. Things might not be quite as easy when the action switches to Florida on Monday. There’s also the fact that they still having a losing record (7-9) vs. Tampa Bay this season, but a lot of those losses occurred before the Jays became who they are today.
A post-season series between Toronto and Tampa Bay would be extremely competitive and might go the distance. The Rays have scored 10 more runs than the Jays this season, but there aren’t too many people who would pick their lineup over the one from the Great White North. The advantage in the rotation belongs to the Jays. The only area where the Rays have a clear leg up is the bullpen.
“That’s one of the best teams in baseball,” manager Charlie Montoyo said of the Rays. “To keep doing what we’re doing, you have to beat them. Three great games and we took two out of three. That’s huge.”
The rest of the league doesn’t appear to be nearly as daunting. The Red Sox and Yankees have been getting outplayed by the Jays for almost three weeks. The White Sox’s run differential is 38 less than the Jays’, while the West-leading Houston Astros are just one game above .500 since Aug. 1.
Of course, the great equalizer in all this is the wild-card game. The Jays might be a better team on paper than the Red Sox and Yankees, but anything can happen in a one-game playoff. New York’s Gerrit Cole might steal a win on his own, and the same could be said for Boston’s Nathan Eovaldi or Chris Sale. One bad pitch from the Jays bullpen could end a deep October run before it gets off the ground.
Even if the Jays have the most talent in the AL, that doesn’t mean they’re guaranteed anything. There are countless examples of top teams getting knocked out early; it happens all the time. There are plenty of people — including me — who
still believe the 2015 Jays were better than the Royals and that the 2016 version was better than Cleveland, yet they lost to both.
What’s more important than anything else in baseball is getting hot at the right time. The Jays are proving that this month with their surge up the standings, but hot streaks don’t last forever. If this one ends later this month, another one will have to begin during the post-season, because if the Jays don’t do it, another team will.
There isn’t an organization out there that wants to face a star-studded lineup like the Jays’ in October that has plus bats through the first seven spots. Those clubs also don’t want to have anything to do with a rotation that includes a Cy Young candidate in Ray, a potential future nominee in Berríos, a former finalist in Hyun-Jin Ryu or a rookie phenom in Manoah.
If the Jays aren’t the best team in the AL right now, they’re at least among the most feared. This is an extremely dangerous ball club that seems intent on making sure their season lasts a lot longer than two more weeks.