Blue Jays’ win streak comes to an end in another coin-flip contest

TORONTO — A quarter of the way through the 2025 season, the American League standings are a jumbled mess. None of the three division leaders — the New York Yankees, Detroit Tigers and Seattle Mariners — led by more than three games heading into Tuesday’s play. Only five games separated top from bottom in the West, the spread was eight games in the East and only thanks to the Chicago White Sox’s putridness was it 14.5 in the Central. In the wild-card race, 10 teams were within 3.5 games of each other, which is why, so far at least, the margins are very much as thin as they appear.

“It feels pretty clustered for us,” said Tampa Bay Rays manager Kevin Cash. “We were just talking earlier, like you haven’t had that group of two or three teams that have really taken off and that’s probably allowed for so much similarity throughout. I don’t know if it’s going to stay like that. I think we all came in saying that the American League East was going to be a division where there were five teams that could definitely play with enough quality that they could separate themselves. It hasn’t happened yet. I don’t know if I have the best answer as to why. I’d just like to see us play a little bit better and we’ve got a pretty challenging task doing it here against a team that is playing, really well.”

That team, of course, is the Toronto Blue Jays, whose penchant for coin-flip contests thus far has fit right into the league’s logjam pattern.

Tuesday’s wild and stunning 11-9 loss to the Rays, in which Jeff Hoffman gave up a Junior Caminero grand slam in the ninth after Daulton Varsho’s go-ahead three-run shot in the eighth inning, was the latest entry into their high-stress register, ending a four-game win streak in which three of the games could easily have gone the other way.

Consider, too, how that run came after the Blue Jays lost four in a row, each of which they could easily have won, after a three-game win streak in which each could have been easily lost, and drama on the daily is no exaggeration.

“Definitely,” Bo Bichette, whose two-run homer in the third began chipping away at a 4-0 Rays lead, said before the game. “Every game we’re playing nine innings, it seems like, but lately we’ve been swinging the bat pretty well, so hopefully we have some more games that are a little bit easier. That’s important for us in the long run. But at the end of the day, we’re just trying to win games.”

Over the past week the Blue Jays had been doing just that by producing the type of offence they’d struggled to generate until recently, but Hoffman’s second blown save of the season dropped them to 20-21 before a crowd of 27,717.

The shocking ending came after Varsho positioned the Blue Jays for yet another steely win, lacing a first-pitch changeup from Edwin Uceta off the upper-deck façade in right field for a 7-6 lead. Varsho also went deep in the fourth while Ernie Clement added a solo shot in the seventh.

But Hoffman issued a one-out walk to Travis Jankowski in the ninth, Danny Jansen followed with a hit-and-run single, Chandler Simpson singled home the tying run and after a Brandon Lowe single loaded the bases, Caminero cleared them with his ninth of the season.

Another push in the bottom of the ninth on consecutive doubles by Myles Straw, Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. off Pete Fairbanks cut the Rays’ lead to 11-9, but with two on and two out, Mason Montgomery got Varsho on a flyball to left to close out the win.

“Man, seems like a lot, 41 games in but such is life in the big leagues,” manager John Schneider said of the frequent leverage affairs. “It’s kind of weird. Right now there are probably five or six games that you think, OK, we should have won that one. That’s why you play 27 outs, you never know what’s going to happen. It seems like there has been a roller-coaster of stuff, but it’s fun. It sucks when days like today happen. But I can’t say enough how much I love the way that the guys are going about it. We’re a tight-knit group that’s playing really well. You take today for what it is and you move on to tomorrow.”

The baseball calendar offers no alternative, of course, and the challenge of playing so much coin-flip baseball is the way every little play gets magnified.

Jose Berrios, for instance, had one rough inning against the Rays, giving up a two-run single to Brandon Lowe and a two-run homer to Jonathan Aranda on a couple of poor changeups, making that 5.1-inning, five-run pitching line look worse than it was. A clever backpick by Tyler Heineman with two on and two out in the sixth went sideways when Taylor Walls got himself in a rundown long enough to allow lead runner Kameron Misner to score, helped along by the ball popping out of Guerrero’s glove on the tag. Thanks to their hit-and-run in the ninth, the Rays turned Jansen’s potential double-play into a base hit.

“At the beginning of the season, having those kind of games shows what we need to keep working on and get better at,” said Berrios. “Also I know our team overall, our offensive guys and our pitching staff, are going to keep doing better and better. And when we click all together, I think we’re going to win a lot more ballgames.”

More effectively uniting the different facets of the game would raise the Blue Jays’ margin for error, paving the way to more consistent success. At the same time, there are benefits to be drawn from learning to live in leverage, especially as the stakes increase over the course of the season.

“That’s the best thing that’s coming from this, knowing that up and down the lineup, if we put together good at-bats, we’re going to be in a good spot,” said Varsho. “It’s just about basically winning those ballgames you’ve got to win and, hopefully here, we’ve got a lot of games left to be able to kind of blow out some teams and be able to help our back end of the bullpen not come into that game.”

The Blue Jays did that Sunday in a 9-1 win at Seattle, their most lopsided victory of the season. But since rallying from 6-0 down to beat Boston on April 30, they’ve also come back to win from a four-run deficit to beat the Angels and three runs down to beat the Mariners, which is why they didn’t flinch against the Rays.

“I’m going to take it back to the last year a little bit, when we were in those situations, I feel like everybody in the lineup was just like down on themselves,” said Varsho. “This year, there’s no panic at all. It’s just like, we’re going to come back and whether you like it or not, we’re going to have good at-bats. It’s just a different kind of mojo to our dugout and having confidence in everybody. It’s just a different way of feeling this year, that’s the additions of guys and with our coaches having full confidence in us.”

In an American League that, in the words of Bichette, “feels open, like it’s there for anybody to take,” where, in the words of Schneider, “there is a lot to be decided,” every little detail is going to matter in trying to nudge more of those 50/50 games in their direction.

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