They were among baseballs best teams last year. Now they could miss the playoffs.
The Toronto Blue Jays were two outs away from winning the World Series last season.Nine months later, they might not even make the playoffs.“We got to start winning,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said in July as his team fell under .500.
“That’s just the bottom line.”That regression would seem to have opened an opportunity for the Seattle Mariners, who lost to Toronto in last year’s American League Championship Series ...if the Mariners weren’t similarly having trouble following up their own breakthrough 2025 season.“Ultimately, we’re just playing very, very, very bad baseball in every facet of the game,” Mariners star Cal Raleigh told reporters this month.
That isn’t how either franchise envisioned this season going when they began the spring with enormous expectations and anticipation for how both might follow up each team’s best season in a generation.Last season, the Jays’ 94 wins tied for the American League’s best record with the New York Yankees, while Seattle had 90 wins.
Now, as the teams meet Friday for a three-game series, both are under .500 and on the bubble of grabbing the final wild-card spot with a month to go in the regular season.Their seasonlong struggles have created a wide-open race for the pennant in the American League.
After having won 77 games all last season, the Tampa Bay Rays (79-54) are in first place, with New York (75-57) right behind, even though Yankees star Aaron Judge hasn’t played since he injured a rib in late April.The Boston Red Sox (73-60), despite having fired most of their coaching staff only weeks into the season, have the third-best record.
Most surprising of all are the Chicago White Sox, who are 70-63 only two seasons after they won just 41 games.Trying to keep up are seven teams that are within six games of .500 — including Toronto and Seattle.
Each got here in part because of offenses in steep decline.Last season, both ranked in the top five in the American League in runs scor...