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 3.5 games separated top from bottom in the West, the spread was five games in the East and only thanks to the Chicago White Sox’s putridness was it nine 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 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 been dropped.
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Consider how that run came after the Blue Jays lost four in a row, each of which they easily could 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 they 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.
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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.
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