Batter's Box Interactive Magazine: New York at Toronto, July 21-23

A remark by greenfrog in the last Game Thread caught my attention. In its entirety...

One question worth considering is: how rare/special is the opportunity the Blue Jays currently have to win the division and advance deep into the postseason? The last time the team had a similar shot at winning the division was a decade ago. If this is a chance that may not come around again for a while, then it might be worth making an extra push to add an impact player or two at the trade deadline.

I cast my mind back to 2015, and my first thought was this - was Anthopoulos really thinking about winning the division? Were they even close? Hadn't they been in a better position the year before? Hadn't they let that deadline go by with no activity at all to speak of. (Indeed, they had.) I had always figured Anthopoulos was focused on other things besides winning the division in late July 2015. The first thing on his mind had to be his own future in the game. New management was coming to town. Anthopoulos was about two months away from becoming Gord Ash. And he had to be concerned about the age of his roster. Mark Buehrle was two months away from the end of his contract (and his career), R.A. Dickey was already 40 years old, and Jose Bautista was two months short of turning 35 (and in the midst of his last great season, as it turned out.). It was getting pretty close to Now-or-Never time. Roll them dice!

First place? It's unusual enough for the Blue Jays to be in second place this late in the season. It's happened just twice since the championship years. Once was 2014, when the Jays were three games back of the Orioles on this date. They would win six in a row to close out the month and were in second place, 1.5 games back, by the end of July. But they didn't do much at the deadline on that occasion (they traded Liam Hendriks and Erik Kratz to the Royals for Danny Valencia) and they played like a Very Disappointed Group afterward, losing 16 of their next 22 to fall right out of the race.

The other time was 2000, Jim Fregosi's second (and final) year in the dugout. On this date, the Jays were just half a game behind the Yankees. Well, sort of - they were four games back in the loss column, having managed to play 97 games to that point (the Yankees had only played 90.) But the Jays were obviously in contention, and Gord Ash went to work. The 2000 team had a league average offense, with a couple of obvious holes n the lineup. In the last ten days before the deadline, both right fielder Raul Mondesi and second baseman Homer Bush would suffer season-ending injuries. The bigger problem was the pitching, which, once you got past David Wells, was pretty lousy.

So Ash went out and got himself a pair of starting pitchers. He traded pitcher Darwin Cubillan and a minor league shortstop named Michael Young to Texas for Esteban Loaiza. He traded minor league second baseman Brent Abernathy to Tampa Bay for Steve Trachsel and LH reliever Mark Guthrie. A few days later, he picked up Dave Martinez from Texas to replace Mondesi in right field. Utility man Craig Grebeck took over as the everyday second baseman, just as he had the year before when the team discovered Tony Fernandez could no longer play in the middle of the infield.

But in those last ten days before the deadline, the team went 3-7, to fall 4.5 games off the pace. They had a decent August (15-11), but the Yankees had a better one. And then the Jays simply stopped hitting in September. Loaiza and Trachsel did stabilize the pitching staff, and Martinez and Grebeck played as well as anyone could have wished. But it wasn't enough, and the opportunity was there. The Yankees would win the division with an 87-74 record.

New York at Toronto, July 21-23

Monday, July 21 2025 @ 04:45 PM EDT