Jordan Schusterman

Hello, my friend.

Always a pleasure to join you, and I understand it is strange times in Jay's world.

Is that correct?

I was going to say, you stole my next line.

I would say there's a lot of American League teams feeling very similarly right now.

I know the other ALCS participants, the Seattle Mariners, are certainly right there feeling in a lot of the same respects, not dealing with quite as many injuries, although they certainly have some important ones for them as well.

But

There's a lot of American League teams that had real expectations coming into this year that have straight up fallen on their face or have dealt with so many injuries where it's been really hard to find a rhythm.

So, yeah, just a difficult season to evaluate so far.

But we can no longer say, oh, we can't just keep shrugging and say it's early.

I think we can in the sense that the standings haven't really gotten away from too many teams, although obviously in the Blue Jays case, it's a little bit different than teams in the American League Central and the American League West.

But yeah, it's just a really weird season so far with a lot of these teams.

Yeah, not even close.

I think, like, if you had told me the Rays were maybe one of those top couple wildcard teams, even with the kind of bearish projections that they had for them, I'd be like, well, yeah, I mean, they're never bad, so that wouldn't be that surprising.

But for them to just have, like, far and away the best record in baseball,

I guess, did Atlanta pass?

You know, so Atlanta's still behind them.

So, yeah, I mean, the fact that they still have the best record of baseball is absurd.

The fact that they've built a four-and-a-half game lead over the Yankees, let alone the rest of the division.

I mean, man, ten-and-a-half games, like, I...