Stuck in the Middle
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Are the Blue Jays still legitimate playoff contenders despite recent struggles?
It's at the Letters for Wednesday, July the 8th, 2026. Arden Zwelling and Ben Nicholson-Smith. Our producer is Christian Ryan. Thanks so much for listening, Ben. If you are a Blue Jays fan, but you suffered like a terrible concussion in early May and just lost the ability to... remember anything or digest anything, just like consume any kind of content at all. And you were coming out of that fog. Now you have recuperated from your traumatic brain injury here in early July. And you're like, wow, like I wonder what's going on with the Blue Jays. And you opened up the standings and you're like, you know, last time I looked at this in early May, the Blue Jays were like fourth in the AL East and nine and a half back of the top of the AL East, one and a half out of a wildcard position.
And now it's two months later and they're third in the AL East, 11 and a half back at the top of the division, three and a half out of wildcard position. You'd be like, oh, they've probably been playing just fine. Like everything's probably been just okay in the two months that I was in the fog of horrific blunt trauma to my head. Surely that would be the appropriate conclusion and no further context would be required.
Or maybe if they like went on vacation or something. Maybe there's a scenario where they just turned on, they did a digital detox for a couple months. Hopefully, hopefully, let's say it's a digital detox as opposed to anything, you know, blunt force trauma related. But yeah, it's so weird. It's such a weird season to make sense of. They're just not playing well. And we're recording this here on Wednesday, July 8th, right before they're about to play the series finale against the Giants. So by the time people listen to this, they will know, was it a series win? Was it a series loss? To me, ultimately, we're talking for the first time since that Mariners series. We saw the 10-1 loss. We saw the win and the Jonathan Class A home run.
A little bit encouraging in that middle game. But ultimately, they're not playing that well. They've been flat. Their best players aren't producing. They have significant questions. So it hasn't been good. It really hasn't. But I don't want to lose sight of the big picture, which is they are in this thing and they're going to play it out and see if they can stay in this thing and get further closer to ultimately being in that playoff position.
Does it even matter if it's been two months now since early May? Two months and the Blue Jays have lost only two games in the AL East race and two games in the wildcard race amidst the terrible... that the starting staff went through where they were bottom of the league in a variety of categories and were walking everybody in sight amidst the bullpen just starting to show the wear of carrying such a heavy load and the tax of having to run multiple bullpen days a week amidst the offense just spinning its wheels and sputtering and struggling to string hits together or hit for power and just sheer frustration put runs on the board like if amidst all that over the last two months the blue jays have lost only two games in the standings only two two games in what ultimately matters which is where you finish in the standings i mean what will it take for us to have any kind of conclusive evidence as to which direction the blue jays season should go or will go in the coming months
The rest of the American League has done them a lot of favors and it has bought them time. It has bought them chances to stay in this thing against all odds. I mean, when you look at the injuries, the performance, just the state of the roster, it's not where they want to be. So this is where we get into this kind of cognitive dissonance of like we're watching these games and we're We all see it. We all know they had so much trouble scoring all weekend in Seattle. That 10-1 loss in the opener just absolutely, you know, vibes killer. Looked completely flat. Vlad's swing looked off. They seemed to be pressing. It seemed to be a low point. You know, we're watching this from afar.
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