TORONTO – Though the Toronto Blue Jays and Boston Red Sox didn’t meet during the first 2½ months of the season, the American League East rivals and neighbours in the wild-card standings certainly kept tabs on one another.
The impression from Beantown of what’s been happening up here?
“They’re good,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora said. “They can pitch. I don’t think the numbers reflect who they are offensively. And they’re in the mix. They’ve been talking about them struggling – they’re right there in the hunt. In the division, if you look by names and who they have in that clubhouse, they’re one of the best if not the best this season.”
Perception isn’t always reality, of course, as neither team is currently in the situation it expected to be in heading into the year; the Blue Jays still trying to find themselves as a lineup and as a roster, the Red Sox leaning into an athleticism/speed identity and executing consistently.
As a result, they are teams having vastly different conversations about themselves while facing some of the same uncertainties over how to approach the July 30 trade deadline.
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The Red Sox are still building toward a competitive window, yet suddenly they’re fourth in the wild-card standings, 2.5 games up on the Blue Jays after a resounding 7-3 victory Monday, a tempting opportunity to chase the post-season at hand even if the probabilities say their best days still lie ahead.
The Blue Jays, meanwhile, are fighting tooth and nail to keep their window open as the contractual control of their roster means a decision point is coming, and if it’s not buying before this deadline hits to chase a wild-card spot, it means selling off expiring deals for a reset at 2025.
Featured prominently in the opener between them were two pending free agents who depending on circumstance will garner significant attention at deadline time — Yusei Kikuchi, the left-handed starter who uncharacteristically surrendered four home runs, including two to Tyler O’Neill, the Canadian slugger who’s now gone deep 14 times.
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Complicating things for both teams is that while the wild-card race in the American League features remarkably mid-contenders, the AL East is set up to be a gauntlet for years to come. The Baltimore Orioles, with their young big-league team and enviably deep farm system set up to continually resupply it, are as well positioned as anyone in the majors and they’re still second to the New York Yankees, who have a big question mark looming with Juan Soto’s free agency but still have a deep base to work from.
For the Blue Jays, their decisions next month will be all about the opportunity in the here and now. But for the Red Sox, who have a deep farm system and a demanding fan base, there are more layers to when they decide to augment aggressively.
“Just because someone heading into opening day looks like a great team on paper, obviously, this game is wildly unpredictable and things happen,” said Craig Breslow, the Red Sox’s chief baseball officer. “So we have to run our own race. We have to put together the most competitive team we possibly can. Now, playing in the AL East is tough. It represents a unique challenge given how good some of those other teams are. We recognize that. But really, we can’t allow that to distract from what we need to do to put the best possible team on the field that we can.”
That doesn’t mean the Red Sox plan to advance their window based on where they sit relative to the teams around them.
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The overall divisional landscape as it ties into their asset management “is still a secondary consideration,” said Breslow, “but I think we’ve been pretty transparent for a while now that we weren’t in a position to sacrifice future wins in favour of now wins. That’s largely driven by our personnel and the development that we anticipate from this young, exciting group that’s currently in the big-leagues, from the next wave of guys that we can start to see emerge in double-A. If that lines up with optimal timing relative to other teams, great. But we kind of owe it to our fan base and owe it to ourselves to put the most competitive team on the field that we can.”
