Last year, the Boston Red Sox clinched the AL East on Sept. 20, beating the Toronto Blue Jays 6-3 in the opener of a weekend series at Fenway Park. It was the Sox’s 94th win of the season on the way to what would be their third World Series championship in 10 years.
This year, the Blue Jays once again had the displeasure of watching a team celebrate a division title on its home field – their fourth loss in five games was the Orioles’ 91st win of the season, giving Baltimore a 12.5 game lead in the AL East with 11 games to play (12 for the Blue Jays) and their first title since 1997, the year of Jeffrey Maier.
Will the Orioles repeat the Red Sox’s feat and pick up their first World Series title since 1983? Only time will tell.
It’s the fourth time in franchise history the Blue Jays have been involved in a division-clinching win for their opposition, it also happened with the 1986 Red Sox and, as Blue Jays fans remember all too painfully, the 1987 Detroit Tigers.
That would make Tuesday night’s loss the ninth AL East clincher in which the Blue Jays have played, and their record is 5-4 in such games. But the last of those five wins came 21 years ago.
The Blue Jays are second in the division, a position in which they’ve finished only once before in the three-division era that began in 1994. That year, 2006, the Jays finished 10 games behind the eventual World Series Champion New York Yankees.
With the Orioles’ win, every team in the AL East — save the Blue Jays — has now won the division at least once over the past five years.
It’s not the end to another disappointing season for the Blue Jays — there are still a dozen games to go and the flames of their playoff hopes, albeit flickering at the moment, are still barely alight – but it’s yet another kick in the teeth in a season that started so well and then fell off the rails.
When the Blue Jays beat the St. Louis Cardinals 3-1 on June 6, they found themselves with a 6.5 game lead in the division, having won 20 of their past 24 games. They were shut out 5-0 the next day by Shelby Miller’s three-hitter, and didn’t score in three of four games to begin their precipitous decline.
Since that June 6 win, the Blue Jays have gone 39-49 — a stretch that included an 11-2 and a 9-2 run — and the Orioles have gone an astonishing 61-31.
Huge credit is due to the O’s for the way they came out of the all-star break. They led the Blue Jays by four games going into the Midsummer Classic, and we all looked forward to an early August series at Rogers Centre because before that Baltimore would have to play 16 straight games against the A’s, Angels and Mariners, 10 of which were out west.
While many teams have an awfully tough time with their west coast swings, the O’s didn’t fall to Earth — they went 6-4 on the road trip and came home to win two out of three against each of Los Angeles (Anaheim) and Seattle, then take a make-up game against fellow division champs-to-be Washington before that pivotal series in Toronto.
They won that series, too, taking two of three and leaving town with the Blue Jays five games out. Baltimore has added 8.5 games to its lead over the second-place Blue Jays in the month and a half since.