How move to Seattle will impact Blue Jays in ALCS

The Toronto Blue Jays begin their attempt to get back into the ALCS at T-Mobile Park on Wednesday, knowing better than most clubs just how important the setting of a ballgame can be to on-field results.

Not only did Toronto’s 54-27 home record rank second in the majors during the regular season, but the team also had an experience in an extreme ballpark that significantly affected its campaign. In early August, the Blue Jays were in an ugly offensive slump and brought a 2-6 record into Colorado with just one performance with more than four runs in that span.

A series at the hitters’ paradise of Coors Field allowed the team to score a historic 45 runs and regain some momentum and confidence during the dog days of summer. It’s impossible to say precisely how beneficial that series was, but the sweep was meaningful to a 2025 campaign where the Blue Jays won the AL East on a tiebreaker, and anyone who watched that series closely knows the park played a significant role in the team’s offensive explosion.

When the Blue Jays face Seattle in Games 3, 4, and potentially 5, they won’t be experiencing the direct opposite of Coors, which is undoubtedly the most extreme ballpark in the majors — but it’s not that far off.

According to Statcast’s Park Factors over the last three years, Coors Field has an overall park factor of 113, meaning it’s 13 percent better than average for hitters. There isn’t another spot in that stratosphere as the second-highest park factor belongs to Fenway Park (104). T-Mobile Park is the biggest contrasting outlier. It has the lowest park factor in the majors (91), and no other team’s home is below 97.

The Blue Jays are heading to one of the most warped environments MLB has to offer. It’s worth understanding how that should affect expectations for the games to come, and who is most likely to be affected.

The pitchers

There probably isn’t a pitcher on the Blue Jays staff who’ll be upset about the cross-continent journey to Seattle, but they won’t all benefit equally.

Getting the greatest performance enhancement from T-Mobile Park requires pitchers to possess at least one of the following characteristics:

1. A below-average groundball rate: Groundballs aren’t made totally equal everywhere, as some infields can be a bit faster, but park effects are more significant on balls in the air.

2. A below-average strikeout rate: Sometimes conditions like cold weather can influence a pitcher’s ability to grip the ball, and the thin air of Coors, for instance, affects the flight of breaking balls. So, ballparks can play a role in strikeouts in some cases, but generally, the effect is greater on balls in play. Trey Yesavage’s ALDS Game 2 performance is an example of an outing where the ballpark played a minimal role.

With these two factors in mind, we can pick out the pitchers on the ALCS roster who could enjoy plying their trade in Seattle the most based on their regular-season numbers with the Blue Jays.

The Blue Jays aren’t rostering a pitcher perfectly suited to get the most out of a trip to Seattle, but that’s not altogether surprising considering arms that fail to generate groundballs or strikeouts are rarely (although not never) desirable.

Where this gets most interesting for Toronto is with their Game 4 plans, as both Scherzer and Lauer are extreme flyball pitchers who are well-suited for T-Mobile Park. Some combination of those two pitchers might be able to stitch together some surprisingly effective innings in a way they would likely struggle to do at home.

The idea of using Scherzer, in particular, is far more palatable in this context than it was against the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium. That was a terrible fit for a pitcher struggling with home runs and conceding a .257/.305/.545 line to lefties.

Another pitcher who stands out in this group is Hoffman. Although his strikeout rate was healthy on the season, that’s been less true recently as he’s dealt with fluctuating velocity down the stretch (6.75 K/9 in September and 8.10 in the playoffs). Considering his greatest issue all season was the home-run ball, he might find Seattle and its home-run park factor of 92 helps keep him out of trouble.

Little stands out in a different way. There may not be a pitcher in the majors less sensitive to ballpark context, considering he keeps the ball on the ground at an elite rate and gets a massive percentage of his outs via the K. As always, his success is likely to come down to his ability to throw strikes consistently.

The hitters

The trip to the West Coast won’t be a treat for a Toronto lineup that’s scuffled out of the gate in this series, but just like with the pitchers, we can get more specific than that.

Below is a chart that shows the park factors for each hit type in T-Mobile from each side of the plate to give us a sense of which Blue Jays could be in for a tough time.

Daulton Varsho find the lack of triple potential frustrating, but outside of him, that extreme is unlikely to hit the Blue Jays too hard. What stands out here is that home runs are suppressed less than other hits, things are generally easier for lefties, and right-handed bats will find doubles hard to come by.

If Bo Bichette were active, that would be bad news for him, but the Blue Jays have two other right-handed hitters with high double totals in Ernie Clement (35/23.2 percent of his total) and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (34/19.8 percent of his total).

The overall lefty/righty split is intriguing, but unlikely to drive many lineup decisions as the Blue Jays have their primary lineups more or less locked in. But it’s helpful context, and not a good thing for a team whose top offensive stars stand in the right batter’s box.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to take from this data is that even though home runs will be difficult to come by, they might still be the best method of generating offence. With that knowledge, it makes sense to look at which Blue Jays hitters have their home-run cuts most affected by T-Mobile Park.

The chart below shows each Toronto hitter on the ALCS roster and Statcast’s projection of their career home runs if they played all their games in Seattle (via xHR) to give a sense of who is likely to be most and least affected by the park.

These numbers paint a surprisingly generous picture, with the pattern of lefties faring better than righties making a noticeable appearance.

In many of these cases, the sample is small enough to avoid reading too much into it. For instance, what power Myles Straw has is unlikely to come into play, and an Andres Gimenez home run remains a long shot. With hitters like George Springer and Varsho, the effect, while subtle, is noticeable and probably better reflects what’s going on here.

While a large percentage of home runs are leaving any park in the majors, Eugenio Suárez's double in Game 1 provides a good example of why this stuff matters.

Another important factor here is temperature. The forecast in Seattle is calling for moderate fall weather, which is cooler than the average regular-season game, and should make it harder for hitters on both teams to clear the fence, considering the well-established positive correlation between heat and flyball length, affecting home runs and other types of offensive production.

If the numbers in the chart above look surprisingly optimistic for Blue Jays hitters, they probably are due to small-sample weirdness for some, and the fact that they are about to play in cooler-than-average conditions.

The big-picture takeaways from the park factor data remain the best when setting expectations for this lineup and understanding what we see in the days to come. Home runs are likely to be a more important offensive vehicle than usual with T-Mobile Park suppressing other hit types more, and right-handed hitters are likely to have more trouble with Seattle’s conditions than lefties.