Toronto (Buffalo) Blue Jays are back in the Major League Baseball playoffs for the first time since 2016, but they’re partly obscured because of the gigantic asterisk. The Blue Jays compiled the eighth best record in the American League but they started on equal footing with 15 other teams in the two leagues.
Baseball traditionalists may cringe, but tradition has taken a vacation in 2020. Tradition is forced to go out the window when trying to create a playoff system in the midst of a pandemic.
Baseball was the last sport to go the wildcard route, giving in to the popular new playoff tradition in 1995. This year, after a truncated 60-game season that didn’t start until late July, eight teams per league started a post-season run that will eventually yield a World Series champion.
In Los Angeles, meanwhile, Dodgers fans are already planning the World Series parade. Sixteen teams may be qualifying for the playoffs, but the Dodgers have been the dominant team all year — No. 1 in pitching stats and No. 2 in hitting (behind Atlanta Braves) and there’s no reason to think that dominance won’t carry on through the playoffs.
Still, stranger things have happened. There are no byes, and all 16 teams will be involved in best-of-three ‘wildcard’ series. Even the Dodgers could be vulnerable in a best-of-three.
An upset is what the Blue Jays, the American League’s No. 8 seed, were visualizing when they took on No. 1 Tampa Bay Rays.
Hyun Jin Ryu, the Jays’ off-season free-agent acquisition, should be good for one victory in Tampa Bay, but Toronto’s pitching gets iffy after that. Offensively, the Jays aren’t a pushover. Bo Bichette is back in the lineup after missing about 25 games, and Teoscar Hernandez has enjoyed a breakout season with 16 homers. Other youngsters such as Cavan Biggio, Lourdes Gurriel, Jr., and Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., are also offensive threats. The Jays could surprise.
Actually, however, the Blue Jays are likely a year or two away from being legitimate contenders for the World Series. But hey, this is 2020, the weirdest year any of us can remember, so expect the unexpected.
- Comedy writer Brad Dickson of Omaha, to area football fans: “If you are tweeting that the worst thing that has happened in 2020 is that Nebraska must play at Ohio State in Week 1 you really need to pay more attention to the news.”
- Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times: “Phillies pitcher Zack Wheeler had to be scratched from a start after he tore the nail of his right middle finger while putting on his pants. As any good Philadelphian knows, what good is a guy if he can’t use his middle finger?”
- Patti Dawn Swansson, the River City Renegade: “The first leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown, the Kentucky Derby, became the second leg, and the second leg, the Preakness Stakes, will be the third leg, and the third leg, the Belmont Stakes, became the first leg. I swear, there hasn’t been this much confusion about legs since Joe Namath did that pantyhose commercial in the 1970s.”
- Joel Beall of GolfWorld, on Matthew Wolff shooting a third-round 65 at Winged Foot during the third round of the U.S.Open. “He did so hitting from spots requiring a compass rather than a yardage book, needing a weedwacker instead of a wedge.”
- Comedy writer Alex Kaseberg: “Danny Lee withdrew from the U.S. Open after taking six strokes to make a four-foot putt. To give you an idea how bad it was, Lee was named an honorary New York Jet.”
- Daniel Rapaport in GolfWorld, on the final pairing in the U.S. Open at Winged Foot: “It was a two-horse race. A two-animal race, really. One man built like a bison, the other named Wolff.”
- Brad Dickson again: “In Nebraska high school football Franklin defeated Elba by a score of 60-6. The Elba coach said his players could've come back from such a deficit if only they were playing the Atlanta Falcons.”
- Dwight Perry again: A curling robot — named Curly, of course — went 3-1 in four matches against members of South Korea’s national teams. Even more impressive, Curly can reportedly grunt ‘Hurry! Hard!’ in 68 languages.”
- Ann Killion of the San Francisco Chronicle, on starting up a football season amid a pandemic: “The Power 5 conferences like to use the phrase ‘student-athlete.’ Maybe ‘lab rat’ is more appropriate.”
- Steve Simmons of the Toronto Sun: “Best way to make a Leaf fan cry? Show them the figures on Brayden Point’s contract. He’s been the Doug Gilmour of this year’s playoffs, high energy and high production, pulling in $4 to $5 million-plus less than Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner.”
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
