At the legendary London, Ont. sports bar Joe Kool’s, some of the more loyal baseball-loving fans in Southwestern Ontario have no doubt been raising a glass or three this week.
Even after the Blue Jays became Canada’s team decades ago, Kool’s remained true to its Detroit Tigers roots in the region and remains so today. With plenty to celebrate as their team is making a massive impact in their first post-season appearance in a decade, Kool’s is no doubt Tiger Town once again.
And that energy is catching around the baseball world. The success of the Tigers — now knotted at at 1-1 in their best-of-five American League Divisional Series with the AL Central winning Cleveland Guardians — is another kick to Jays fans, of course. It’s another sign of what might (and probably should) have been. And another indictment to the miserable 74-82 season of regression.
But in a straight up comparison to the Tigers, it stings even worse.
Both teams were sellers at the July 31 trade deadline, but while one team cratered, the other soared. And as the Tigers prepare for a big home date at downtown Detroit’s Comerica Park on Thursday, the Jays are already well into their off-season search for answers.
It feels even worse when you flip the calendar back to Aug. 10 and see the two teams in an identical spot. Both the Tigers and Blue Jays had a record of 55-63, 10 games out of an AL wildcard spot.
We all know what happened since. The Tigers went on a blistering, 31-13 heater while the Jays … did not.
“We’ve talked about that here internally,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said recently when asked about the Tigers surge that became one of the biggest stories in the final month of the season. “The season is so long. Detroit had a season like Arizona last year. They just kept plodding. They made changes too and there just happened to be benefits to them. You never really know when it’s going to happen.”
The Tigers surge has certainly shown the randomness of the baseball season, especially with the expanded playoff format currently in place. There is a faction of the Jays management team that is of the mind that just getting into the post season is the main task through the grind of a 162-game season. In what is traditionally a tough division like the AL East, it’s seen as a realistic, if defeatist, approach.
“Around the league, there’s maybe a handful of teams that are slam-dunk post-season contenders every year and within that, it does take a lot of being precise in how you nail your trade deadline,” Schneider said. “Whether you say you can stand pat and saw we can sneak our way in or do you try to pivot?”
Perhaps to their credit, the Jays were well aware that the roster — and in particular the lack of depth on it — was highly unlikely to “pivot” the way the Tigers did.
Mind you, there was probably some skepticism in Detroit as well given that after also falling into the seller category at the deadline. But out of the moves came opportunity for young, hungry players that soon escalated to impressive momentum.
The influence of manager A.J. Hinch cannot be discounted, of course. The man who led the Houston Astros to three consecutive ALCS appearances and a World Series championship in 2017. Hinch is creative in how he manages in game, is a strong motivator and a keen judge of talent and the upstart Tigers have responded in kind.
Obviously it doesn’t hurt to have a bonafide, top of the league ace starting pitcher like the Tigers do in Tarik Skubal, the should-be unanimous AL Cy Young Award winner. But the Tiger’s bullpen, cleverly managed by Hinch, has been money throughout the closing furlongs of the regular season and a wildcard round sweep of the Astros.
On some level, there can be regret in how far south the Jays went while the Tigers were soaring upward. But in reality, it spoke to the depth and the downturn in Toronto that it was never going to be realistic.
“We’ve talked about that recently about how things could have been different if our first half of the season was different, if our trade deadline was different,” Schneider said. “Around the league, there are not a lot of teams that are the Yankees or the Dodgers year in and year out with 95 or 100 wins. You never know how it’s going to work. There’s usually one team every year that it kind of clicks with and they play well at the right team and Detroit’s that team this year.”
That they are. And now after going 3-1 on the road to start the post season, they return home to Comerica Park for Thursday’s Game 3 against the Guardians. And down the 401 at Joe Kool’s, as good a watering hole as you can find in Southwestern Ontario, they’ll be thirsty for more as well.