The Blue Jays face a chaotic weekend, which might just be a warm-up for a crazier week

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This article was published 01/10/2021 (1494 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Blue Jays lost the series that they couldn’t afford to lose, while the Red Sox were playing the worst team in the league, and yet the Jays didn’t lose any ground in the race for the second wild-card spot.

Nothing was settled by the pivotal three-game set between the Jays and Yankees at Rogers Centre, besides three days coming off the schedule, though New York is in better shape now than when they got to town. The Bronx Bombers head south with a two-game bulge on Boston and Seattle for the first wild card, and a three-game lead on Toronto.

But all is far from lost for the Jays, despite the three baseballs lost by the Yankees in a span of four hitters against Robbie Ray in the sixth inning Thursday night.

The Jays will start their final series of the season just one slim game out of the second wild card, trailing both the Red Sox and the Mariners.

The Baltimore Orioles, who just did the Jays a huge favour by wrapping up their home schedule winning two of three against Boston, will be the visitors.

With the series win over the Red Sox, the Orioles won exactly one-third of their home games, going 27-54. On the road, they’re working at a slightly higher level of general awflitude, 25-53.

The visit from the O’s means the Jays will have the easiest final weekend, on paper, of all four teams remaining in the AL wild-card race.

The Red Sox will do a drive of shame down the Beltway to Washington, D.C. for a three-game set against the last-place Nationals, who are just home from a 2-5 road trip through Cincinnati and Colorado. The Sox have lost five of six games following a seven-game winning streak.

You might remember Washington sweeping the Jays in a two-game series during an August road trip when the Jays went 3-6 through Seattle, Anaheim and D.C., losing George Springer to a knee injury in the bargain.

The surprising Mariners, whose 18-8 September record is percentage points better than the Jays’ 19-9 for best in the league for the month, have thrust their way into a playoff spot by winning 10 of their last 11 games, including two sweeps of Oakland. The M’s took two out of three from the Angels in L.A. last week and will host the Halos to wrap up their season.

The Yankees finish at home in the Bronx against a Rays team that has already clinched the best record in the American League. Tampa Bay has nothing to play for, though no team wants to go into the playoffs on cruise control and then try to rev the engine back up for the post-season.

Do you love chaos? Get ready.

If the Jays manage one more win this weekend than the Red Sox and Seattle, there would be a three-way tie for the second wild card after Sunday’s regular-season finales, all of which begin around 3 p.m. Eastern just to heighten the drama.

In the case of a three-way tie, the fun begins. The Red Sox, who won the season series over the Jays (10-9) and Mariners (4-3), would get to choose if they wanted to host a knockout game on Monday — the winner moving on to another knockout game to determine who would go to New York for the actual wild-card game — or if they wanted to let the Jays and Mariners play each other first (in Seattle) and then play only one game, in the home of the winner, for the chance to move on.

If Boston chooses to play the first knockout game, the Mariners would then have the choice of going to Fenway Park for that game or sending the Jays there and cooling their heels, waiting to travel to the city of the winning team for a chance to play New York.

It is conceivable that the Jays could play Sunday at home to the Orioles, then travel to Seattle Monday, back to Toronto on Tuesday to face the Red Sox, go to New York on Wednesday and then to St. Petersburg on Thursday to open an American League Division Series.

It’s also possible that the Jays could go from Toronto on Sunday to Boston on Monday, Seattle on Tuesday and New York on Wednesday.

Chaos is a good time, though as often as we look forward to such wacky scenarios they hardly ever happen.

Back in 2016, the Jays went into the final Saturday of the season just a half-game up on Detroit for the second wild-card spot and a game ahead of Seattle. With the Jays trailing Baltimore by a game for the top wild card, a four-way tie was very much in play. As it turned out, we didn’t even get a single tiebreaker game.

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The Jays have never played a Game 163 with playoff implications, though they’ve gone down to the wire a couple of times.

Had they beaten the Tigers instead of completing that horrible collapse on the last day of the 1987 season, there would have been a one-game playoff for the division title in Detroit the next day. They could have forced a Game 163 in 1990 as well, with a last-day win and a Red Sox loss. Neither of those things happened. Either one would have been fun.

The Jays have only played three winner-take-all elimination playoff games in franchise history. They lost to Kansas City in Game 7 of the 1985 ALCS (I can still see Jim Sundberg’s bases-loaded triple hitting the top of the fence in right field), they beat Texas in what will be forever known as The Bat Flip Game in 2015, and they eliminated the Orioles in the 2016 wild-card game. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that they’ll have another one – or three – next week, but they’re going to need some help to get there.

Correction — Oct. 1, 2021: This article was updated to correct that the Yankees will finish their series against the Rays at Yankee Stadium, not in St. Petersburg.

Mike Wilner is a Toronto-based baseball columnist for the Star and host of the baseball podcast “Deep Left Field.” Follow him on Twitter: @wilnerness