‘It hurts.’ The Jays were good. Just not quite good enough in baseball’s toughest division

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This article was published 03/10/2021 (1496 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It ended much too soon.

The Blue Jays did exactly what they needed to do in their final series of the season, easily sweeping the Baltimore Orioles.

They did what they needed to do on the season’s final day, putting the game away early by scoring 11 runs in the first four innings, highlighted by two home runs from George Springer, including a grand slam.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s 48th of the season broke Hall of Famer Eddie Mathews’s record for home runs in a single season by a player 22 years old or younger.

Marcus Semien’s 45th put the icing on the cake. The fifth-inning solo shot plated the Jays’ dozenth run, the last they would score this year. It was the 262nd home run for the 2021 Jays, extending their club record and also extending Semien’s MLB single-season mark for homers by a primary second baseman.

The Jays did as much as they could down the stretch, posting the best record in the American League in September at 19-9, then winning all three October games too. Just barely, it wasn’t enough.

A team that had the presumptive Cy Young Award winner, a slugger who would be the easy MVP in any other season and a legitimate rookie of the year contender, along with a pair of middle infielders each setting a club record for home runs, fell short by the slimmest of margins.

They left themselves needing a last-day hand from either the Tampa Bay Rays or the Boston Red Sox, and they didn’t get one.

After Game 162 reached its inevitable conclusion, the Rogers Centre scoreboard showed the ninth inning of the Boston-Washington game, and in an ironic twist the first batter was the Red Sox’s Rafael Devers, who promptly hit a tiebreaking two-run home run that ultimately ended the Jays’ run.

“It hurts,” said Guerrero, speaking to Jays fans across the country and around the world whether he knew it or not. “Knowing that you won 91 games and didn’t make the playoffs, it really hurts me, hurts my all teammates. But that’s just going to make me stronger and come back even better next year.”

That win total: 91, sixth-highest in club history, same as the 1991 AL East championship team, two more than the ’89 division winner and 2016 wild-card team.

“A 91-win season is something to be unbelievably proud of,” said Springer, who hit .500 over the final homestand. “But I think it just shows you how hard this division is, how hard the American League is and how hard this is, in general, to do.”

It was Springer’s first experience with the meat grinder that is the American League East, something with which Jays fans are all too familiar.

In the first season in which a single division had four teams each surpass 90 wins, it sticks in the craw that it’s still the Rays, Red Sox and Yankees heading into the post-season while the Jays watch.

“There were a lot of losses early on that were tough to take,” said shortstop Bo Bichette, fighting back tears as he addressed the media after the game. “Losing with fans cheering against you at home (in Dunedin and Buffalo) … after the game you come in and it sucked more than a normal May loss.”

The combination of the return to Toronto and José Berríos’ arrival led to a 9-2 homestand that became a 40-23 finish. The Jays played at a 103-win pace over the final two months, briefly moving into the top wild-card spot, but never having any breathing room.

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There were moments — the thrilling Semien walk-off home run that keyed back-to-back early September sweeps of the A’s and Yankees; the thrilling doubleheader sweep in Baltimore, coming from behind in the last inning of each game; Bichette’s tiebreaking homer in the eighth against the Yankees — that made us think this was going to happen. That made the Jays the team nobody wanted to play in the playoffs.

And now nobody has to.

It would have been so much fun to see what they might have done. After waiting so long for baseball to come back to Toronto, it’s a gut-punch that the next game is six months away.

Correction — Oct. 3, 2021: This story has been updated to show that 91 wins is the sixth-highest total in Blue Jays history.

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