It’s not an exaggeration to say that the Toronto Blue Jays’ three-game set with the New York Yankees that begins on Tuesday is one of the biggest regular-season series in franchise history.
In the Blue Jays’ 45-season history they’ve made the playoffs just eight times, and in the 37 instances they’ve missed out, they’ve rarely been close enough for their fate to be decided in the final days. In 1987, a final series with the Detroit Tigers determined whether they played October baseball (they were swept and found themselves on the outside looking in), but aside from that the misses have rarely been near misses, and the very end of the season has seldom been definitive.