Following good luck, Toronto set to wear white-panel hats in Game 3 of ALDS

NEW YORK -- The Blue Jays are up 2-0 in the best-of-five American League Division Series, but the white panel hats are on a five-game winning streak.

If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.

Baseball is the official sport of superstitions, and after losing six of seven down the stretch to put their lead in the AL East in danger, closer Jeff Hoffman had an idea. He wanted to bring back the old white-panel hats, a look rarely seen since the Blue Jays’ World Series years but always a fan favorite.

“I thought someone was like … playing a joke on me with the hats, you know?” manager John Schneider said after the hats reemerged on Sept. 25. “You just kind of put on what's in your locker. And I said, ‘What are we doing?’ But yeah, Hoff wanted to kind of just have a different feel of what we were wearing and what we were doing. And here we are.”

They’ve worn them for five of the six games since, excluding the last Friday night of the year, which was a City Connect night. Schneider joked, as he often does, about the “ridiculous outfit” he’s stuck wearing on those City Connect nights with the bright blue and red on top of the black base. He’s never been a fan of the pants, either.

The white-panel caps just kept working, though, and for a team looking for any good wave to ride, they stuck right into the playoffs. Even Game 1 starter Kevin Gausman had something to say about them, which the team wore for a July 25-27 weekend road series against the Tigers, winning two out of three.

“I believe we wore them for the Hall of Fame game, and those ones were a little different. Those ones were actually like the old school '92-93 teams that wore them,” Gausman said. “One of the best logos ever, I think. We just kind of needed to change things up, and when we did, I think we won four in a row. A lot of these guys think these look really good. I'm a big fan of pinwheel hats. I think they're as baseball as it gets. So I'm all for it.”

As noted by Gausman, the hats they wore for Hall of Fame Weekend were slightly different than the version they have been wearing since Sept. 25. In fact, the hats they are currently wearing had not been previously worn since the 2022 season, according to uniformlineup.com.

Sitting at the podium on the Blue Jays’ workout day Monday at Yankee Stadium, Schneider wore the white-panel hat again, a sign of what’s to come in Game 3.

“I didn’t pack another hat,” he said.

Toronto has a chance to sweep the Yankees on Tuesday night to advance to its first AL Championship Series since 2016. The Blue Jays still chasing their first World Series since 1993, and if they pull it off wearing the white-panel hats, they might stick around for good.