KANSAS CITY -- Finally back to .500, the Blue Jays have 20 games to determine how we’ll remember the 2026 season and they’re playing their best baseball at exactly the right time.
This isn’t the race the Blue Jays dreamed of when they entered the 2026 season as World Series contenders, fresh off taking the Dodgers to extra innings in Game 7, but none of that matters now. The Blue Jays have given themselves another life, and with Friday’s 9-2 win over the Royals, are back to .500 (71-71). This leaves them just one game shy of the Guardians, who they hold a tiebreaker over.
“We’re gritty as hell,” said Ernie Clement. “If we go down early, we’re not afraid to come back. Right now, we’re punching first, which is something I don’t think we had done early in the season.”
This is what mattered most:
1. Another offensive outburst
This hasn’t been the Blue Jays’ “brand of baseball” by any means, but what a start Friday night.
With a flurry of blows right out of the gate, the Blue Jays hung four runs on the Royals in the first inning, capped by an Ernie Clement double into the left-field corner. This was a Clement classic, and much-needed after he’s been grinding through the past month offensively.
"The boys have done a great job picking me up after my historic month of August,” Clement joked. “These guys are awesome. We're playing great baseball. It’s not about me, so I’ve got to put my frustrations aside and try to help the team win. It felt good to get a couple, score a run, a couple of RBIs, just be part of a win.”
No one is going to mistake the 2026 Blue Jays for an offensive powerhouse, but with performances like this and the growing belief that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. could finally be turning a corner, there’s at least some optimism. Slowly and steadily, John Schneider has seen this grow since the Trade Deadline.
“Our at-bats have definitely been better and we’ve gotten some timely hitting,” Schneider said. “We got a lot of hits in the month of August as a team. We’re doing the little things better. We’re playing better defense. We’re keeping games where they should be better than we did at the beginning of the year. Then, the offense has kind of picked up a little bit.”
2. Key conversations around the Trade Deadline
The Blue Jays were trying to “thread the needle”. It’s so rare that teams actually pull that off, but with additions like José Soriano and the immediate impact of prospect returns like Brett Bateman, it’s working.
Leading up to that Deadline, Schneider and general manager Ross Atkins sought out players they knew would be sticking around and had some very direct, daily conversations with them. They wanted to get out in front of it.
“We really wanted to say that every day to the guys. ‘Hey, we still believe that a lot of you guys can be better and we’re just going to sell our entire [freaking] roster. We’re going to continue to compete,’” Schneider said. “I think that saying that every single day was important. Then, it was the guys believing that and going out and playing with it. That’s what we were trying to do.”
It’s taken some patience, but this is the vision the Blue Jays had all along.
“We’re a really good baseball team,” Clement said. “It was only a matter of time before things started clicking and we started playing our game, figured out our team identity, figured out our lineup. There’s been so many moving pieces throughout the whole year. It’s nice to finally have a solid grasp on who we are.”
3. The path forward
This weekend won’t get any easier for the Blue Jays after Jameson Taillon left Friday’s game following the second inning with right elbow discomfort. This bullpen, already running on fumes, needed to cover seven innings. There’s essentially another “bullpen day” around Spencer Arrighetti as the bulk guy on Sunday, too.
There can be no complaining from the driver’s seat, though. With the Guardians playing a motivated Tigers team, the Rangers playing the Rays and the Orioles playing the Red Sox, this weekend is wide open for the Blue Jays to separate themselves in the AL Wild Card race before some more winnable games against the A’s.