The Blue Jays will make the playoffs, thanks to the ineptitude of the teams around them

If more people in baseball were good at their jobs, it wouldn’t matter how bad the Toronto Blue Jays have been at theirs. They’d already be booking beach vacations in October.

What have the Jays done well this year? If you take Dylan Cease out of it, nothing. If you include him, almost nothing.

On Thursday, they were rocked 7-0 by the Boston Red Sox in their series finale. The obits on the season should be half-written, but the Jays are still only a couple of games out of a wild-card spot.

Three weeks ago, this team was an American battle cruiser – everybody on it was in the process of going overboard. Fangraphs had Toronto’s odds of making the post-season at seven per cent. I do not do math to a high-school level, but to me, seven per cent means “impossible.”

What the Fangraphs model cannot reckon with is the unbelievable, verging on epochal, awfulness of the rest of the American League in 2026.

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Tampa is good. New York is good. Everyone else is somewhere between much worse than they should be and so bad they should be too embarrassed to show up for work most days. I’m talking players, general managers, parking lot attendants. Everybody.

It is increasingly possible that someone will “win” the AL West with a losing record. Whatever their final tally, that team will almost certainly have a negative run differential. In what other sport could you be the best at something when you can’t score more points than you allow?

In the Central, it’s a tug of war, except everybody’s pushing on the rope. The only team that looks anywhere close to decent recently is Detroit, and they got that way immediately after tossing off their best player, which means they have no chance.

Last year, at this same time with the record they have now in a more sane American League, the Jays would have been four games out of the wild card. Year before, 7.5 games. Year before that, seven games out. Those are mountains to climb. This year, they’ve got a slight incline. It’s barely even a hill.

Under normal circumstances, when a team that has been losing games starts winning a few, you would say that they had gotten better. But the Jays haven’t done that.

What’s changed is that they’ve stopped playing like the travelling recruitment department for a clown college, and the rest of the league has remained the same. It helps that, after a month-long burst of competence, the Red Sox are reverting to the mean.

The new, better Jays still have the 29th-ranked offence in baseball. Their pitching figures somewhere in the middle of the pack. Shockingly terrible plus mediocre should not equal one lucky weekend out of a playoff spot.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. still looks like he’s trying to drive a nail with the wrong end of a shovel. Every day, someone different blows a connective joint getting up out of a chair. Now it’s up to Myles Straw to provide the heroics. Straw wasn’t an everyday player until the Jays ran out of outfielders. Just ran out of them. Like milk.

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Every time anybody who isn’t Cease is pitching, you’re half expecting the other side to start driving balls through the outfield wall, not just over it. This team is hanging onto the bumper of every single inning it plays in.

You know what this means, right? The Jays are making the playoffs. Why? Because that is the most ridiculous thing that could happen.

They were five minutes from winning the World Series, and then they were the New Hampshire Fisher Cats, and now they’re going to be the team no one wants to play in the post-season because at least one of them is clearly a witch. They don’t how they will do this, but they will. It’s too perfect.

Again, in less unusual times, the gauntlet would be run in the next 10 days. The Jays face the Yankees, the Rays and then the Yankees again.

But this year, it won’t matter what happens, because the Texas Rangers’ charter will leave without the team and they’ll be swept while AWOL. Then the Seattle Mariners will try to change their luck by having every batter face away from the pitcher, and Cleveland will close their ballpark so that they can paint the seats a different colour.

If you need a reason to have faith, it’s not the Blue Jays. They’re still bad. Have faith that the rest of the American League is uninterested in being any better this year. Maybe it’s the coming work stoppage. Maybe it’s Dodgers fatigue. Whatever it is, no one wants to bother taking advantage of the most wide open year in living memory.

After that New York/Tampa/New York swing, the Jays’ season begins to angle downhill. And I mean, skiing off the edge of a cliff. Of the Jays’ last 10 series of the year, not one features an opponent with a winning record.

I don’t know what to tell you – keep your medium-term plans vague. You can already see the path through. The Jays take out the White Sox (charlatans) in the wild card. They rout Tampa (paper tiger) in the division series. They tear the heart out of the Yankees (can’t close) in the ALCS. And then it’s Shohei how you been since last year, we missed you guys.

It’s not me saying this. It’s you saying this. You’ve already said it to someone you know. You weren’t serious serious, but you were sort of serious. Now you’ve stopped saying it because you’re actually serious, and you don’t want to curse yourself.

But don’t worry. This isn’t that sort of curse. It’s the other kind.