It’s never been easier to make the post-season in the American League, and the Toronto Blue Jays are trying to take advantage.
If the MLB season ended today, a team with a losing record (the Baltimore Orioles) would make the playoffs for the first time in a full-length campaign. The third wild-card spot is also projected to go to a below-.500 club. The lowest win total to ever earn an AL wild-card berth was the 85-win Minnesota Twins in 2017. That will probably change this year.
Meanwhile, the Blue Jays have won 12 of their last 18 games. They climbed from five games back in the AL wild-card race to only 0.5 back over that span. Toronto was able to leap four teams in the standings last week with seven days of good baseball, going 5-2 against the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox.
Its FanGraphs playoff odds were a season-low 4.3 per cent on Aug. 6, and have since climbed to 17 per cent.
After Monday’s games, there are now five teams tied with 61 wins vying for the last spot.
Bearing in mind the Blue Jays’ weak strength of schedule after this week’s gauntlet (road series against the Tampa Bay Rays and Yankees), and the abundance of games they have against the logjam of teams also competing for the third wild card, they have a realistic shot at pulling off an improbable rally.
Let’s put the Blue Jays’ unprecedented playoff push in context by comparing it to past seasons.
Worst records to earn post-season berths
The wild card, as we know it, has only been around since 1995, the first season after the infamous 1994 MLB strike. It started with a single wild-card spot being awarded to the best non-division winner and was expanded to a two-team format in 2012. The modern, 12-team format, with three additional playoff spots in each league, started in 2022.
Still, even with more teams being granted passage to October, no AL club has secured a playoff spot with a worse record than the 2017 Twins (85-77). The Rays snuck in with 86 wins in 2022, and the Detroit Tigers nabbed the final spot the last two years with 86 and 87 wins, respectively.
Historically, it’s been easier to obtain a playoff spot in the National League. The 1997 Houston Astros and 2008 Los Angeles Dodgers won their divisions with 84-78 records. The Miami Marlins and Arizona Diamondbacks earned the last two wild-card spots with the same record in 2023, and Arizona made it to the World Series. The St. Louis Cardinals won the Fall Classic in 2006 after going 83-78.
The two worst post-season records of all time: the 2025 Reds at 83-79 and the 2005 Padres, who won the NL West at 82-80.
For the Blue Jays to equal the worst-ever AL wild-card team with 85 wins, they would need to go 24-12 over their remaining 36 games. That’s a .666 win percentage that would be better than any team in MLB this year — or a 108-win pace over the course of a full season. The Texas Rangers, Orioles and Tigers would need to go 24-13 (.648 winning percentage), all of which seems improbable, meaning the last AL wild-card will likely see a new all-time low this year.
The American League as a whole has struggled, with a .486 winning percentage, the lowest it’s been since interleague play was introduced in 1997.
When it comes to recent history, the two best comparisons for the Blue Jays’ position in the standings are the 2015 and 2021 editions of the team.
That seems counterintuitive because those two clubs could not be more different stylistically than this year. Both boasted lineups chock-full of power and led MLB in home runs. They also both had large positive run differentials that implied they were better than their records indicated midway through the season. This year, the Blue Jays are 29th in home runs and have a negative-57 run differential.
In 2015, the Blue Jays were two games back of the wild card at the start of August and were one game above .500. But they won 11 straight games between Aug. 2-13 and eventually surged to a division title.
The more recent 2021 team might be a better comparison. They were further back than the ’26 Blue Jays on the same date, four games out of the final wild-card spot. Toronto was 63-55 at that point in 2021, but the AL was far stronger. They finished with a 28-16 record (.636 winning percentage) down the stretch, but ultimately missed the playoffs by one game when Rafael Devers broke their hearts on the final day of the season. Given the 2026 Blue Jays’ standing and the trajectory of their season, they could be in for a photo finish.
Largest wild-card comebacks
There are many examples of extraordinary late-season surges to secure playoff spots. Two came in each of the last two seasons, as the Cleveland Guardians overcame a 10-game deficit in the division to catch the Tigers, and Detroit went on its own 11-2 heater to surmount a 3.5-game hole the year before.
The 2021 Cardinals also erased a three-game wild-card deficit with a franchise-record 17-game winning streak, culminating in a post-season clinching win on Sept. 28.
And in the pre-wild-card era, eight teams came back from down at least four games with 16 or fewer games to play to seize a post-season spot. The oldest and most famous example is the 1951 New York Giants, who rallied from four games back in the standings with only seven remaining to catch the Brooklyn Dodgers, winning 13 of their last 14, capped by Bobby Thomson’s walk-off homer known as the “shot heard ’round the world.”
These steep climbs make the one the Blue Jays are facing look mild. However, completing any comeback will require some heroics.