Welcome to the AL East, baseball's best roller-coaster ride
The New York Yankees have almost 60 more homers than the Toronto Blue Jays. Toronto's best home-run hitter this season, George Springer, would be tied for fourth in New York. Over three games at the Rogers Centre this week, the Yankees belted seven long balls against one for the Blue Jays.
And yet, the Jays still took two out of three to stretch their lead atop the American League East to four games.
The series in Toronto captured the chaos gripping Major League Baseball's deepest division - the only one with four teams with winning records - as the AL East has shifted from proceeding as planned to being turned on its head.
The Yankees bombed away, scoring every one of their 10 runs over three games via the home run. But they also kicked the baseball all over the place, committing seven errors, several of them downright laughable. New York's defense was even funny at times on innocent plays. Jasson Dominguez took a terrible angle on an Alejandro Kirk liner to center-left Wednesday night and ended up waving awkwardly as the ball skipped by him. Not an error, but still a blooper.
All of the defensive mistakes allowed the Jays to take the series, and in doing so, win six of their last seven games against the Yankees, in what has become their usual way: patient hitting, good starting pitching, solid defense, and contributions from the whole lineup. If a Yankees bobble epitomized their swoon, no single moment captured Toronto's run better than an at-bat from reserve outfielder Myles Straw on Wednesday. Acquired in the offseason by the Blue Jays amid skepticism after Cleveland demoted him to the minors last season despite his expensive contract, Straw stepped up to the plate in the sixth inning with a runner on third base. (Fittingly, Ernie Clement arrived there after Cody Bellinger lost a fly ball in the lights.) Sporting a modest .309 slugging percentage, Straw promptly ripped a double down the left-field line to give the Jays a lead they wouldn't surrender. He then advanced to third on a fly ball and scored when New York's Ben Rice booted a ball at first base.
The whole sequence must have been exceedingly frustrating for a Yankees fan: A team that struggles to do the little things right being outdone by a team whose entire identity has become doing the little things right.
While Toronto has flipped 12 games on New York in the standings over the last couple of months, the rest of the AL East has also been a roller coaster. The Tampa Bay Rays, once on track to pile up wins with their typical mix of relatively unknown and inexpensive talent, are now on a 7-15 run that's dropped them to fourth in the division.
The Boston Red Sox, meanwhile, were below .500 coming into July and looked to be trade-deadline sellers before a 10-game win streak put them back in the playoff picture. A 2-4 mini-swoon after the All-Star break has left the Sox with some tricky decisions as the trade deadline approaches. Do they become buyers, or was the hot streak a mere mirage?
There's no such uncertainty at the bottom of the division, where the Baltimore Orioles have gone from a 91-win playoff team loaded with young talent to sitting 15.5 games back of the Blue Jays and 1-5 since the All-Star break. Baltimore's steep decline is the mirror image of Toronto's unexpected rise. The question isn't whether the Orioles will be sellers, but how much they'll sell. Will Baltimore part with typical deadline rentals, or is the club willing to move someone once thought to be a foundational piece to get a big haul in return?
As much as Toronto's long hot streak has been the story of the AL East thus far, the division still feels like it'll hinge on whether the Yankees can sort themselves out. Manager Aaron Boone had a rough week, at one point angrily disputing the notion that his players don't care enough and then getting himself tossed from Wednesday's game in a moment that looked like his own frustrations boiling over.
Yankees supporters seem similarly aggrieved. The internet is practically bursting with clips of fans, celebrities, and radio hosts giving performative and exasperated rants every time the New Yorkers do something embarrassing - which, in recent times, has been fairly often.
That mood couldn't be more different in Toronto, where each win brings fresh stories of players supporting one another and embracing whatever role the team asks of them, even though no pitcher or hitter is posting numbers that leap off the page.
The Yankees were expected to win the division, though. The Jays were very much not.
It could all change in a week, of course. In the AL East, it's been that kind of year.
Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.