Toronto's wild-card math is getting tighter by the day, and Kansas City just showed it can still make life difficult. The Blue Jays and Royals meet again on Saturday, September 5, in Kansas City, with very different stakes riding on it for each club.
Max Scherzer (2-7, 6.16 ERA) gets the ball for Toronto on Saturday, and his last time out was nothing like that ugly ERA suggests — 7 shutout innings with 10 strikeouts against Seattle on August 30. Kansas City hasn't named its starter for this one yet. Toronto's also gotten a small piece of encouraging pitching news: Jameson Taillon, working back from forearm tightness, has looked good enough in his rehab outings that a return before the season ends is plausible, even without a firm target date locked in.
Toronto's already thin pitching staff picked up a new problem behind the plate this week — catcher Danny Jansen fractured his right middle finger on a foul ball, had surgery, and is done for the rest of the regular season, pushing Tyler Heineman up from Buffalo to share time with Alejandro Kirk. Kansas City's bullpen news isn't any better: closer Carlos Estevez is out for the year after shoulder surgery, another subtraction from a relief corps that was already running thin behind him.
The two clubs are playing very different Septembers. Toronto is still mathematically alive in a crowded AL wild-card field and treating every game like it matters. Kansas City is well outside the picture and using these final weeks to look at what it has for next year. That gap in urgency is worth watching as the weekend plays out.
Before Saturday, Toronto still has two games at Cleveland and Kansas City has two against Miami — plus another meeting between these two on September 4 that will shuffle the last-five picture before this game even starts. What's already final: the Blue Jays swept Seattle Mariners, 3-0, capping the set with a 7-0 shutout, but have since lost their last game. The Royals, meanwhile, took 2 of 3 from Cleveland Guardians before dropping their last two.
Toronto opened September a handful of games behind the final AL wild-card spot, in a crowd that also includes New York, Boston, Cleveland, Baltimore and Texas — which is why every series in Kansas City matters more to the Blue Jays than the standings alone suggest. The Royals aren't chasing anything but reps and evaluation time right now, which makes Saturday a measuring-stick game for one team and an audition for the other.
