One Club, One Season

How a team built on defence, discipline and belief ended three decades of waiting and gave Toronto its October baseball back.

Zain Hirani, January 2026

October baseball. That is the dream.

For every team across Major League Baseball, the goal is simple: still be playing when the calendar turns. For a handful of giants, teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers or the New York Yankees, October is not just an ambition but an expectation, reinforced by budgets, history and star power. For most teams, though, October baseball represents something more fragile. Hope. Relevance. Proof that six grinding months have led somewhere meaningful.

For the uninitiated, October baseball means the postseason. After a 162-game regular season that stretches from spring into autumn, the best teams advance into knockout rounds to determine league champions, with the two survivors meeting in the curiously named World Series. Those 162 games matter. Teams play almost every day, travel constantly, and ask players to perform for around 15 hours a week under competitive pressure. Half that time is spent on the road. The physical and mental load is relentless.

For the Toronto Blue Jays, October baseball had long felt like a memory rather than a destination.

After winning back-to-back World Series titles in 1992 and 1993 with one of the most feared lineups the sport has seen, the franchise drifted. From 1994 to 2014, the Blue Jays failed to reach the postseason once. Twenty-one years passed without meaningful October games. Generations of fans grew up knowing the team as an afterthought rather than a contender.

Hope briefly returned in 2015 and 2016, only to fade again into another cycle of rebuilds, hype and unmet expectations.

So when I visited family in Toronto in July 2025, with the Blue Jays sitting atop their division, the mood felt unfamiliar. The optimism was there, but cautious. Years of disappointment had taught the city not to celebrate too early. Still, something was happening. Across 27 games that month, the Jays won 19 times and set a franchise record with 11 straight home victories at the Rogers Centre. By the time I left in August, the lid had blown off. Fans arrived at the Rogers Centre with brooms, expecting clean sweeps. October baseball no longer felt like wishful thinking. It felt earned.

Baseball is a sport obsessed with data, as Moneyball famously illustrated. For a newcomer with a love of numbers, this was irresistible. I spent evenings glued to the sofa with my cousin, firing off questions. Back in London, I watched games at unreasonable hours, messaging him on WhatsApp for explanations. I became oddly fixated on players like Davis Schneider, moustache and all, Daulton Varsho for a staggering blind catch at the outfield wall, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., whose name alone demanded explanation. This was not a roster packed with superstars like Shohei Ohtani or Aaron Judge. It was something else.

Defence: the backbone of the season

Together, under manager John Schneider, the Blue Jays built the strongest defence in baseball. They starved opposing teams of oxygen. Over the season, they led the league in runs saved and posted a fielding percentage of 98.5 percent, meaning errors were few and far between. Players like Ernie Clement consistently erased scoring chances, while outfielders turned potential hits into routine outs.

This defensive identity was not accidental. It had been built patiently over several seasons through smart recruitment and clear priorities. Rather than chasing flash, the Blue Jays invested in “glove-first” players such as Miles Straw and Andrés Giménez to support defensive anchors like Alejandro Kirk and Clement. Positional flexibility mattered too. Players regularly covered multiple roles, allowing injuries and rest days without weakening the system.

What stood out was not just athleticism, but instinct. Split-second decisions, seamless communication, and an almost telepathic understanding between players became routine. Highlight-reel catches were memorable, but the real value lay in how rarely mistakes crept in.

I thought offence was all about home runs

There are few sights in sport as spectacular as a home run. A batter has roughly 400 milliseconds from release to contact. About the length of a blink. In that time, they must identify the pitch, decide whether to swing, and execute a precise movement with a rounded bat against a ball travelling close to 100 miles per hour. When it works, it is electric.

The Blue Jays hit home runs, but that was never the plan.

Their offensive approach could best be described as control over chaos. Rather than chasing power, they focused on reducing volatility. Strikeouts were treated as a cost, not an inevitability. With runners on base, swings shortened. Walks were taken. Outs were used strategically to move runners forward. It was collective, not individual.

This was an offence that accepted its limits. Without elite power threats at every position, Toronto leaned into what it could control: consistent contact, base-to-base progress, sacrifice flies, and forcing defences to make plays again and again. It felt almost unfashionable in a league obsessed with launch angles and home run totals.

But it worked. The Blue Jays rarely beat themselves.

Nine innings of relentless control

A starting pitcher will usually throw 80 to 90 pitches before handing over to the bullpen. Each pitch travels at close to 100 miles per hour towards a strike zone barely wider than a dinner plate. Toronto’s pitching staff this season embodied one idea: relentless control.

They were not overpowering or theatrical. They focused on location, sequencing and trust. Pitchers invited contact because the defence behind them was ready. Soft ground balls, high fly balls to deep parts of the park, and a refusal to give away free baserunners slowly suffocated opponents.

Just as important was emotional steadiness. Bad innings were absorbed rather than multiplied. Walks did not spiral. Mistakes did not cascade. In tight games, the team improved rather than tightened.

This was pitching built for October. Not to dominate highlights, but to survive pressure.

Why this season mattered

The Blue Jays did not win because they were perfect. They won because they were coherent.

After decades of false starts and broken promises, this team understood exactly who it was. Defence first. Discipline over drama. Trust over ego. Across 162 games, that clarity accumulated quietly until it became impossible to ignore.

For Toronto, the 2025 season was not just about reaching October again. It was about reclaiming belief. About proving that success does not always arrive in explosions, but sometimes through patience, alignment and shared purpose.

Baseball history is full of dynasties and dominant champions. But it also remembers the seasons that reconnect a city to its team. Years that restore belief rather than rewrite record books. This team may have fallen to the formidable Los Angeles Dodgers in the eleventh inning of Game 7 in the World Series, but in doing so they captured hearts and reignited expectation across Toronto and far beyond.

For the Toronto Blue Jays, 2025 was one of those seasons.