Get Your First Look At The 2019 Blue Jays Schedule

I’d say it’s time to start looking forward to next year, but we’ve been doing that for months. Since we’ve pretty much all declared this season dead before June even finished, I know today is a special one.

The Blue Jays have released their 2019 schedule.

Even though there are still 35 games left in this season, you can begin to start planning vacations, or at least fantasizing about the baby birds bashing bombs next year.

To start, the Blue Jays begin the year at home against the Detroit Tigers for a four-game set. Something tells me that this will be easier on our hearts as we won’t have to deal with the hype surrounding Giancarlo Stanton and the rest of the New York Yankees this time around.

The next thing on our collective minds is, yes, Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

If you’re new to the sport or just unsure of why this MLB-ready phenom is still riding buses, let me explain: Once you’ve accumulated 6 years of MLB service time, you can become a free agent. What constitutes as a year? Obviously just appearing in a handful of seasons means you’ve started your MLB career in year 20__, but that doesn’t count as a full year when talking about service time. There are 186 days in the 2019 MLB season when factoring in both game days and days off. One year of service time equals 172 or more days on a major league roster. The Blue Jays aren’t the only team that have done this in recent memory (see: Kris Bryant, Ronald Acuna Jr), but what they’re doing is keeping Vlad off the team long enough to get an extra year of him under team control when he’s in his prime.

Looking at the calendar, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. must miss the Blue Jays first 14 days (not games) of the season. That takes us to April 10th, so, judging that I counted the days in the 2019 season correctly*, you should probably book Thursday April 12th off in your calendars to watch the Blue Jays play at Fenway Park.

The Canada Day game in 2019 is, predictably, at home against the Kansas City Royals. In previous years, you could roll your eyes about getting that draw on a holiday, but it’d be nice for the team to beat up on a (hopefully) lesser opponent in the name of the Queen. Or freedom. Or, I don’t know, beavers.

This year’s interleague division is the National League West. The team will play a two-game series at AT&T Park in San Francisco in May, Coors Field in Colorado in late May/Early June, and then, in August, they head to Chavez Ravine to play the Dodgers.

Again, if you’re looking at the schedule trying to plan trips, there’s potential for a bucket list Blue Jays vacation here: the team plays in LA on August 20-22, then they fly to Seattle for another weekend series. Traveling from Canada to California to Washington State sounds like an unforgettable couple of days, and possibly an incredible road trip if you’re reading this from BC or Alberta.

The Blue Jays go to SunTrust Park in early September for two games, and then finish off with 22 straight against the American League East. The good news here is that they play six times against the Orioles in the last month. The bad news is that the other 16 games are against teams they historically haven’t been able to beat that much.

Take a look at the full schedule:

What games are you looking forward to most?