Around a month ago, the Blue Jays believed that something was different about them compared to the incredibly disappointing 2024 season. They insisted it was a feeling they had about this team that set them apart. It was a vague intuition they couldn’t quite explain in words.
When reliever Eric Lauer spoke to The Athletic’s Mitch Bannon on May 17, after Toronto’s 2-1 walk-off win against the Detroit Tigers, he said this is the team that scratches and claws until it wins. This is also when infielder Ernie Clement said that no deficit weighed heavily on the team, unlike last year.
It was all easy to attribute a sweet and hard-fought walk-off win to “mojo” and “blue collar mentality,” especially earning a win against one of the better teams in the league. Except that feeling didn’t carry on much further when the Tigers took the series from the Jays shortly after. Funny enough, Toronto patched that up by sweeping the San Diego Padres. It would be short-lived, as they proceeded to get swept by the Tampa Bay Rays down in Florida, which undid some of the team’s momentum. 
The Blue Jays’ road trip to Arlington wasn’t particularly convincing either, as they struggled to generate anything offensively most of the series despite winning two games out of three. The even more confounding part was Toronto’s merciless pummeling of the Athletics. This wasn’t a team that was used to punishing weaker teams ruthlessly, but they had somehow found ways to do exactly that in that miraculously messy four-game series. 
That magic was then sapped out when the Philadelphia Phillies flexed their offence for the first game of the three-game series. Just when Toronto seemed to be trending in the wrong direction, they clawed back and beat the Phillies the next two games before they hopped on a long road trip. Putting all of this together, one thing became clear — Toronto was winning more games, no matter how confusing the mechanisms and details of those wins were. 
Even with all the optimism, Toronto’s nine away games in June weren’t going to be a walk in the park. In particular, the Minnesota Twins themselves were very much riding the wave of momentum of their own after recently experiencing an improbable 13-game win streak. Eking out some type of positivity from a tough series in Minnesota was imperative for the Blue Jays if they intended to emerge as a worthy contender.
Getting an upper hand against the Twins was a tall task. Previously, Minnesota prevailed in the infamous 2023 AL Wild Card series when Toronto couldn’t muster up any meaningful hits while letting the Twins pounce on its pitching. This series in Target Field was very much a chance for the Blue Jays’ redemption and to continue to pad their record.
Of course, Minnesota had no intentions of making that quest easy for Toronto. In each game on June 6th and June 7th, the Twins came roaring back to tie up or take the lead away from the Blue Jays.  The past iterations of the Canadian team would have surrendered to the Twins’ supremacy without much rebellion.
But this time, something about these Blue Jays was different. Even if they fell behind or ceded the lead to the Twins, it was never the end for them.
It was Addison Barger, Bo Bichette, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Tyler Heineman, and George Springer all contributing to unlikely rallies, playing hero in their own ways. It was Kevin Gausman, Mason Fluharty, Chad Green, Jeff Hoffman, Eric Lauer, and Brendon Little making the pitch they needed to get out of risky situations. That led to the Blue Jays already having 19 comeback wins, compared to last year, when they had only 25 comeback wins for the entire season. Two of these comeback wins were the first two games of the series.
Although Toronto attempted to sweep the Twins on Sunday afternoon, the team’s efforts fell short when Bowden Francis struggled out of the gate and the offence never quite clicked enough to prevent or score enough runs. The Blue Jays handed over the last game of the series in Minneapolis with the score of 6-3, but the fact of the matter was that they still secured their fourth straight series win. As of June 8th, the team is tied with the Minnesota Twins and the Tampa Bay Rays with a 35-30 record and is still firmly at the top of the AL Wild Card race. 
There are still 90-something games left, and more trials will be inevitable in such a long season. The Blue Jays will win some and lose some, as most teams around the league do. They will now head to Busch Stadium to face the unexpectedly competitive St. Louis Cardinals for a three-game series. Then they will head to Citizens Bank Park to face the Phillies once more this month. 
The question was never whether they could win all 162 games — it was always about whether they had what it takes to overcome the trying times. If the “blue-collar mentality” is anything real for these Blue Jays, they will certainly find ways to scratch and claw until they win. Whether their grit is ethereal or not, only time will tell.
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