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Instant Reaction: Blue Jays drop second straight to Rangers to fall even further in the wild card race
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Photo credit: © Jerome Miron-Imagn Images
Tristan Morgan
Sep 20, 2026, 07:00 EDTUpdated: Sep 20, 2026, 01:01 EDT
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The Toronto Blue Jays lost 6-2 to the Texas Rangers on Saturday night at Globe Life Field, and for the second straight game, the visitors did plenty of damage to themselves.
With the loss, the Blue Jays’ record sits at 76-79, three games back of the Chicago White Sox for the final American League Wild Card spot. Because the White Sox hold the tiebreaker, the Blue Jays must finish ahead of them outright, which effectively puts them four games back with seven to play. The Jays have lost four of its last five and is 4-8 over its last 12 games, and this may be the final nail in the coffin, as their Fangraphs playoff odds now sit at 4.7 percent.
What’s more concerning is how they’ve been losing. Across the first two games of this series, the Blue Jays have committed four errors and allowed six unearned runs. Three of those errors came on Friday, when Dylan Cease walked a season-high six batters in two and two-thirds innings in a 7-1 loss, with the Rangers drawing 10 walks in that game. Saturday saw the Jays issue two more walks, hit batter, commit a throwing error and throw a wild pitch.
Losing to a team that plays better than you is part of baseball. Losing because you keep handing over extra outs and free bases is a different thing altogether, and the Blue Jays are shooting themselves in the foot at the worst possible time. They spent Saturday night kicking the ball around the field, and the offence was unable to mount a real comeback.
The Rangers struck first thanks to Josh Jung’s opposite-field solo home run in the first inning, then added two more in the second without a single hit. José Soriano walked leadoff hitter Wyatt Langford and hit Nicky Lopez before an errant throw from shortstop Andrés Giménez allowed Langford to score. Lopez came home on a Soriano wild pitch to make it 3-0.
Soriano missed bats as he struck out eight over five innings on 80 pitches, but the traffic around those strikeouts were too much to bear. Entering the game, Soriano had a 10.2 percent walk rate, 27th percentile in MLB. On Monday, he carried a no-hitter into the seventh inning against the Detroit Tigers before allowing four runs. This time, he was hit around for six runs, five of them earned. Since joining Toronto at the trade deadline, Soriano has a 4.79 ERA across nine starts.
The Blue Jays had a real opening when Texas starter Cal Quantrill, who entered with a 2.90 ERA, left one out into the second inning with right lat tightness. The Blue Jays could not capitalize. Jordan Montgomery covered three and two-thirds hitless innings in relief, and they did not record a hit until the sixth.
Alejandro Kirk was the first to get on base via a hit, as he hit an RBI single that cashed in Giménez, making it 3-1 at that point. Kirk finished Saturday 2-for-4 and, since August 1st, has a .882 OPS in what has been a stellar second-half. However, the Rangers answered quickly in the bottom half, scoring three times, one of them on a sacrifice fly that brought Langford home, to stretch their lead to 6-1.
Davis Schneider pinch-hit for Nathan Lukes in the seventh and answered with a solo home run off Robert Garcia to make it 6-2. This was his fourth home run of the season and his first MLB home run since June 16 at Fenway Park, but that was as close as they’d get.
Paul Sewald, Tyler Rogers and Brendan Cellucci pitched well, combining for three innings without surrendering a run, good news for a bullpen taxed by Cease’s short outing Friday and ahead of a couple of bullpen heavy games. Since September 5th, Toronto’s bullpen has posted a 1.64 ERA, second-best in MLB over that stretch, one of the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak situation.
At the plate, the Blue Jays entered the series last in the American League in runs per game at 4.05. Even though the Blue Jays out-hit the Rangers 6-5 and the Rangers went 1-for-11 with runners in scoring position, the Rangers were aided by the Blue Jays’ critical errors defensively and inability to jump on opportunities at the plate. That led to the six runs given up.
With the win, the Rangers improved to 78-77 and now hold the top spot in the American League West thanks to a Houston Astros’ loss. Jung and Langford scored four of the Rangers’ six runs, with Jung’s homer and Langford’s double and two walks driving the offence as the Rangers set themselves up for a sweep with a win on Sunday.
The series finale is Sunday at 2:35 p.m. ET, with Jacob deGrom starting for the Rangers. As of yet, the Blue Jays have not named a starter, but Spencer Arrighetti is expected to pitch the bulk of the innings. 
With effectively four games to make up on the White Sox and only seven left to play, it is hard to find much optimism in a Blue Jays team that has been handing games to opponents on a silver platter in the middle of a playoff race this past week. If there is any hope of October baseball left, the Blue Jays need to win often, and it needs to start on Sunday.
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