Blue Jays Home Field Advantage Grows with Best Home Record in Majors
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Traditionally, teams are difficult to be at home. But no team in Major League Baseball is as tough as the Toronto Blue Jays are they are at the Rogers Centre.
After a clean sweep of the San Francisco Giants to resume play post-All-Star break, the Jays improved to a league-best 35-16 at home. Seven of those 16 victories came in May and they have been practically unbeatable since the end of May.
Since June 1 Toronto has been 16-4 at home, which includes a current 10-game winning streak which ties a franchise dating back to 1985. Before the All-Star break, the Blue Jays posted their best homestand in franchise history with a perfect seven-game take down of the New York Yankees (four games) and the Los Angeles Angels (three games).
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At home, the Blue Jays are in the Top 5 in multiple categories in the Majors, including RBI, home runs, hits, OPS, slugging percentage, on-base percentage, along with leading the Majors in batting average.
The Blue Jays will now host the Yankees in Toronto. The last time they faced each other was in that four-game stretch at Rogers Centre where the Blue Jays not only swept the Yankees but swept into the AL East Division lead.
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Toronto now has sole control over the AL East by three games. Back on May 25 the Jays seemed to be looking down a dark hole. They were 25-27 and had just been swept by the Tampa Bay Rays (which included a 13-0 shutout).
Now teams should fear coming to Canada. It is now daunting to have to play at Rogers Centre as even some of the best teams in the league are truly struggling there.
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The Jays will stay where they are comfortable for the Yankees series before traveling to Detroit to take on a struggling Tigers team and then to Maryland to face off with the Baltimore Orioles.
Currently in July they are 12-3 and are in a tight battle for their division. If they start to perform even half as good as they do at home on the road Toronto will be pretty hard to beat come October. And, with a division title comes a bonus for the Blue Jays — a home playoff series.
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Maddy Dickens resides in Loveland, Colorado. She grew up with two older brothers, where their lives revolved around sports. She earned a master's degree in business management from Tarleton State University while simultaneously playing basketball and competing in rodeo at the collegiate level. She successfully parlayed a reserve national championship into a professional rodeo career and now stays involved in upper-level athletics by writing for On SI on several different MLB teams' pages, along with some NCAA sites.