“Exist in the moment”: Stephen Brunt on the Blue Jays’ amazing run

Jordan I don’t know about you, but it’s been a long September. So far this month, on this podcast, we have discussed politics, climate change, the fourth wave of the pandemic, sexual assault on campus, the housing crisis, more politics, hate crimes, truth and reconciliation… actually, we’ve discussed the lack of that. And again, politics. Well, not today.

Blue Jays Clip The Blue Jays have just one hit. Semien goes after the first pitch… high and deep to left. Get up! Get out of here! And gone! Game winner!

Jordan There is one week left in September. The election is over, and the Toronto Blue Jays are one of the best teams in baseball. And more importantly, perhaps than being among the best teams, they are fun. These guys laugh in the dugout. They genuinely like one another. They come from countries around the world, and they have each other’s backs. They were way back in the standings. They didn’t quit. And if you asked them, they knew they’d be here. Oh, and there’s this guy…

Blue Jays Clip Swing and a drive! Get up ball! Get out of here! How about a 3-homer night for Vladdy?!

Jordan So no, today, we don’t care about the balance of power in a minority government. Today we are watching the out of town scoreboard. And whatever happens over the next week, my Lord, is that a pleasant change.

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, and this is the most fun episode of The Big Story we’ve had in at least a month. Stephen Brunt is a columnist, a commentator, a radio host for Sportsnet, one of Canada’s most venerated sports writers and one of our favorite guests. Hello, Mr. Brunt.

Stephen Hey, how are you?

Jordan I’m doing really well. I’m doing so much better now that the election is over and we’re talking about baseball.

Stephen Many of us feel that way, I think.

Jordan So take me back about a month. Would you or anyone have thought that September 24, Canada, all eyes on the Blue Jays versus Twins?

Stephen Well, I knew it was possible because I’ve been a baseball fan all my life. And if you follow baseball and inhabit baseball, you know that there’s all kinds of precedents for teams getting hot at the end or getting cold at the end. There have been great surges to the finish line and there have been epic collapses. So you hope that this was possible because, look, there’s nothing better than a September pennant race. I think you could argue that it’s better than the playoffs.

Jordan Tell me about what the last month has been like covering this team, but also just for anybody associated with it.

Stephen Well, it’s kind of like everything fell into place. One of the measures for how good a team is is run differential. How many more runs have you scored, than you’ve given up, or the flipside. You know, how many more have you given up than you’ve scored. So the Jays had this very healthy, positive run differential in August, when they were still kind of scuffling around a few games over 500. And we’re having a great offensive season, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. having an MVP caliber season. Robbie Ray having a Cy Young caliber season in the rotation. But somehow the pieces didn’t all add up. And then they started winning series after series and winning stretches of games in a row.

And anybody who followed the 2015 season after the the trade deadline, the Jays were 50 and 51 at one point in that season, and they wound up winning the division. And for two months it felt like they couldn’t lose. That’s sort of what September has felt like with this team.

Jordan Was there a moment or a particular win near the beginning of this run that they’ve been on, when you or people watching the team were kind of like, ‘oh, that was a big one. Let’s see what comes now.’

Stephen There was a crazy comeback when against Oakland at the Rogers Center that involved them falling way behind in a game and feeling hopeless and then coming back to tie it with a Grand Slam home run and then falling behind again in the top of the 9th and all hope was lost and then winning on a walk off home run. For anybody who saw it, especially because there were only 15,000 people there, it may feel like 150,000 people were there now because of the way people talked about it. But there are moments when it feels like baseball teams kind of get the wind behind them emotionally and for the fan base, that’s definitely when it kicked in.

I think these guys have known they were good all along. It’s a very confident group. I guess maybe what happens is the sense of destiny kicks in. The idea that that was an incredibly unlikely victory, and so maybe this is meant to happen on some level.

Jordan The last time we talked about the Jays on this show was July. We talked to your colleague, Shi Davidi about… this was just after they’d gotten permission to go home. We talked about everything they’d been through, being Nomads. What’s it been like at the Rogers Center and has that played a role for the team reeling this off?

Stephen As a fan, I haven’t been there working, but I’ve been there as a fan. And I can say that it’s funny with 15000 people, it still can feel like a now kind of novel experience of being in a crowd. None of us have been in a crowd for a couple of years, and suddenly you’re in a crowd. And it’s great, by the way. It’s a fantastic feeling, and it’s fun to lock into a game and to sit with people who are also locked into a game and to have a beer and eat a hot dog and just do baseball. It’s quite glorious.

Jordan It’s been missed.

Stephen Yeah. And I think for the players… what does cheering matter to athletes? Sometimes I wonder. They’re used to people cheering for them or not cheering for them. But I think you got to kind of think of them as human beings, guys with partners, guys with families, living out of hotels for months and months and months at a time. And baseball season is long. Spring training starts in February, and if you don’t make the playoffs, the season ends in the first week of October. And that idea of just living out of a suitcase the whole time.

And you know, George Springer, who they signed in the off season last year, one of the biggest free agent signings in Jays history had never played in Toronto. He played here as a visitor, like with the Houston Astros, but never played here as a Blue Jay. So I think that idea of just settling in, coming home, being in their own club house, having their own training facility, being able to have their families here, being able to have their partners here and say, ‘no, we’re not going to be pulling up stakes in two weeks.’ I think you would settle into your work life a whole lot better if that were the case.

Jordan For people who haven’t been following this team really closely, or maybe people who have been busy covering elections or whatever else. Who is this team? What kind of personality do they have?

Stephen At its core, it’s a young team, and there’s some guys on this team who came up through the minor leagues together, through the Jay’s system together, who have played with each other and have had success at lower levels. And so there’s a fair bit of natural camaraderie among that young core. If you watch them in the dugout, they’re very animated. There’s lots of smiles. As I alluded to, they’re very confident, to the degree that there’s a bit of swag among some of them. But it comes off as very good natured. In a lot of ways, I think they reflect the personality of their manager, Charlie Montoyo, who is a very upbeat guy, always has a smile on his face.

There are people out there who say, ‘well, yeah, it’s great to be happy but it doesn’t matter if you don’t win. It’s not about happy, it’s about winning.’ But again, if you’re spending all those weeks and months together, guys can grind on each other in baseball club houses. I’ve been around winning teams that have been pretty miserable, but this looks like a very happy—serious about baseball—but a happy group.

Jordan How does this front office approach building a team when you’re starting with, as you mentioned, a core of guys who’ve come up in house. How do you manage adding the right pieces without upsetting the apple cart?

Stephen It’s not science, I don’t think, I think it’s intuitive. But the 2015-2016 playoff team, it was an old team, so you needed to go into a rebuild, and they held on for one more year to try and win in 2017, which proved to be a mistake. And then they started moving those veteran players along. But the idea was to allow your young players to kind of be the leaders on the team, to allow the team to grow with them. But to give them the opportunity to go into the clubhouse and be the guys.

Sometimes there’s no oxygen for young players, right? They have to just kind of keep to themselves and speak when spoken to. But one of the guiding philosophies here was allow the young guys to have the space to be the leaders on your team and then build around them. As I said, with baseball, it’s the day to day thing. It can be really grating sometimes to have the wrong personalities together for the 3 hours before the 3 hour game over 162 games, it’s a lot of time. I think they’ve been careful about who they brought in, but they’ve also brought in a ton of talent. They spent a lot of money.

Jordan So who’s been really key to this run right now? And what do you want to see from them over the next week of the season? Aside from just get out here and win the damn thing?

Stephen Well, boy, there’s a lot of names, right? Vladdy Guerrero Jr. is 22 and he’s having one of the greatest offensive seasons in Blue Jays history and one of the greatest seasons in baseball history for anybody his age. Bo Bichette having a great breakthrough season and playing very well at short stop. Teoscar Hernandez was an All Star. Robbie Ray anchoring a rotation that has become a strength of the team, especially late in the season. Jordan Romano, hometown kid, the closer in the bullpen who has been all but lights out. Marcus Semien, who is here on a one year deal, came over from Oakland, and again, if Vladdy wasn’t the MVP and Shohei Ohtani wasn’t the MVP, we’d be talking about him as the MVP.

So they score a lot of runs. Their starting pitching has been tremendous. An adequate bullpen, probably not a strength, but again, on paper, if they make it to the post season, I wouldn’t put any limits on it. I think they could beat just about anybody.

Jordan Talk to me about that, if they make it to the post season. As we are speaking, it’s Red Sox and Blue Jays and Yankees. All right, tight together. How crazy is it going to be over this next week?

Stephen Well, crazy in a great way because again, pennant race. This is what you live for If you’re a baseball fan. I’ve said this a billion times in the last couple of weeks. But people who are kind of suffering through it or worrying about how disappointing will it be if they don’t get in. Live, exist in the moment. Enjoy it. If you like baseball, you want to be looking at the scoreboard and seeing what’s happening in those other games and living and dying with every out. So it shouldn’t be torture. It should be something you relish.

But yeah, right now it looks like there are three teams competing for two wildcard spots. There are two other teams, Oakland and Seattle, who are still technically in it. But that’s less likely. The one that finishes highest would host a one game ‘win and you go on, lose and you’re out’ playoff, which is a bit daunting. The Yankees have the toughest schedule from here on in, the Red Sox, the lightest, the Jays somewhere in between. The Jays do play the Yankees again in one series. They don’t play Boston again, but Boston and New York play each other. So if you keep winning series, if you win two out of every three, if you deal with the Yankees in that series, you’re going to get in and you might have to go to Boston for that one game or you might have to play it here.

But there are all kinds of other possibilities, with other teams folding up or the Jays having a tough two weeks. It’s possible. The games against Minnesota or Baltimore or lesser teams, you still have to play the games, you still have to win them. But right now, honestly, you have to like their chances. You have to like the chances of getting in that wild card game, and then that’s a bit of a crap shoot. But if you get through that, well, then you’re on to the division series, probably against Tampa, maybe against Houston. And that’s when things would really get interesting.

Jordan You talked about him a bit already, but I was not going to let you go without asking you more about Vlad Guerrero Jr. This is a kid that the Jays signed when he was a really young teenager. He’s still so super young. You’ve covered this game for a long time. Tell me about what you think of this kid and how far he’s come.

Stephen Well, I saw him in the minor leagues before he came to Toronto. Obviously, there was a lot of hype around him from the day he was signed as a 16 year old, in part because his father was a great ball player, Vladdy senior. But the superlatives that were hurled at him in terms of him as a prospect were off the charts and the expectations of the charts. And then he got here. He got to the major leagues as a 19 year old, and he didn’t overwhelm at first, although you could see the potential.

And then last year, the shortened season because of the pandemic, they went to spring training, he looked really good. And then spring training shut down in March. I think he assumed, like a lot of people that as things went on, it didn’t look like there was going to be a season. And then finally, there was a season, obviously, that started in the summer, a 60 game season and he showed up out of shape. And he admitted it afterwards. But over the course of those, he played every one of the 60 games. Jays made the post season, the shortened post season and lost to Tampa. But they did get there. And he kind of played himself into shape and went away saying that’s not going to happen again. You know, physically, he had been transformed.

And he has had, I would argue right now, the greatest offensive season in Jays history. Period. He has had, as I said, one of the greatest offensive seasons in history for someone his age. The defensive part of his game was thought to be a liability. He’s actually turned himself into a very good first baseman. And the sky is the limit. We’re just scratching the surface of a guy who is going to come close to hitting 50 home runs and he’s 22. As long as he stays healthy, he might not peak for another ten years.

Jordan Well, this is the last thing I want to ask you then, you know, Vladdy is incredibly young. Bo Bichette’s young. They have a farm system that seems to have some talent in it. Is this possibly the worst team that the Jays will field for the next few years?

Stephen Look, there’s so many unpredictable things in sport. Players get hurt. There will be churn in the roster. You’ll lose some guys through free agency. They’ll trade some guys. That’s just the nature of professional sports. So you need change and evolution, you don’t just keep the band together in the same way. When Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins took over this team, what they said over and over again was it’s not about building for one shot at a World Series. It’s about trying to build a team that is going to be a playoff contender year after year after year. And then one of those years, you’re going to win it or two of those years are going to win it.

Make it sustainable. And the only way you do that is by developing your own players and drafting well and international signings. So you have to go build a foundation then use the kind of financial might that you have to build on that. And that’s what they’ve done. So nothing’s guaranteed. But there’s every reason to be optimistic. And in the meantime, as I say, rather than thinking about 2022 or 2023 or 2025, or ‘who has to get paid?’ or ‘how are they gonna fit these guys in?’ Right now is awesome. Like, right now is awesome. So if you’ve learned anything in the last year and a half, enjoy the moments, the good moments when you got them. This is a really good moment.

Jordan This is the first time in I think three weeks that I’ve ended one of these interviews on an optimistic tone. Thank you so much for that, Stephen.

Stephen My pleasure.

Jordan Stephen Brunt of Sportsnet .

That was the Big Story, for more from us, including all the depressing ones we just did. Head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. You can also, if you scroll back in there, find the episode we did in July when the Blue Jays came home. You can also talk to us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. And you can email us to tell us you want more depressing episodes. Send it to thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!]. You can find us in your favorite podcast player. You can ask for us on your favorite smart speaker, and you can tell your favorite friend that there’s a great show out there they should be listening to.

Stefanie Phillips is the lead producer of The Big Story. Ryan Clarke and Joseph Fish are our associate producers.

I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. I’m in a better mood now than I was most of the week. We’ll talk Monday. Back to top of page