Can the Blue Jays go all the way this year?

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Baseball is back.

I mean that literally — the 2026 Major League Baseball season began last night with the Yankees beating the Giants 7-0 in San Francisco, while 22 other teams open today — and figuratively as the sport feels reinvigorated right now on both a global and local level.

The ascent began three years ago with the (at the time controversial) decision to introduce a pitch clock, ban the infield shift and introduce other rule changes designed to improve the flow and quality of the game in response to two decades of increasingly joyless analytics-based innovations. Despite warnings from so-called purists who deemed these moves too radical, they've worked beautifully, restoring baseball to something that better resembles the game people fell in love with.

More recently, the sixth edition of the World Baseball Classic was an absolute blast, blending the sport's many distinct cultures — Northern American, Caribbean, Asian, and this time even Italian — into a delicious stew of raucous crowds, high-quality baseball and plenty of drama, culminating with Venezuela's stunning win over the United States in last week's championship final. And of course it didn't hurt that Canada qualified for the playoffs for the first time ever.

But the biggest reason for baseball's resurgence in this country is the sudden rise of the Toronto Blue Jays.

After eight years without a single playoff victory, the Jays soared from worst to first in the American League East last season, capturing their first division title in a decade. That set the stage for a magical post-season run that saw them