Hey, everybody.

Welcome to RotaWire fantasy sports today.

Jeff, I'm not pretty fancy sports today.

Fantasy baseball podcast.

Woo, off to a flying start today.

Jeff Erickson and Fred Zinke here may be doing a little too much media.

Who knows?

But Fred, your Toronto Blue Jays are on fire.

They are, you know, everybody in the ALEs is here in footsteps.

The Red Sox are kind of imploding at the same time.

I saw a really cool staff from Mike Petriello,

it was talking about during this Jay streak about how few high leverage

innings the relievers have had to pitch lately.

And they've refurbished their bullpen a little bit,

but it helps a bullpen that doesn't get taxed too hard, too. For sure. And that'll be the big test is when they get into some close games. I mean, they had some close games with the Red Sox on the weekend. But, yeah, as they get into close games, especially a stretch where maybe they have like four in a row and they have to really dip in.

They can't just use Romano every time.

It will be, you know, how do they hold up from that? But it's been really exciting. Sundays win, come back, went over the Red Sox, probably my favorite Blue Jays game in the past couple of years. Yeah. The Springer Homer. That one was great. I think they were down seven, too. I followed that one, you know, all the way for four plus hours.

So that was really good.

I think everybody all season has been looking at the Blue Jays and their lineup and they're

starting pitching, which has been pretty good. And they're run differential, which is really high,

and thinking like this is a playoff team. When you just look at them on paper and you look at that run differential, you think this is a playoff team. So to see them finally playing like it and they have to make up some ground still, but not that much to get to a wild card. I think it's down to three games to get to either wildcard spot now, like the A's or the Red Sox. And that's very manageable with what's left in the season. So they head out west now, double header today. The West Coast is not always kind to the Blue Jays I find over the years. And so we'll see how it goes. They're not facing a lot of the West Coast giants or anything. Like the best team, not the Giants, but the best teams out there. These are games they should be able to win. They should be able to win a series against the Angels, win a series against the Mariners. So hopefully they traveled well. And we'll see how they do today. And the Mariners series, I mean, that's, yeah, they get a chance to kind of eliminate one of the wild card opponents, if you will. They're kind of fading back a little bit anyways, but take care of business here. Now, I always remember the Toronto Seattle series always used to be heavily attended by Jays fans for, you know, those people dropping down from B.C. and Alberta and things like that. Alberta is not that close, but you know what I'm saying. From the western part of Canada, I guess it's mostly B.C. But, you know, I do remember every time I used to watch it now, I don't know if they can do that now. What, you know, it'll be travel limit. You know, I know the travel, you know, is a little bit easier now than it used to be, but still. There will be, yeah, very few, I'd say very few J's fans at those games because they're still, I think we haven't even got to the point where if you're fully vaccinated, you can come back in the country and not quarantine. I think they self-quarantine for some amount of time across the border. So I would say the, yeah, the Jays won't get that away, but home field bump when they're in Seattle. But see, I mean, Seattle's not on my radar as a team the Blue Jays have to get ahead of.

I've always maintained that if the Blue Jays finished behind Seattle, like they're going to be behind a bunch of other teams. Right. Seattle won't be the wild card team. So I've got, you know, the A's, Red Sox, and Yankees, they've got to get in front of two of them to get that wild card spot at least.

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