Toronto Blue Jays playoff history, by the numbers

The Jays have made the playoffs nine times in their history. Here’s how they’ve fared once there.

One quick thing, right off the *ahem* bat: Winning in baseball is hard. For decades, only four teams even made the MLB playoffs in any given season. And even now that the post-season has expanded to include 12 teams, well, there’s still the New York Yankees to contend with.

It was in that ecosystem that the Toronto Blue Jays made a triumphant return to the MLB post-season after going 92-70 in the 2022 regular season. It marked just the fourth time the Jays participated in the playoffs since they last won the World Series in 1993.

So, in other words, a lot to celebrate if you’re a Jays fan — or even if you just like the buzz of a city with a major pro team in the playoffs.

Alas, the Blue Jays bowed out of their wild-card series with the Seattle Mariners after just two games, bringing an unceremonious end to the campaign.

Still, to mark the occasion, we took a deep dive into the Stathead database. We then pulled a bunch of numbers on Blue Jays playoff history, and updated after the series. Read on for the breakdown.

2
World Series won

Let’s lead with this — kind of a biggie.

The Blue Jays won the 1992 World Series in six games over the Atlanta Braves, and came back the following year to do it again — this time it was in six games over the Philadelphia Phillies.

Catcher Pat Borders won the World Series MVP award in 1992 with a .450 batting average, and Paul Milton won it the following year — even managing to top Borders with a .500 average. Manager Cito Gaston was at the helm of both teams.

Also, remember when we said winning in baseball is hard? Repeating is even harder. In the nearly three decades since the 1993 series, only one MLB team has managed to repeat — the Yankees.

9
Post-seasons made

The two World Series–winning seasons are the headline, but hardly the sum total of the Blue Jays post-season experience. Including 2022, they’ve made nine appearances in 45 seasons (note: there was no post-season in 1994 due to a players’ strike).

The longest playoff-less gaps in franchise history were 20 years between 1993 and 2015 (again, no post-season in 1994), and eight years at the outset of the franchise between 1977 and 1985.

So, long story short: Always best to savour a playoff appearance, because you never really know when the next one’s coming around.

65
Post-season games played

In the Blue Jays’ first playoff series in 1985, they bowed out to the eventual World Series champion Kansas City Royals in seven games. The team played 34 more games by the end of the 1993 World Series.

In the years since, they’ve added 24 more, thanks largely to American League Championship Series runs in 2015 and 2016.

It’s difficult to compare across leagues due to differing playoff formats — number of games per match-up, for example — but it’s still interesting to see how the Jays stack up in this regard to other major pro sports teams in the city:

(Note: Only results from teams’ current leagues have been included here, so nothing for the Argos prior to the start of the CFL, and no Canadian Championship or CONCACAF Champions League for TFC.)

As you can see in the chart above, the relative difficulty of life in MLB is on full display. Only TFC have made fewer post-season appearances than the Jays, and they started playing three full decades later. The Raptors, meanwhile, started almost two decades after the Jays, and have already played almost twice as many post-season games.

.477
All-time win percentage

Right around .500, right around the middle of the pack in MLB history.

This puts them 17th on the list of active teams, well behind the league-best .632 win percentage put up in 38 all-time playoff games by the Miami Marlins (née Florida Marlins).

(Okay, one more Yankees mention: Guess where they are on the list? Second place, with a .582 win percentage in 414 games, as of the start of the 2022 post-season. Now we will never speak of them again.)

15
Most runs in a single game

In the 1993 World Series, the Blue Jays scored 15 runs in Game 4 in Philadelphia — and needed every one of them. Down five runs at the end of the fifth and seventh, the Jays scored six runs in the eighth to edge the Phillies 15–14.

Fun additional fact: That’s the most combined runs in a World Series game in history.

6
Most playoff home runs hit by a Blue Jay

This record is shared — poetically, really — by Joe Carter and Jose Bautista. The former hit one of the most famous home runs in World Series history, the walk-off dinger to close Game 6 in 1993 that officially cemented the Jays as repeat champs:

The latter of the two players mentioned above hit the other most famous playoff homer in Blue Jays history, an iconic, bombastic shot in a contentious Game 5 of the ALDS against the Texas Rangers — that came with an equally iconic, bombastic bat flip:

Only one player on the current Jays roster has hit a home run for the team — catcher Danny Jansen, who hit two in the 2020 playoffs.

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