A rundown of the Blue Jays ten previous playoff runs

2015: Blue Jays lose ALCS to Kansas City Royals (4-2). Blue Jays win ALDS over Texas Rangers (3-2). 

22 years after Carter’s home run, Jose Bautista gave us the ‘bat flip heard ‘round the world.’ In their first trip to the postseason in two decades, Toronto (93-69) were division champions once again and met a Rangers (88-74) team that had very recently lost back-to-back World Series.

The Blue Jays lost the first two games, before taking the next two on the road. In Game five, the seventh inning became one of the craziest innings of baseball ever played and it was all capped off by Bautista’s three-run home run to put the Jays ahead for good. 

Bautista almost had another moment of that kind of magnitude in the next series against the Royals (95-67). With the Blue Jays down 3-2 in the series, Bautista hit a solo home run in the fourth and then a game-tying two-run home run in the eighth inning, but the Blue Jays gave up a run in the bottom half, trailing 4-3 going into the ninth. The Blue Jays then got runners on the corners with nobody out, but back-to-back strikeouts and a groundout later and the 2015 season was all of a sudden over.

2016: Blue Jays lose ALCS to Cleveland Guardians (4-1). Blue Jays win ALDS over Texas Rangers (3-0). Blue Jays win AL Wild Card Game over Baltimore Orioles 5-2. 

This was in the era where the Wild Card teams were forced to play in a one-game playoff. The Blue Jays and their division rivals the Orioles finished with identical 89-73 records, but Toronto got to host the game that went into the 11th inning with the game tied 2-2.

With runners on first and third and one out, Orioles manager Buck Showalter committed one of the worst managerial errors in postseason history and left a struggling Ubaldo Jiménez in the game to face Edwin Encarnación who had hit 42 home runs in the regular season. Edwin went deep with a walk-off three-run home run and the Blue Jays punched their ticket to the ALDS for a rematch against the Rangers. 

The Rangers got humiliated by the Blue Jays as Toronto won 10-1 in Game One, 5-3 in Game Two and then Toronto walked them off to end the series in Game Three on a play known as the “Donaldson Dash” when Josh Donaldson rounded third on a fielder's choice error in the bottom of the tenth and sprinted home for the series winning run.

Toronto’s offense then disappeared completely against the Guardians in the ALCS. The Guardians took a commanding 3-0 series lead over the Blue Jays by winning 2-0, 2-1, and 4-2. Toronto took Game Four 5-1 to stave off elimination, but fell 3-0 in Game Five.