For any fan who’s followed the Toronto Blue Jays for a long time, they know just how daunting the American League East can be.
The Blue Jays have won the division just six times since 1977, including when it was a seven-team division from 1977 to 1993. The five-team group has remained unchanged since 1998, when the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (now just Rays) joined the league as an expansion team.
Since the current division alignment went into effect, 13 AL East teams have made the World Series (New York Yankees seven times, Boston Red Sox four times, and Tampa Bay twice). That’s 48 per cent of all possible World Series berths, with the other two American League Divisions making up the remaining 52 per cent.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred was on an ESPN broadcast on Sunday Night Baseball this past weekend, and explored the possibility of expansion teams, which could also lead to a major reimagining of what the MLB’s divisional structure could look like.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred says expansion could spark major changes:
• Geographic realignment to ease travel
• A more appealing postseason format for partners like ESPN
• New opportunities in untapped markets
— Front Office Sports (@FOS) August 18, 2025
“It provides us with an opportunity to geographically realign, I think we can save a lot of wear and tear on our players in terms of travel,” Manfred said. “I think the owners realize that there is demand for Major League Baseball in a lot of great cities, and we have an opportunity to do something good around that expansion process.”
What would a new division look like for the Blue Jays?
While the current division setup does have historical precedent, it’s not nearly the one that would minimize the travel schedule for Toronto.
The Cleveland Guardians, Detroit Tigers, and Pittsburgh Pirates are the three closest teams to Toronto, as pointed out on Sport Map World via Blue Jays Nation’s Tyson Shushkewich.Â
Toronto previously played with Detroit and Cleveland in previous seven-team iterations of the AL East prior to 1998, while also having the Milwaukee Brewers in there from 1977 to 1993.
But Toronto has the luxury of more than half of the MLB being less than a three-hour flight apart, with much of the sport being concentrated in the Northeastern United States.
sportleaguemaps.com
Currently, MLB teams play 13 games against each of their four division rivals, for a total of 26 home and away divisional matchups each. Just about any reasonable realignment wouldn’t drastically affect Toronto’s schedule either way, but it might chop down on longer trips each year to Tampa Bay to take on the Rays.
For the MLB, maintaining rivalries is a tricky balance when it comes to figuring out how best to manage the future league setup. For example, does it make sense to put both the Chicago and New York teams in the same division purely for proximity’s sake, and mess up over a century of the two teams being in opposite leagues?
While we don’t have any answers to what the final realignment will look like, Manfred’s comments on Sunday night sure have us thinking.