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And also, the Yankees are 30 games above .500 and 20 games ahead of the Blue Jays.

Photo by Tom Szczerbowski / Getty Images

The Jays, as has been beaten to death by this point, have problems at the major-league level. But for all that needs to happen for them to return to a competitive team, whether it comes from bounce-back seasons from veterans, or an infusion of youth or some combination of the two, there remains the daunting reality of the Yankees and the Red Sox. Those two teams are miles better than the Jays, they have young talent to spare and, perhaps most significantly, they operate with a fearlessness that the Blue Jays’ front office simply does not.

Whatever one thinks of the job done by Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins, who tried to keep an old team reasonably competitive and have seen that blow up in their faces two years running, it has been an undeniably cautious effort. They picked up veterans on short-term deals and avoided the big financial commitments that might have impaired an eventual rebuild. If they were going to make a mistake, it wasn’t going to be a punishingly costly one.

In Boston and New York, they do not worry about such things.

In May, the Red Sox released Hanley Ramirez, eating the remainder of his US$22-million salary this season. That was less than a year after they dumped Pablo Sandoval, who they are effectively paying US$41 million to play for the San Francisco Giants. The Yankees, meanwhile, paid Alex Rodriguez US$21 million in each of 2016 and 2017 even though he retired early in the 2016 season. When he was finally off the books, they took that money and traded for Stanton and the US$295-million owed on his contract that everyone assumed was untradeable. They are also paying Jacoby Ellsbury US$21 million to not play for them this season, but that didn’t stop the Yankees from trading for Britton and J.A. Happ at the deadline.