They were among baseball’s best teams last year. Now they could miss the playoffs.

The Seattle Mariners and the Tampa Bay Rays were World Series contenders last season but are struggling mightily just to reach the postseason.

The Toronto Blue Jays were two outs away from winning the World Series last season. Nine months later, they might not even make the playoffs.

“We got to start winning,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said in July as his team fell under .500. “That’s just the bottom line.”

That regression would seem to have opened an opportunity for the Seattle Mariners, who lost to Toronto in last year’s American League Championship Series ... if the Mariners weren’t similarly having trouble following up their own breakthrough 2025 season.

“Ultimately, we’re just playing very, very, very bad baseball in every facet of the game,” Mariners star Cal Raleigh told reporters this month.

That isn’t how either franchise envisioned this season going when they began the spring with enormous expectations and anticipation for how both might follow up each team’s best season in a generation. Last season, the Jays’ 94 wins tied for the American League’s best record with the New York Yankees, while Seattle had 90 wins. Now, as the teams meet Friday for a three-game series, both are under .500 and on the bubble of grabbing the final wild-card spot with a month to go in the regular season.