Blue Jays 1 of 2 MLB teams with 20-year playoff drought
Toronto has failed to make playoffs since they last won the World Series in 1993
Only two Major League Baseball teams have failed to make the playoffs since the start of the 1994 strike-shortened season: the Toronto Blue Jays and the Kansas City Royals.
It used to be a list of three teams, until the Pittsburgh Pirates clinched their first playoff berth in more than two decades last night.
Put another way, 28 baseball teams have found a way to make the playoffs at least once since the Jays last won the World Series in 1993.
It's a great story in Pittsburgh at the moment, with the team seeing some long-awaited success after posting 20 consecutive seasons of sub-.500 baseball.
But that makes the failure in Toronto all the more apparent, considering that the Blue Jays had eight winning seasons over the same time period. If you include the .500 finish in 2011, the Jays have had nine seasons in which they broke even or better.
The Royals have only had three seasons where they won more than half their games: 1994, in which the season ended without playoffs because of the strike, as well as 2003 and 2013. Kansas City hasn't made the playoffs since 1985, the year they won the World Series.
There's still more bad news for the Blue Jays.
The Royals still have an outside shot at clinching a wildcard spot this year, with MLB.com putting their odds at doing so at 1.5 per cent.
Still, if the Royals manage to pull off the seemingly impossible feat of landing a wildcard spot, Toronto will become the only team in the majors not to have played meaningful October baseball since Kim Campbell was the prime minister.
The Blue Jays have six games left to play in the regular season and the team sits at the bottom of the American League's East Division.
Toronto had started the season with sky-high expectations, following an off-season in which the team acquired starting pitchers R.A. Dickey, Josh Johnson and Mark Buehrle, as well as shortstop Jose Reyes and outfielder Melky Cabrera.
But aside from a 11-game winning streak in June, the Blue Jays never managed to put together the type of season they and their fans were hoping for.