TORONTO — As the Yankees battle the Blue Jays for the top spot in the AL East, they got some good news Monday, as all of their players made the trip north to Canada — something that wasn’t seen as a given when the season began, given their lack of fully vaccinated players.
But as Aaron Boone said he expected last week, the Yankees were able to bring their entire active roster, which is something other teams — including the Red Sox — haven’t been able to do.
“This is obviously what I had hoped for and we’re fortunate to be in a position that we’re all able to be here,’’ Boone said before the series opener against Toronto at Rogers Centre.
Boone hinted during spring training he might talk to certain players about their vaccination status before they had to cross the border to Canada.
“It’ll be interesting, to say the least, how that situation unfolds,” Boone said in March. “So we’ll be monitoring that situation closely and see how that plays out. … But yeah, it’s a concern.”
It’s an issue the Yankees and other teams didn’t have to deal with last season due to a national interest exemption for professional and amateur athletes that allowed unvaccinated players to cross the Canadian border.
That exemption has since been revoked, though, meaning unvaccinated major leaguers will have to go on the restricted list — losing pay and service time during the series — when their teams play in Toronto.
The manager declined on Monday to get into specifics, but said, “I had some conversations at times with guys. I’ll leave it at that. I feel strongly this is very much a personal choice. Whatever happened, I was gonna respect whatever choice [they made].”
General manager Brian Cashman had acknowledged during the spring that while some of the unvaccinated players from a year ago had been vaccinated, there were still some who had not.
Clearly, that changed prior to Monday.
It was the latest positive development for a Yankee team that took a nine-game winning streak into a key three-game series against their closest competition in the division.
The two teams split a four-game set last month in The Bronx, but the Yankees have looked significantly better since then — and the highly touted Blue Jays’ offense hasn’t lived up to its reputation.
While the Yankees’ recent offensive explosion has moved them to second in the American League in runs scored with 106, the Blue Jays are just seventh-best in the AL at 92 runs through 22 games.
Toronto still has plenty of power, but the Jays have scored over a run per game less than they did a year ago.
While George Springer has lived up to expectations, others haven’t matched the success they had in 2021.
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is on that list.
Although he’s still a fearsome threat, Guerrero enters Monday with six homers — and three of them came against the Yankees on April 13.
His OPS at .866 remains formidable, but it pales in comparison to the league-leading 1.002 he had last season. Guerrero didn’t suffer through a slow start in ’21.
Among the Blue Jays’ other issues is the fact Bo Bichette has been dreadful at the plate and their primary offensive offseason acquisition, Matt Chapman, has hit like he did in his final season in Oakland — when he was just above an average-hitting first baseman — and not like the elite right-handed hitter he was from 2018-2020.