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TORONTO — Hours before Hyun-Jin Ryu took the mound for his Blue Jays debut on opening day at Tropicana Field, the club finally found a place to play its home games this season.

In the end, it wasn’t the major-league venue Jays players had been seeking.

Instead, the Jays pivoted back to the one plan that seemed logical the entire way and will call Buffalo’s Sahlen Field home this summer, moving in once the required upgrades are made to the clubhouse areas as well as supplemental lighting to bring the Triple-A ballpark up to MLB standards.

“We obviously had to make a decision,” Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro said on a conference call Friday afternoon. “Knowing that we had a very good alternative, albeit not a major-league one, but one we felt could get close to a major-league level, we made that decision.”

With the club deciding to play both legs of its home-and-home set with the Washington Nationals at Nationals Park next week, the Jays could be set to play their first game in Buffalo on July 31 against the Philadelphia Phillies.

If the stadium work isn’t completed in time for the three-game series against the Phillies, it will without a doubt be ready for their next home series, slated for Aug. 11-12 against the Miami Marlins.

That gives them a max of 28 home games at Sahlen Field and a minimum of 25.

It’s far from ideal for the Blue Jays, but after exhausting the alternatives over the past seven weeks, it ended up being the best option, even if outfielder Randal Grichuk called it a worst-case scenario a few days ago.

Despite that, Jays president Mark Shapiro believes the news has gone over well with the previously homeless Blue Jays players who could have been facing the prospect of playing every single game on the road this season if a suitable stadium situation wasn’t secured.

“It’s our players' mentality that they’re not going to allow the thought to enter in that it’s a minor-league (ballpark) versus a major-league stadium,” Shapiro said. “I’ve always thought one of the greatest things I’ve heard expressed along the way is, ‘Wherever you are is your major leagues.’”

While Grichuk and reliever Anthony Bass, two tenured MLB veterans, called the plan to play in a minor-league ballpark a competitive disadvantage, there’s an obvious split on that subject within the clubhouse.

Players like Bo Bichette, Cavan Biggio, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and many others, were riding Triple-A buses as recently as a year ago, giving them a bit of a different perspective.

“It’s pretty normal for me,” Guerrero Jr. said Friday afternoon. “I’ve played there before and I know the field. We’ll just go there and do what we’re going to do, play hard and try to win some games there.”

Tasked with trying to get a baseball team ready to play a pressure-packed 60-game sprint with expanded playoffs further increasing everyone’s chances, manager Charlie Montoyo is glad the stadium situation is behind them now.

“I’m excited we finally have a place to play,” Montoyo said. “We’re done with that. Let’s focus on the Rays today and focus on the schedule. That’s how everybody feels in there. We’re excited. Now we know.”

Forced out of Dunedin by a COVID-19 surge, denied by government officials and health authorities in Toronto and Pennsylvania, the Jays were trying to lock down an agreement with the Baltimore Orioles to play in Camden Yards over the last couple of days, but the timing of it all and the uncertainty surrounding the state of Maryland’s ultimate approval led the Jays back to Buffalo.

For the most part, everything but the clubhouse and some of the amenities — weight rooms, training rooms, batting cages — are top notch at Sahlen Field, a spot considered by many to be in the upper-echelon of Triple-A ballparks.

Now, the Jays will try to turn the quirky environment — it’ll be quirky to MLB veterans, at least — into a homefield advantage.

It may not be that hard.

For visiting teams coming from MLB ballparks and environments, it’s going to be a shock to the system initially.

“I think it’s going to be an advantage, actually, for our pitching,” Guerrero said. “It’s a big field. I bet it’s a bigger field than our one in Toronto. I think that will be the difference.”

Whether that rings true remains to be seen, but how the ballpark plays will be an interesting wrinkle to monitor once the Blue Jays move in.

“The park plays differently at different times of year,” Shapiro said. “It’s a pretty true and a pretty fair park, overall. It will be interesting to see how it plays at a major-league level. I’m not certain about that. I think the biggest thing for us as we looked at minor-league alternatives was to not be in one of the minor-league alternatives that had extreme ballpark attributes. There were a lot that we looked at that did. Really short porches, alleys that could have been exploited, a bandbox. We feel like Buffalo will be a good major-league environment.”

After securing Sahlen Field as the home venue, the Jays will now move forward with plans to use Frontier Field in Rochester, home of the Minnesota Twins’ Triple-A affiliate, as the club’s alternate training site.​