What I learned from the World Series

Growing up in the Toronto Area in the early 90’s, it was only natural that I would imprint on the Toronto Blue Jays. I was just old enough to understand what baseball was when they won their first World Series in 1992, compounded by a cultural omnipresence of the sport in the form of movies like Rookie of the Year and The Sandlot (both from 1993,) baseball cards being on offer at every corner store, and video games like NES’ RBI Baseball and Little League Championship Baseball being in our collection. When they won a second in 1993 it seemed, simply, like this was what life was: the team that wears your city’s name on it winning the championship, over and over. The names of the championship lineups are ones that will be emblazoned in the mind of every Torontonian of a certain generation forever: Joe Carter, Roberto Alomar, John Olerud, Pat Borders, Devon White, Paul Molitor, Rickey Henderson as he neared the twilight of his career, and pitchers like Todd Sottlemyer, Jack Morris, Pat Hentgen and Juan Guzman.

After the 1994 strike, things changed. Toronto’s winning ways were over, and the team became simply a presence in an American League East dominated by the Yankees and Red Sox. Toronto has a lot more stamina in cheering for its Maple Leafs, and during their peak, the Raptors, and for those of us who just prefer baseball to other sports, it looked like all we would have were our memories.

That’s fine. 32 years is far from the longest World Series drought. (The Seattle Mariners, who battled it out with the Jays for the American League Pennant, are the only team to have never been in 49 years of existence. The next longest drought is the Pirates at 46 years, and the Brewers and Orioles at over 40 years, plus a few more teams that haven’t been since before the Jay’s heyday.) They’ve skirted their way into the postseason numerous times in the last decade, winning the AL East title in 2015, and being the beneficiaries of the wild card system several times since then. This success, however, felt a lot more real and tangible here in the ‘6. There was a real sense that magic was happening.

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The Jays’ winning ways felt a bit like something that was happening to other people, though. You would go to a party or a gathering and someone there would be a superfan who had been to a big game recently, often with something to say about how ticket prices were going up because the team was getting hot. My brothers, in particularly my oldest brother, are bigger fans than I am and follow the team and are acutely aware of the roster. By contrast, I’m like, “Is Bo Bichette still there?” I’m happy the team is doing well, but I usually have the good sense to keep it at arm’s length. We’ve been through all this before.

There’s a great line in the Farrelly Brothers-directed version of Fever Pitch (adapted from Nick Hornby’s novel) that says sometimes the things you love don’t love you back, a message to keep some perspective amidst the mania of sports fandom. Of course in that movie as in real life, the Red Sox ended up winning the Series, thus proving that sometimes, hey, you win, and it’s all worth getting excited about. So who the hell knows.

For me, I’m happy to root for a winning team, but it’s easier to root for a losing team, when you might happen into some tickets for a Saturday afternoon and seem the lose 3-2 to the Tigers or something from the 500-level, which is how it feels like every game I’ve watched at the ballpark went. My wife, who actually played on the baseball team in high school, is much the same way, with life too busy to get caught up in sports fandom. (Not that we watch sports at all, but she’s a bit more into the NFL, where she is a perennial Packers fan, and where we are always hanging near the bottom of the family’s football pool, and now she operates a fantasy team through work.) While the Jays were beating the Mariners for the AL Championship, we were watching a forgotten ABC dramedy we stumbled onto on Disney+ (“What About Brian?” starring Barry Watson) and passively checking our phones for the score.

I think it’s in the nature of Blue Jays fans to be a little cautious when they start doing well — you can lose your mind watching a team get so close only to blow it at the end — but it’s also in the nature of any city’s fans to go completely nuts when they feel like they’re attached to a winner. Suddenly everyone in town loves the team, living and breathing them.

I only watched one game all season, the second last where they won and, due to the arcane ranking system, it was determined that if they Jays won or the Yankees lost their next game, the Jays would win the division title. IF not, they’d be in the Wild Card again and probably, according to my wife’s uncle who was hosting us, wash out, since they’d have to play on the road.

But they never did wash out, and kept going all the way to the World Series, against the defending champion Dodgers. The fervor heated up, and you would see it in everyone’s social media. We figured we should probably watch in case history was being made but even then it was hard to get real enthusiasm up beyond our normal baseline. They played the possible clincher of Game 6 on Halloween Night. We recorded the game, handed out candy to trick-or-treaters, watching the first two Fear Street movies on Netflix while keeping an eye on the score as it inched toward a Dodgers victory forcing Game 7.

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We watched Game 7 under relatively bizarre circumstances. My middle brother’s birthday is on October 31st, so on November 1 we were set to have dinner at my Dad’s place. My dad doesn’t even have cable but bought a subscription to SportsNet’s internet package just to watch the playoffs. The game was due to start at 8, so we had dinner and cake first before settling in, our dog Hank on our laps with his pet-sized Jays jersey (number 01) which we had gotten early in the summer.

Also present at this family gathering-slash-World Series Viewing Party was a woman we had never met before, a friend of my dad’s partner named Cathy, whom they were hosting not simply because she was a big baseball fan — although she was — but because she is a traveling RMT who lives two hours away but whose clients were nearby, so they offered to put her up for the night. Throughout the game she made her feelings known vocally that the pitchers should be throwing more strikes, and the batters hitting more home runs. She also asked what was the deal with the chant they kept doing prompting me to explain the song “Seven Nation Army” to a trio of Boomers. While watching, I put exasperated texts in the group chat with my in-laws, whose baseball fandom is also a little more consistent than my own.

In a total war of attrition, as you probably know by now, the Toronto Blue Jays lost to the L.A. Dodgers 5-4 in the 11th, a rare extra innings game for the World Series. The game had us on the edge of our seats gasping for air, our entire spirits hinging on the actions of ten men until the last play, when the air was completely sucked out of the room. Considering I had felt distant from this entire season and postseason, I very much became part of it for that night, living and dying with every at bat. Shortly after midnight we said a quick goodbye and shuffled home, tired and exhausted.

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A few years ago, I was at a work function, a summer picnic. I had donned my Blue Jays cap for the occasion, and a VP, a jocky type, asked if I was a fan or if it was just for keeping the sun out of my eyes, and I admitted it was mostly the latter. I don’t lie about what kind of Jays fan I am but I’m not a bandwagoner or a fairweather fan either. I like baseball well enough and they’re the team that plays in my hometown, who gave me a lot of fond memories when I was a kid. A lot of the time I’m glad I’m not wrapped up in it, because I see people bickering and sniping online and I think “It’s just a game, they’re just players and you’re just a fan.” There are other things, you know? It’s nice that people are happy to have a hobby, but it’s too stressful for me — which is to say I direct that exact energy into other things that I do like.

Jerry Seinfeld has a memorable bit about how, the way professional sports works, you get a bunch of players who are not from a city, usually moving around a league over the course of their careers, depending on where the money is. The only thing that stays the same is the logo. You’re really just cheering for clothes. It doesn’t make any sense, yet for the time they wear that jersey, guys like George Springer and Max Scherzer are Toronto. The entire spirit of the city — and depending on who you ask (not my friend James from Edmonton) the country — gets funneled into those clothes.

As a fan, you have no control over the game, you are putting your entire mood and your sense of self into the actions of a group of people you can’t control. They might not even be any good, they just happen to be based near you. You’re born somewhere and you end up a Jays fan or a Phillies fan or a Twins fan or a Mariners fan or whatever, and it’s just something you have to surrender, or if you’re like me, excuse yourself from.

I’m not a big sports guy. I have other things on my mind, like comics and music and reality shows I can watch with my wife. I’m not going to pretend that puts me above it, because it’s just as bad or worse to like sci-fi movies and RuPaul’s Drag Race and comics and pro wrestling. Not being a sports guy has probably had more of a negative impact on my life than positive because as much as it frees up my mental facilities for other things, it means I’m without a pretty vital way of bonding with other people — specifically dudes I know. Sometimes at a party, I have to hunt for a guy that’s also not a hockey fan so we can talk about anything else.

The reason why people like sports, I figure, is so they can Not Think About Life Together. And the reason I know this is because my wife and I, we’ve had a really rough couple of weeks. We’ve had to go through any number of mind-numbing bureaucratic processes relating to our finances, as well as other personal stresses plaguing us in life that are too numerous and complicated to get into here. But from 8:00 until a little after 12 AM Saturday night, the only thing we cared about was who won the baseball game. And we shared in that with a room full of people who were important to us, and Cathy. And after we left, the only thing on our mind was not just how the game had gone, but the experience of watching it, for better or worse, and not all these other things that are troubling us. It got us out of our heads and out amongst other people for once, in a life that can sometimes feel a little isolating.

That’s the good side of surrender. That’s a gift, and that’s something you probably can’t get anywhere other than sports, (or maybe at a gay bar the night Drag Race airs.) It’s great to keep things at a remove and in perspective, but sometimes the point is to go nuts and let it be the biggest thing in your life, for a day or two at least.

Maybe next year I’ll pay a bit more attention. Try to get out to the Dome once or twice. Before they won their first World Series, the Jays had a few division titles to their names, so I know sometimes it takes time to catch fire and grab that brass ring. But if they completely fall apart, it’s all the same. The team will still be there.

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