I’ve just come back from running my usual Sunday errands. The streets seem a bit busier than normal. It’s chilly but sunny, and I suspect like me, people are rushing around to get everything done before the darkness sets in at 4:30pm, a cruelty of daylight savings in November. Midtown Toronto feels as it always does.
Still, it’s a marked change from just the day before. You couldn’t pass two people without at least one of them in some kind of Jays gear. The buses said ‘Go Jays Go’ next to their route numbers. Storefronts flew Jays flags and balloons. The excitement was palpable. It had been more than 30 years since the team was in the World Series and it felt like the entire country had crowded onto the bandwagon.
In so much as a person can have a ‘brand’, baseball fan (who loves hats, sweaters and flowy dresses) has been mine. A school trip to Exhibition Stadium and the Jays outfield of George Bell, Lloyd Moseby and Jesse Barfield was all I needed to be all in, for all time.
But I have occasionally wondered what’s kept me so devoted for the majority of my life. Certainly I didn’t grow up in a baseball-loving family. I was the first, and really still the only. And I can’t even genuinely say it was the Jays, who as great as they were for the early parts of my fandom, were even more consistently bad for most of it.
And it’s not because I play it. I’m so clumsy the vendor at the game last night let me keep the cap on my water bottle even though it’s against the rules, and I still managed to drop it shortly after. And that was before I spilled an entire box of Halloween candy I brought onto the guy sitting in front of me.
If I have to pinpoint anything, it’s the community around the sport, which has definitely strengthened since social media allowed us to find each other all over the world.
Baseball attracts for lack of a gentler word: nerds. And I am nothing if not a nerd. It’s not just how data driven the sport can be, I think it’s the length of it. The length of the games, the length of the season. How much of a grind it can be, and then how fast it seems to be over and you’re counting down the days until it starts again. By its very nature it creates community, and rivalries, all bound by a sense of togetherness.
For a long while though, I was too big a fan. Nerds can dig in to the things they love. And I did. I was too intense, letting my emotions get impacted by the Jays’ performance. Getting attached to players based on media-driven narratives while not really knowing anything about what they were actually like as people. After the Jays 2016 season and another ALCS disappointment, a result that had me feeling down for days - I knew this had to change.
Ironically, I was able to detach by watching more baseball. I went to IBL games (a semi-pro league in Southern Ontario), started watching whatever game was on TV that night, visiting stadiums without caring if the Jays were playing or not, and it granted me perspective.
Baseball, at least in my little corner of the fandom also attracts good people. People who want to make the world better. And so because of this, we also want to assign a morality to the team we love, to the players we cheer for and spend money to watch play. This is unquestionably a fool’s errand. No team becomes the ‘good guys’ because they’re ‘your guys’. They are just guys. Some are good, some are not.
This adjustment allowed me to approach baseball in a much healthier way. My personal fortunes no longer rested on the performance of the Jays. I could get excited watching good baseball being played by anyone. I stopped loving a team and fully embraced loving the sport.
It also led me to people who have become true and real friends. Friends I travel with. Friends who love other MLB teams and who I want to be as happy as me or anyone else. We all deserve it, and also none of us do.
Still, how could I not get caught up in this 2025 run? And yet, when my friend asked me if I wanted his extra ticket to game 7 of the World Series, I hesitated. I’ve had some bad experiences at Jays post-season games.
After game 2 of this ALCS, which had the Jays down 0-2, walking to the subway I tried to stop a man who kept slamming his hand on every metal fence, trash container etc. he could reach. He was raging, screaming and swearing and desperately trying to hurt himself. I gently pleaded with him to stop before he broke his hand.
I briefly seemed to penetrate his veil of anger, but then I made the mistake of saying ‘maybe the Jays will come back’. This reignited his furor and he turned to his friend and shouted ‘Can you believe this BITCH, saying MAYBE they’ll come back. What the fuck kind of fan is she?’ The poor friend frantically tried to apologize to me while I shrunk away, scared the other guy might hit me and wishing I had never said anything and just let him hurt himself. Sometimes I forget how much some men genuinely hate women, especially when it comes to sports.
With this in the back of my mind, I wondered how the crowd would be if the Jays lost game 7. But, when the Dodgers won game 6 I knew I couldn’t miss the chance to see the final game of World Series live. The last time this happened in Toronto was 32 years ago. Thinking about how old I would in another 30+ years made me need to contemplate my mortality and stare out the window for a while. I knew I had to go.
The last time the Jays played in a World Series, my late dad managed to get me tickets to a game. The SkyDome held about 10K more fans then, even more if you counted the Hard Rock Cafe restaurant that overlooked the field and all the hotel rooms. But even with this, getting tickets could be like winning the lottery. My dad was a sports fan, but not really a baseball fan. He took me because I loved it. I don’t know how he got these tickets, even regular season seats back then were vanishingly hard to come by. I never thought to ask, in my kid’s selfishness, and now I never can. I had a little cry and then got ready to head out.
I arrived at the stadium more than two hours before game time and kept bumping into friends. People I knew from years of fandom, some from other parts of my ‘real life’ all of us nervous, excited, still disbelieving this was happening and we were here.
I told myself on the way down that I would be fine no matter the outcome. And I did mean it. Especially as I had a feeling the Dodgers coming back to win game 6 meant they would win game 7. Still, from the 9th to 11th innings it was impossible not to get caught up in the tension. My Fitbit registered me doing 17 minutes of ‘exercise’ my heart was actually pounding that much.
We all know what happened. After a crazy, wild, epic World Series, the ending felt kind of anti-climatic. An almost run-of-the-mill homerun followed by an even more run-of-the-mill broken bat double play to end the game, and the Jays season.
To my surprise and relief, the anger and aggression I’ve experienced at other post-season losses didn’t seem to take hold this time. Maybe we were all too tired, or in shock. I still probably overcompensated, babbling to friends and the woman sitting next to me who was weeping, that the Jays just came up against a historic pitching performance (true) and that nobody (including and especially me) thought they would be here to begin with (also true).
In my Uber home I finally checked what felt like endless messages that had come in after the game. And what I felt the most was loved. I was so moved by how many people cared, even people who have never watched a game in their life.
The Jays no longer have a chokehold over my emotions, but my community does and in the best possible way. Together we commiserated, and together we turned the page. That’s sports. Someone has to win and that means someone has to lose. But finding beauty in that is the biggest win of all.
Thank you to everyone who joined me.