Choosing hope
On the Toronto Blue Jays 2025 season and a lifetime of loving sport
I’m a big fan of Contextualism. Can you be a fan of philosophical concepts? I don’t know, but if you can, I definitely support the idea that to understand any expression of creativity, you also have to factor in the time, place and circumstances in which the piece was created.
It’s just common sense, right? Particularly as it relates to my chosen way to express myself – through writing, particularly literary, non-fiction essays, like the one I am writing here.
Literary, non-fiction essays may seem like a pretentious way to spell “blogging” (which in itself is just a weird way to say journaling), and that’s fair because it kind of is, but the point remains: What I write today is deeply influenced by the world and place I’m in at this very moment.
This can be viewed on a macro level – 21 century living, Cis Male experiencing, Old Man pontificating, writing in Canada – or at a micro level – Dude who didn’t sleep well last night and is a bit hungry. Both impact what I write, but the former is a little easier to ascertain in a future time, when you are reading it. For the latter to be understood, I’d have to literally tell you what was going on (footnotes, maybe?) as I wrote, and not many authors do that routinely. I mean, maybe Hunter S. Thompson did, but that’s only because the answer was almost always “I’m really high.”
ANYWAY, I’m going to get into the micro level now, so that this next bit makes sense, within the greater whole of the essay I’m writing here.
This is being written on November 4, 2025, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Most importantly, it’s being written less than three days after the Toronto Blue Jays blew a ninth inning lead in Game 7 of the 2025 World Series to hand the L.A. Dodgers their second consecutive championship.
I was at the game. I was also at the game the previous night when the Blue Jays could have also won the World Series. So, that was a thing that happened this past weekend and understanding it is key to interpreting the things that I write here – particularly as it relates to baseball.
And, I want to write about baseball now. Mostly because I just experienced a lot of baseball over the past month, and it evokes deeply felt meaning and memories within myself. [case in point, describe any Olympic moment in the past 30 years, eg. “that snowboarder fell and took out that camera person” and the author can name the year and location of said Olympics - Editor]
In fact, my love of sport has defined me for much of the time that I have walked this earth. It’s my passion – not my only one, but it’s the one most people know me for. The rhythms of following sport is how I remember my life and the people I’ve shared it with. Of late, I’ve been less inspired to write about sport because, frankly, after 18 years, I’m a little burned out. What more is there to say, right?
But every so often, something will remind me of why I want to express myself through the art of sports writing – and it is an art, I don’t care how much saying that makes me sound like a wanker.
That something, now, is the Toronto Blue Jays and a season that will forever mean so much more to me than I thought was still possible, 50 plus laps around the sun that I am.
You’ll have to take my word for it, but my attachment to this Blue Jays season started long before anyone – literally anyone -- in Toronto was dreaming of World Series wins. It started not out of a desire to glory hunt. I didn’t think there would be much glory. Rather, it started after I had a strange realization, early in 2025.
What occurred to me is that, with the single exception of my father, there isn’t anything or anyone in the world that I have a longer-standing relationship with than I do with the Toronto Blue Jays. I have been there since the beginning. I’ve seen the evidence!
That’s right, there is a photo of me at Exhibition Stadium in 1977, sitting on my grandfather’s knee, while the Blue Jays play the California Angels. It was the Blue Jays first season and Dad had won a pair of tickets at the Quinte Mall. One Saturday, we all – mom, dad, grama and grandpa -- jumped in the car and drove the two hours from Belleville to Toronto. The boys were off to the ball game; the girls were meeting up with my aunt for a day of shopping. It was the ‘70s, gender stereotypes were more acceptable.
I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that I remember much about the game. I was young enough that the Blue Jays ticket staff let me in without a ticket, after all. However, a search through the archives tells me that the Jays won the game, which was played on Saturday, May 28, by a score of 6-4. Ron Fairly was the hero, doubling in the winning runs in a 4-run third inning. Jesse Jeffereson got the win. Pete Vuckovich the save.
So, there you go. It was a nice start for what would become a lifetime love. As I said above, it’s the thing I’ve now cared about the second longest. I hope Dad is with me for (quite) a few more years, but eventually the Blue Jays will stand on top of the longevity list. You pick a team for life after all. That’s a rule I most definitely live by.
Going back to this spring and the longevity epiphany I had, it wasn’t that I was equating a baseball team made up of strangers to people who have actually spent time with me and who have loved me. No, I’m not a sociopath. I do understand what actually matters in this world and I can distinguish between entertainment and real life.
However, that doesn’t mean my relationship with the Blue Jays isn’t without meaning. Or, for that matter, that it’s not intimately connected to those very people – people that I have shared the team and the sport with.
Many of those people are gone now, of course – Grandma, Grandpa, both Mom and her sister, my Aunt. To that point, the baseball team’s ranking on this list has steadily improved over the last 20 years. Loss is a constant of life, after all.
This being 2025 – back to that idea of Contextualism – there was one lost person in particular that was most on my mind: My mother.
The 2025 baseball season would be the first to start without her. That, like everything else in the fall of 2024 and in 2025, is something that was often on my mind – it was the time of “the first without.”
My mother, like all mothers, played a central and all-encompassing role in the story of my life. Some further Contextualism – I originally wrote that line as “plays a central and all-encompassing role…”, which should tell you a little something else about the words you are reading now.
As for the role she played with the Blue Jays, or in professional sports fandom, things get a little more abstract. The truth is, I don’t have a central baseball memory of mom – she didn’t have a favourite player, I didn’t learn to catch with her in the back yard, I don’t have a story of her listening to the radio as George Bell caught a fly ball in 1985, handing the Jays their first division title.
No, Mom’s relationship with the Blue Jays – of all sports --was restricted to how I, her only son, engaged with them. Yet, somehow, most of my sports memories involve her. She would make an effort to know just enough to be part of the thing that I cared about. Now that she’s gone, I appreciate that effort much more than I ever acknowledged – or realized, even -- at the time.
It was easy not to notice then, as, with my mother, she would really only be aware of the basic stuff – “oh, the Jays are doing well, aren’t they?” “That was quite the home run Joe Carter got, wasn’t it? I don’t think she could have told you what a batting average was, let alone what Ernie Clement’s Rbat+ versus left handers is. Then again, I’m not sure I could either.*
*This a joke. Please don’t explain Rbat+ to me**.
** Ok, I know what Rbat+ is, because I am a maniac, which is the point I’m making here.
It’s fair to say that mom’s enjoyment of baseball – of all sports – was tied to how others enjoyed it. There are a lot of people out there who engage with sports in a similar way, bandwagoners, some might call them. Fair weather fans? Lots of derogatory terms that are designed to separate them from those of us who really care, and those who only care when the headlines are brightest.
I have a better way to describe the type of fan my mother was – normal. Sane, even. You see, it’s how sport connects you to others that makes it worthwhile. That’s the dirty little secret in all this. It doesn’t really matter who wins the baseball game – not really – it matters more how the baseball game enhances your life, how it gives you joy.
There is no rational reason to attach our moods to the performance of strangers wearing our favourite laundry. Intellectually speaking, it’s an odd thing to care about. Being a sports fan is fully and completely irrational. No sane person should sign up for a life of following sports obsessively.
That’s because it’s mostly disappointment. Your team only wins the championship a select few times in your lifetime. If you are lucky. Unless you grew up in a diehard Real Madrid household (or insert any other big, historic, European soccer club you prefer here), where decade-long runs can happen, most years end in sadness. And even then, you end up disappointed more than happy, as there is always something more that you’ll want to see – more wins, more trophies, more, more, more.
Yet…
We always come back. The names and faces that we are cheering for change, but the laundry still has that emotional pull. It’s connecting you to those family road trips taken 48 years ago, to a thousand different conversations about pitching match-ups or free agent signings. It’s that game they took you to in 1993 the day after your heart got broken, and the independence you felt in taking a road trip to the big city with your friends as a teenager.
Yeah, it’s the day Joe Touched ’Em All, but it’s also crying after Jim Sundberg’s harmless looking fly ball refused to drop. It’s a batflip and watching the Cleveland Indians celebrate going to the World Series 100 yards in front of you.
It’s many things, both good and bad, including, now, Alejandro Kirk grounding into a double play. We’ll come back to that. For now, let’s go back to the spring and a choice to embrace the joy and the possibility that any new baseball season brings.
It really was a choice. There are innumerable reasons to be miserable and pessimistic in 2025, and that’s without getting into the personal stuff I’ve already addressed here. But what is the point of that? There are only so many laps in this race; there’s no point pouting during any of them. Find your joy. Honour those you have lost by continuing to embrace all there is to love in this world.
Believe in what’s possible and you’ll never be disappointed, even if it ends with a slow catcher unable to beat out the throw.
After all, embracing that hope allowed me to experience truly delightful things: That same catcher hitting a grand slam to win the division, Vladdy singling the start of the playoffs by going deep, and then blowing past the evil empire in pinstripes.
Strangers high-fiving me on the street because of the hat I was wearing. Watching an entire country get excited. Being in that stadium when Bo gave us a three-run lead in game 7.
Memories that truly will last a lifetime and that I shared with people that I have shared with before and will most certainly do so again.
Earlier, I suggested that no sane person should sign up for a life of following sports obsessively. I take it back. Choosing to deny yourself of this kind of joy is what’s really crazy.
I’m not going to pretend that I wouldn’t have rather Kirk doubled into the gap and then rounded first with his fist in the air as 45,500 of my closet friends lost their everlasting mind. I am wistfully imagining that very scene as I type this and I will obsessively watch the Jays off-season moves while dreaming for more moments to remember – more moments to share and to choose to care about.
It’s just that the lack of a final moment doesn’t take away the rest. Not of 2025, not of the last 48 years.
You see, in the end we’re going to remember who we watched with and how it felt, not what the final stats were.