Full Count

Baseball at the intersection of love and grief

The roar, the clapping. The deep blare of the foghorn signaling victory as dozens of players rush the field. 47,000 fans in the stadium and hundreds of thousands more at home jump to their feet. This moment of sheer disbelief, anticipation and hope morphing into exalted understanding. The pure joy. For the first time in 32 years, the Blue Jays are headed to the World Series.

***

I don’t remember the winning games in 1992 or 1993. But I know I watched them both as a teenager, at a friend’s apartment in the Annex. I know a bunch of us were huddled in the small space and that a party erupted on Bloor Street below, lasting all day and all night. We felt the collective energy pulsing through the city; the street vibrated, physically, cosmically. I know we knew how special it was.

***

My father was a New Yorker, more specifically, a Brooklynite. As a child his team was the Brooklyn Dodgers and I don’t think he ever forgave them for moving to Los Angeles. The Yankees? Never. He settled on the Mets, and we bought him team hats for his birthday. He didn’t think Canadians fully appreciated baseball.

We went to countless Blue Jays games at Exhibition Stadium. The best days were the ones when you got a free gift – a ball or a t-shirt or even a bat. Half the kids at my school brought their lunch and gym clothes in a Blue Jays bag. We did the seventh inning stretch then sat on the Blue Jays cushions we placed on the hard seats beneath us. We took pop out of our Blue Jays soft-side coolers and drank them in the summer afternoon heat. Buying a drink was out of the question. I watched the crowd but our dad watched the game. He knew every player, every play; complained about the bad calls and cheered on the runs. The Blue Jays were never his team. But it’s what he had. We kids were proud Torontonians, proud Canadians. We had the Blue Jays, and we had our dad, who took us to as many games as he could.

Much of the art in my childhood home was knock-off baseball memorabilia and posters framed and set under glass. There was the print of Ebbets Field, circa 1955 with the signatures of all the players on the winning roster filling the picture’s white spaces like ghosts. There were team pennants from various years in various designs. And there was the stylized city-scape image that mapped Toronto from our home in the north end, along Yonge Street to the downtown and a skyline highlighting the retractable arch of the brand new Sky Dome, where the Jays would now play. At first my parents boycotted this space, the objection that there was a no smoking rule even when the dome was open. But their resolve didn’t last long and they were back at the games by the middle of the season. Me and my older sister were teenagers by then and less interested in attending the games with my parents, but our younger brother and sister took over the extra seats (made more comfortable with the Jays seat cushions brought from home of course) and rounded out the family four-pack nicely. I’ve since been to games with each of my various siblings, but I don’t know if we’ve ever been to one all together.

***

When something enters the cultural zeitgeist, people, especially the more performative of us, have a natural tendency to want to be a part of it; to prove that we were there. Prove that we are connected to it. Sometimes the subtext is, I am more connected than you. We don’t want to miss the moment. It’s good to have something to celebrate. We take to social media and the streets when our team wins. The crowd goes wild.

***

After the 1992 win, my mother, a master knitter, made my brother a Blue Jays jacket with the bird head insignia on the back and a zipper down the front. My sister mentioned it the other day, wishing she had it for her own little boys. But my brother is in his 40s now, and the sweater has long since disappeared. My mother’s fingers are arthritic and tired. She hasn’t knit in ages.

***

Our dad has been gone for 18 years now. The Jays haven’t made it to the World Series in nearly twice that length of time. But when they clinched the ALCS, the family chat blew up. We whooped and whoo-hoo’d and sent the appropriate jokes and gifs, but the conversation very quickly turned to family lore and nostalgia and the forces that somehow make us not give up on our teams. Hope and love and a bit of delusion, we decided, were some of the most powerful forces of all.

Our dad would certainly have been cheering for the Jays this year. Defeating the Yankees, then getting a shot at the traitorous team that disappointed him in childhood so many years ago – “Good,” he’d say, “I hope the Dodgers get creamed.”

I was with my younger sister for game 6 of the ALCS and my brother for game 7. If the World Series goes to 5, we will all be in Toronto, watching the rest of the games together. Hope and love and a bit of delusion. It keeps fans rooting for their teams and families rooting for each other.

Take me out to the ballgame.

1981. Bowl cuts and pheasant couches and a first-gen Blue Jays cap most certainly free from a game.