The breaks of the game
On the reprieve that was Canada's boys of summer playing meaningful October and November baseball.
Thankfully, blissfully, attempts to politicize the Toronto Blue Jays’ historic, viewership-shattering American League pennant win and World Series run never succeeded. Although, returning to the scene of the elbows up seniors’ scam, the Globe and Mail most certainly tried. (The Star surely joined them, but why go hunting for reasons to be miserable on a Saturday and Sunday.)
Now a week removed from heartbreak, and knowing full well that many of us have yet to muster the strength to watch the final outs of a game seven that slipped away, or who don’t feel like analyzing a lackluster secondary lead from third base as if it were the Zapruder film because coulda, woulda, shoulda, there are at the very least sociocultural matters of the heart worth celebrating.
Last February’s ‘4 Nations Face-Off’, culminating in an admittedly epic showdown between Canada and the U.S., was not so lucky. Taking place during the very heart of Operation Tariff the World, politicians who wouldn’t know a shin guard from an elbow pad flocked to make retail-political displays as saccharine as the worst Ron MacLean soliloquy. As a harbinger of the reform election rug-pull to come, modern Canada’s penchant for anti-Americanism as identity was on full display, dusting off the maple leaf to wield it as a political symbol, to its very detriment. (This tends to happen when your nation has divine-right-to-rulers who covet creating political wedges above all else.)
Trudeau preened. Carney circled. Momentum shifted on ice and off. The mood in the sports bars of the nature carried an uneasy undercurrent of bilious resentment and hostility, as if only Canada may harm Canada, and on that we remain peerless masters of our own house.
Permission-slip patriotism, oppositional defiance-oriented patriotism, domestic electoral destiny suddenly pitched into a foreign-focused and pseudo-religious fervour — it was a fickle bitch.
In the aftermath of Mark Carney and Mike Myers cynically donning Team Canada sweaters to ride off the coattails of our national program’s victory, and in arriving at the here and now, the country, as those who can walk and chew gum at the same time predicted, remains pessimistic about its trajectory.
The budget? Not great either, but there are indeed (some) signs of life. (Join myself and Professor Ian Lee to break it down, if one is feeling so inclined.)
And young people were just handed a “disaster” of a housing update, with revised immigration numbers improving but not promising much better. Ontario’s housing starts alone have cratered to just 64,000 this year.
Yet, remarkably. for five weeks this fall, that stench didn’t reach Toronto’s baseball team. Canada’s baseball team.
As a uniquely personable and loveable group, with a plucky playing style and jokes about the “power of friendship” spurring them forward, a high-spending but pre-season underdog cultivated a clubhouse vibe that ended up sweeping the nation.
Even at the lone sports bar in Iqaluit, there wasn’t an empty seat to be found. This writer, no fan of the reserved and detached nature that has taken hold among our pedestrians in once-better Canadian cities, found himself receiving high-fives from strangers walking down the aisle on a flight from Vancouver to Toronto for games one and two of the World Series.
(And let’s just say that after some of the revelry experienced following that thrilling game one victory, there may or may not have been a walk home in the same jersey and cap as the night before, after catching all of one REM cycle on a friend’s couch. Even the city’s tragically swelling itinerant population wanted to converse jovially about the game, as this still hypothetical scenario involved a bleary-eyed stroll from downtown to midtown in the crisp dawn air, born out of the necessity to shake one’s self out of the doldrums. Again, may or may not have happened.)
To highlight the depths of the nation’s dedication, that loving feeling, Mrs. Acceptable Views even hopped a post-work Friday red-eye to catch one game, before heading right back across the country to work. And for a change, to land at Pearson wasn’t just a semi-radicalizing experience, but a moment to witness fans arriving from coast to coast.
There will be some who may reflexively argue that’s just bread and circus. I very much disagree. The Toronto Blue Jays, and for far too short a run, the Montreal Expos, have served as the soundtrack to our Canadian summers. It doesn’t take a die-hard baseball fan, some trained seal clapping when the jumbotron says yes or no, to appreciate the finer things surrounding the Great American Pastime, or to appreciate Canada’s out-sized influence on the game’s decorated and varied history.
These scenes of jubilation alone were a welcome reprieve. Normally embittered and cynical sports journalists teared up in post-game remarks, the young men of the nation went “tarps off,” concierges remarked that “we really needed this.”
Torontonians, Canadian culture-enjoyers, our young, they were most certainly deserving of respite, for this is still a nation where two halves don’t make a whole.
Even in that vacuum of equal parts nerves and exuberance, Canada the Bad attempted to creep in. First in the Globe, then in two offensive, tone-deaf, heritage-mocking, anti-civilizational acts of butchery of our anthem, that wormed their way into the nation’s ears. (The public rebuttal, at least, was swift and unflinching, and the team’s play continued to be the story.)
For that brief period, like a cover-band playing the hits from your childhood, both the Toronto — or the Canada — many of us remember from our childhoods felt familiar: we weren’t all strangers; generations were able to share in a project of upward mobility; the streets were alive with post-game mob scenes of the friendly and not terror-supporting variety.
We’re otherwise a Balkanized lot — that’s an order that comes down from the worst of our Machiavellian redistributionists and post-nationalists. But squint while you’re seated among 45,000 friends, have your low expectations met when there was thankfully no anthem booing, give yourself over to the “immaculate vibes” from “one of the great Toronto nights,” use a World Series to catch up with old friends, and it’s harder to notice the decay, and easier to remember the good times, still possible, right there if we’re willing to put ourselves out there and do the work.
Sometimes, all it takes is an excuse to hop on a plane, to share nervous text chains with a friend or parent begging for a different reliever to be warming up in the bullpen, to show up at that sports bar at the top of the world.
A week removed from all that ecstasy and the agony, something shared we didn’t allow to be ruined, look what can happen when our “Want It All,” our fear of missing out, our need to be around one another, is oriented towards a positive, not the sallow-faced hostility of imagined invasion and “break us so he can own us.”
For that, we can thank our baseball team.
For making that reprieve into something more permanent, that’s on us.
Alexander Brown is the writer of the best-selling Acceptable Views newsletter, a show host on Juno News, a non-profit director and campaigner, a columnist and contributor, and the co-founder and managing editor of Without Diminishment.