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A dejected Toronto Blue Jays fan after the Los Angeles Dodgers won Game 7 of the World Series at Rogers Centre in Toronto on Saturday.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Shortly after the Toronto Blue Jays lost an all-time classic Game 7 on Saturday night, I rushed out of the Rogers Centre to join the riot.
The game had been red hot by baseball standards – at one point, the dugouts and bullpens cleared so that everyone could get up close and yell “Yeah?” and “Yeah??” at each other. Given that Toronto went on to lose a soul crusher, maybe that aggro had spread to the streets.
No such luck.
I started walking north from the stadium up Blue Jays Way. Sidewalks thronged and total gridlock, but no apparent hostility.
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Halfway to King Street, a VIP motorcade came up behind us, led by a quartet of police on motorcycles, sirens going. One of the cops cut the lane and stormed into an intersection. He dismounted and began barking instructions at cars and pedestrians in that authoritative police voice. Everyone ignored him.
“You,” he shouted at about a hundred yous. “Stay there.”
Everyone crossed the street 20 feet from him.
“You,” he shouted at a car, pointing in a stabbing motion. “Over here.”
The car inched a foot forward in the opposite direction.
At which point, the cop dropped his shoulders and screamed at no one in particular, “HOW COME NO ONE LISTENS TO ME?”
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A Toronto Blue Jays supporter inside the Rec Room bar in Toronto holds her head in her hands after Game 7’s heartbreaking loss on Saturday.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
What happened on the baseball field was a localized phenomenon. This one guy embodied a whole nation’s reaction to it – bewildered frustration, tinged with self-pity.
Had the game ended on a brutal called strike or a botched replay, that might have been a reason to flip something over. But what happened on Saturday night was so layered and so complex that it could not be reacted to in an evening. It will require a lot more processing first.
Was it the greatest game ever played? I think so. Best I’ve ever seen, at least.
I used to say that of the London 2012 women’s soccer semi-final, the one in which the United States and the referee teamed up to beat Canada. That team would have rioted if they could, but they had a bus to catch.
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What were some of the things that made it so good? Well, how much time have you got?
We could sit here for a week discussing Ernie Clement’s grinning, balletic, totally unnecessary slide into home plate in the sixth inning. Because of what happened in the eighth and the ninth and the 10th and then the 11th, Mr. Clement’s grand gesture didn’t matter. But I will still read 10,000 words about it in 20 years, when Mr. Clement’s had enough time to decide what he was thinking in that moment.
Is it possible that Bo Bichette’s home run in the third – along with a bat shrug as a companion piece to the bat flip – is a Top 5 Toronto sports moment of all time? If you accept that premise, you are separating the means and the ends of sports, which might be to say that results are not just surplus to fandom, but irrelevant to it. Discuss.
Were you time travelling last night? Did your mind drift to Addison Barger’s lodged-ball ground-rule double in the ninth inning of Game 6? And to his base-running goof that ended the game? And to the fact that George Springer would have been the next man up, except he was stuck in the on-deck circle? And that Mr. Springer led off Game 7 with a single, which would have been the game-tying hit if he’d done it a night earlier? Me too.
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Ernie Clement slides into home plate to score during the sixth inning of Game 7.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
I was thinking about this as the game ended and the crowd filed out. A substantial minority – three, four thousand? – remained in their seats. They were scattered all about the room in pockets. Some of them were singles. Did they come to the game alone? Or had they remained as their friends and family left?
They sat there stunned for 15 minutes or so while Rogers Centre workers assembled a podium behind second base. In an alternate reality, this was happening while the Jays celebrated. Once the first Dodgers rep began speaking, the diminished crowd booed for a bit. Then they fell back into sullen contemplation.
Up in the press box, my boss and I passed fleetingly. We congratulated each other on having been there to see it and surprised ourselves by hugging. He and I don’t normally do that kind of thing, but the situation seemed to call for something more than the usual raised eyebrows.
It was the longest seventh game in history. It was the first in which the guy who closed it had started the game before. How do you beat that? It was the sort of game you felt the need to talk to people about, immediately. One friend, a real true believer, texted: “I hurt.”
Jays fans say thank you to the Blue Jays players and they expect the team to be back in the World Series in 2026.
Doing this for a living, I don’t often find myself caring about a result. By often, I mean ever. But this one got me.
Not because I felt bad for the Blue Jays, but because I felt jealous of them. What it must be like to have taken part in something so instantly epic.
To know that for the rest of your life, you will be able to close your eyes and go back there. To have felt such intensity of emotion over a tragedy that is not actually tragic. They got the war experience, minus the war.
Ahead of really big games, I write the scaffolding of two columns – a win and a loss. I don’t want to be scrambling at the end.
It is a sports-writing rule that whichever column you like better, the opposite result is inevitable. So I was sure the Jays would win. Saturday night was one of the few times it’s gone the other way.
In that win column, I wrote that the Jays, unlikely World Series champions, having just beaten a foreign power at a time of great international unrest, were the most quintessentially Canadian outfit since the Summit Series. That passports didn’t matter. That what happened over the past month was deeper than that.
Considering it now, I believe that may be true even though they lost. I’ll have to think about it some more.
The Toronto Blue Jays reflect on the team’s loss to Los Angeles in Game 7 of the World Series. It’s the closest the team has come to winning the championship in more than 30 years.
The Canadian Press
