“Go Jays Go!” reverberated through my living room this past Sunday, along with “Home Run! Blue Jays! It’s outta here! YES!”
And for a short while, everything was exciting in front of the TV screen. My Boys of Summer (the Toronto Blue Jays) were beating Baltimore’s team like a rug, and the Washington Nationals (better known in this house as the Washington Expos) were leading the Boston Red Sox 5-1.
Then the Nationals collapsed. Boston won. And just like that, my baseball season came to an end. And yes, I posted on Facebook “Oh God how I hate the Washington Expos right now.”
Sigh.
I’ve been a Blue Jays fan since that first snowy day in 1977. No, I wasn’t at The Game, but I did watch it on TV.
I confess. I am not a “baseball” fan. I am a Blue Jays fan. So now that they’re out of the playoffs for 2021, I probably have my days and my evenings back again.
(Maybe it’s time to catch up on all those Netflix series that everyone else has been raving about? Got any suggestions?)
But dammit, for a few weeks, it was a shining moment, and the team was SO close.
So, my congratulations to the Jays players and the entire organization (although I know soon I’ll be bitching about bad head office decisions, but that’s my right as a fan). (Sign Semien and Ray TightPants!!!!)
Every year, when we get to the final game of the season — whenever that is, and even if “my” team is victorious and wins the World Series — I am reminded of the words of the late A. Bartlet Giamatti, Yale scholar, teacher, and most importantly, former Commissioner of Major League Baseball:
[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
(from his essay “Take Time For Paradise: Americans And Their Games”).
So fellow Blue Jays fans, I guess, this year, it performed as it’s designed, eh? It’s a feature, not a bug.
I can’t wait for the excitement of spring training. It’s only a few months away, gang. And then hope will spring eternal again and we’ll thrill to the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd.
Go Jays Go!
PS. Not everything in life has to do with bookkeeping, you know.
Photo Credit: Baseball in a Mitt by Lenora Cagle from Pixabay
