Yes, sports fans, it’s time for my annual end-of-baseball season post.
Let’s begin, as I always do, with 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”).
But this year, I’m not heartbroken. I’m not elated; my Blue Jays did not win the World Series.
Notice, I did not say that they lost. They just didn’t win.
So, I’m sad. Maybe even a bit depressed. Definitely not happy.
But…
This was a team that nearly everyone — me included — thought was going to be cellar-dwelling, last place team this year. Much to my surprise — they weren’t. They scratched and crawled and played their hearts out. This team had no quit in it.
In their post-game interviews, they all supported each other. Nobody cast blame. Nobody got thrown under the bus. They were crying — not because they lost, but because something wonderful happened and it may never happen again. And that some of their friends/family may not be back next year.
Did you see Bo hugging Don Mattingly and comforting him? Or hear about Ernie checking in on Hazel Mae to see if she was OK — before the game was even over?
That’s something special.
And…
I met a wonderful group of fans online during the stretch drive and playoffs, that kept the spirit alive, from across Canada and the US. I even turned a friend — an NYC resident and life-long Mets fan — into a fanatic Jays fan for a couple of weeks. Today she told me “I’m now always a Jays fan. For real!” (although I don’t think she’s given up on her Mets. Woe is us if the Jays play the Mets in the Series!)
Where else can you cheer on someone knitting a sweater?
(If I may steal a line “Blue Jays fans are born all over the world; it just sometimes takes a bit of time for them to get here”).
And…
I spent a lot of time — online and in person — with my family, for playoff watch parties. Who can ever complain about that!
So, thank you Toronto Blue Jays, from the bottom of my heart. It was a wonderful, incredible, and terrific year. (George should get that parade and that horse, regardless!)
And remember, it’s just over 100 days until spring training!
PS All the em dashes in this were inserted by me. No AI. But that’s a conversation for another day
PPS No, I didn’t write about bookkeeping and non-tax accounting (again). No, I didn’t say that there’s a life or a business lesson to be learned. Life is more than just debits and credits.
I’m still the bowtie-wearing, fountainpen-wielding, online CPA who does bookkeeping and non-tax accounting for coaches, consultants, and creatives.
Let’s Go Jays!
