Baseball makes you feel bad. I don't mean that in a literate sense ripping off Bart Giamatti's lede, the sense of dreading a sullen winter spent longing for the sensory pleasures of the game. I mean that baseball at its best, when the beats are on rhythm and when the high notes are hit, can be downright torture to watch. At the most stressful moments, the time between pitches allows you a regular moment to be alone with your agony—to bite fingernails or breathe shallowly or pace your living room. Then the pitch is delivered, and there's just enough time to hope or fear, but, likely as not, a ball is fouled off and you get to do it all again. And again and again and again. Sometimes, several unexpected bonus innings of it. Heart disease as a hobby. Whoever invented baseball had a cruel streak. Whoever enjoys it has a touch of masochism.
If your team wins, the bad memories dissipate. This is a favor from the brain, a thank-you for the dopamine. Dodgers fans won't long be able to truly recall how they felt in the interstices of Game 7. They'll remember the triumphs big and small that broke the stretches of torment, and the elation that followed, but the rest of it will fade. Most teams, however, don't get to win—not the big one, anyway. Most fans get to sit with their what-ifs for the winter and, if they're unlucky enough to have a team good enough to raise their hopes and successful enough to reach October where true heartbreak grows, they'll sit with it for the rest of their lives. Few fans have it worse here than Blue Jays fans.
Imagine! Even after Miguel Rojas, he of the .362 lifetime slugging percentage, went yard in the ninth inning, it was the situation one only dares dream of: bottom of the ninth, Game 7 of the World Series. In Joe Carter's town! A team that had scored a playoff-record 105 runs needed but one more to give millions of Canadians a moment they'd treasure forever. They came so close. So close. They loaded the bases with one out, and Daulton Varsho chopped a grounder with a bit of mustard to a drawn-in Rojas, and his weight was on the wrong foot for an instant. That instant was long enough to imagine the possibilities. Long enough to convince yourself. Long enough to believe the wait was over.
Long enough for Will Smith to receive the ball and toe-tap the plate to make sure. At first, I thought he was safe. Most people in the ballpark thought he was safe. A crowd in Edmonton watching the game on the Jumbotron thought he was safe, and erupted to disrupt a hockey game. He was not safe, and if walking off a World Series on a video review isn't ideal, it would have been better than the alternative.
What if? What if he had come off the plate? What if Isiah Kiner-Falefa had taken another foot or two of lead, on what was one of the smallest primary leads of the entire postseason? What if he hadn't slid? Somewhere there is a young Blue Jays fan who will remain stricken by these what-ifs on their deathbed 70 years from now.
“They told us to stay close to the base," Kiner-Falefa said. "They don’t want us to get doubled off in that situation with a hard line drive. Varsho hits the ball really, really hard. [Third baseman Muncy is] right there, I’m waiting for a back pick from Will Smith in that situation. I can’t get doubled off right there so it’s almost like bases loaded. They wanted a smaller lead and a smaller secondary, so that’s what I did."
It wasn't disaster, not yet. There were still only two outs. And when Ernie Clement, with a playoff-record 30 hits of his own under his belt, sent a ball to deep left-center that clearly had Enrique Hernandez in hell, well, again there was enough time to taste the coming jubilation. Then Andy Pages, brought into the game for defense just one batter earlier, literally bodychecked Hernandez and metaphorically bodychecked Toronto fans straight into a nightmare.
"I was going to pull a Willie Mays," Hernandez said, "and then he tackled me, and I felt like I got dunked on, and I thought we lost. I was just down because I thought we lost. And he came up to me and said, 'Are you OK?' [I said] 'Fuck that, do you have the ball?'"
You know how the rest went. This is the way of things, sometimes. The Blue Jays broke the Mariners' hearts. The Mariners broke the Tigers' hearts. But World Series heartbreak? World Series Game 7, tie game, sudden-death heartbreak? That's something special. So let's have a little heart-to-heart chat, you, the grieving and traumatized Jays fan, me, a fan who was on the wrong side of what was probably the best and most dramatic World Series until this one. Maybe I can help:
You're screwed. You will never get over this. You will never fully recover. The sharp pain may age to a dull ache, but it will never go away. You will go hours, then days, then weeks without thinking about how close you came—and then something will remind you, and it will hurt all over again. Who you were last week is not who you will be for the rest of your life. You are ruined; you are a ruined human being. Something that was whole and good in you is irrevocably broken now.
How can you not love baseball?
