Blue Jays fan Moez Kassam, of Toronto, in a sea of celebrating Dodgers fans after the Jays lost to the Dodgers during game three of the World Series.Barbara Davidson/The Globe and Mail
Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and the author of Fail Better: Why Baseball Matters.
It breaks your heart, the late MLB commissioner Bart Giamatti said of baseball. It’s designed to break your heart. And that’s true even without a single-swing walk-off defeat in the 18th inning at almost three in the morning.
It’s not just the much-noted prevalence of failure – the four-for-10 standard of greatness in hitting, the haunting record of career errors – it’s also the long arc of the game. As Jays fans watch in agonized hope for a World Series victory, we see the paradox of the contest itself. The more the games matter, the harder they are to watch.
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This is true in all sports when it comes to postseason or championship crunch time. But only baseball has excruciating tension baked into its essence. The long seconds before the pitcher’s wind-up; the slow sail of a long ball; all that looking and thinking and waiting. It’s made of expectation. Everything that makes baseball the ideal non-territorial sport, its contemplative longueurs and elegant geometry of effort, becomes almost unbearable when the stakes of the game are as high as they are now.
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Games function in a space of contingency. The unexpected can always happen: that’s why we watch. But baseball’s rhythms, the offensive pile-on bursts of a crooked-number inning, or the blink of a three-strikeout mow-down, are uniquely dizzying. Fortunes change with vertiginous swiftness. You see things you’ve never seen before. In football, if you give up a score, you at least have the consolation of getting the ball back. In baseball, the hits can just keep on coming, zero outs again and again.
In the last Jays World Series run, a newbie fan-friend kept looking at the slow play and saying to me, This game is so hard! It is, and it’s meant to be. Even now, with that annoying countdown clock hurrying the hurler along, pitches feel like forever. Fouled off. Fouled off. Fouled off. What genius, really, to have the first two fouls count as strikes, but no more. Difficult to get a hit? Yes. Also to get an out. To throw a strike. To turn a double-play. To do anything on that counter-clockwise field. Every return to home is a threat-filled odyssey.
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They call it a pastime, because it has those Edenic features that Giamatti and the other poets of the game (essayist Roger Angell, writer Donald Hall, to name just two) love so much. “In baseball-time,” Hall wrote, “we have left the clock behind us. Nothing is over, nothing is ongoing. But entering baseball-time, we have walked into the great day where successiveness is cancelled. Now is always; now is forever.”
That sounds great – in the summer. We want time to drop slowly when the weather is warm and the roof is open. When a beer and a hot dog and a friend are all you need for complete happiness in the here and now, at the park, that little corner of heaven. But come the autumn, when the air is colder and the remaining games dwindle – well, like it or not, it’s like the end of days.
Jays fans cheer during the game against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Saturday.Emilee Chinn/Getty Images
I know, I know: mysticism from the literary luxury boxes. But baseball really is also a metaphor for life. All that striving, when each moment matters but seems so trivial in itself. And then you start caring about the end, and the present becomes almost unendurable. Because its fragility cannot be set on one side any more. The beer is no longer consumed in leisurely sips, the gameward gaze is not so philosophical, and your posture is upright and tense from first pitch to last out. Some pastime …
We’re the lucky ones, Jays fans, to suffer this way. Just this year, spare a thought for the Mariners, our 1977 expansion classmates, who’ve never made it to the Series; or hapless Milwaukee, whose sterling regular-season record was no shield against the juggernaut Dodgers. The 1992 and ‘93 Jays victories seem so inevitable now, that we forget just how amazing any run to the top of the sport really is.
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And so here we are again, wanting it all to work out, awash in fear. Superstition runs riot: the magical thinking of lucky shirts and no-jinx speech. Anxiety is so rampant that this newspaper ran an advice article on how to cope: take a breath; remember that it is only a game; hydrate.
But we all know that it’s more than a game. The Jays bear the hopes of a nation as well as a city. They are a locus of collective joy in a world on fire, and they’re in trouble. But win or lose, it’s heartbreak time. Try to enjoy every clockless minute of it.