New York Yankees' Aaron Judge talks with Toronto Blue Jays first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. during a game in the Bronx last month.Adam Hunger/The Associated Press
When Yankees broadcaster and professional loudmouth Michael Kay ripped the Blue Jays in July, it wasn’t what he said.
What Kay said made a sort of sense – that the Jays, who were in first place, weren’t a first-place team based on their run differential. Baseball nerds have this discussion all the time.
Rather, it was the way Kay, a native New Yorker, said it. It was the sneer in his voice.
The Yankees have never rated the Jays, because New York doesn’t rate Toronto. I don’t even want to think about what they’d say after a couple of beers about the rest of Canada.
Hockey, sure. They’ll defer on hockey. But baseball? What’s next? Football? Are you serious?
Anybody who’s followed Toronto sports for a while knows it’s not worth hating New York teams, because they won’t hate you back. They’d need to see you as equals for that to happen.
The nadir of this tendency was the Howie Clark incident.
Clark was a 14-year-veteran who’d yo-yo’d between the majors and the minors – mostly the minors – his whole career. He’d worked construction in the off-season to pay the rent, making him the last, honest-to-God working-class pro. He may also be the sweetest guy I’ve ever met in baseball.
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In 2007, he caught on with the Jays for the second time. In his debut that year – a meaningless late-May encounter with the Yankees – then-New York star Alex Rodriguez decided to yank his chain.
Jorge Posada popped a two-out pitch up in the infield. Clark settled under it. As he ran past, Rodriguez yelled something. Jays players later said it sounded like, “Mine.” Clark thought he was being called off. The ball dropped in. A run scored.
The Yankees were already winning the game. The only purpose of Rodriguez’s shout – he later said he’d yelled “Ha,” which doesn’t make it any better – was to humiliate Clark.
Had he done it to an all-star in a game that mattered, it would have still been an awful abrogation of fair play. But to do it to a guy who’s just hanging on, in his first game, for no reason other than to do it?
Then-Jays manager John Gibbons got it. Gibbons was a yeller, but he rarely got genuinely angry. He was angry then. As angry as I ever saw him. He couldn’t believe someone so high on the baseball ladder had done that to someone so much further down.
That incident expressed better than any “they got a great team over there” quote how the Yankees actually felt about the Jays. That they were lesser than.
This summer, Kay reminded everyone that things haven’t changed. That’s what people were reacting to.
Even his apology reeked of noblesse oblige. He made excuses, then he ripped Sportsnet broadcaster Jamie Campbell for waving a broom after Toronto swept New York.
Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay was unhappy with the way Blue Jays broadcaster Jamie Campbell celebrated a series sweep earlier this year.Duane Cole/The Globe and Mail
“I love Toronto. It is a cosmopolitan city,” Kay said. “You’re waving a broom on a postgame show? You’re turning it into Mayberry RFD.”
(I had to look that one up. Maybe they watch a lot of TV Land in the Bronx.)
Why do all set-tos between Canadians and Americans feel like the weaponization of our national reputation for niceness? “What, you’re mad? I feel terrible about that, loser.”
When things kick off on Saturday, it will be the first time the Jays have played the Yankees in the postseason. Maybe that’s part of it, too. If you’re feeling good about your prospects in a fight, it’s hard to take your opponent seriously until they’ve hurt you. The Jays have never hurt the Yankees in a game that really mattered. They’ve nicked them up, but they’ve never knocked them out.
The last time Toronto was really good – the late eighties and early nineties – the Yankees were mostly terrible. The Jays couldn’t snatch from them something they weren’t capable of grabbing in the first place.
Now, 50 years in, they have that chance.
I make it a practice not to care who wins what game when, but it would be fun to watch the Jays stomp the Yankees at 161st Street.
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I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t make much of an impression. A one-off, New York would tell itself.
Then I’d like to see Toronto do it again. And maybe one more season after that.
This is the only bright spot to wild-card expansion. It makes it theoretically possible that right now, Toronto can break New York’s (and Boston’s) heart for a generation.
It’s beneath any Canadian team to want to be taken seriously in the States. Not just because it can never happen, but because it’s a perversion of how rivalry works. You can only be proper rivals with the places that are most like you.
Let’s face it – Calgary is Edmonton with bigger belt buckles; Toronto is Montreal with a different accent. Hence, the great rivalries.
When we start parsing the small differences between this place and that which we claim add up to a chasm, we’re showing how close we are. That people will read this and be angry about it proves my point.
New Yorkers don’t know anything about us. They know it’s cheaper up here, and that you don’t go broke if you fall off a ladder and need to go to the E.R. Some blah blah about multiculturalism, and isn’t this where Drake has that big, ugly house?
New Yorkers are not our rivals. It’s not romantic like that. They are our frenemies from work. We see each other every now and again, and they never remember our name.
We go to them, but they never bother coming to us. That’s fine. Not everyone is meant to be your best pal.
But you draw the line at a lack of respect. There’s no call for that sort of thing. You don’t earn respect from someone who’s not willing to give it. You take it from them. In this case, you do that one baseball humiliation at a time.