George Springer reacts after hitting a three-run home run against the Seattle Mariners.David J. Phillip/The Associated Press
When the Toronto Blue Jays signed former Houston Astro George Springer as a free agent in 2021, it was a big moment for the club. It showed they were finally getting serious about winning.
It may have been less of one for Springer. He was leaving the best team in baseball to join one that perpetually failed to get over the hump.
Springer waited a few years. Then he pushed the Jays over it himself.
His seventh-inning three-run blast on Monday night fits somewhere between Jose Bautista’s bat-flip effort and Joe Carter’s 1993 game-ender in the taxonomy of greatest-ever Jays home runs.
He put it near to where Carter’s landed in the left-field bleachers, to the same sort of hysterical reaction. Springer will never pay for a drink in Toronto again.
Blue Jays players celebrated for hours on the field at Rogers Centre and in a beer-and-champagne-soaked party in their clubhouse.
The Canadian Press
That hit propelled his team to a 4-3 win, and into their first World Series in over 30 years.
“I’m just so happy for everybody here – our fans, our city, our country. This is for them,” Springer said on the field immediately after the victory.
The Jays will now face the one that got away, Shohei Ohtani, and the Los Angeles Dodgers in that championship. It begins Friday in Toronto.
This was the sort of game the Toronto we’ve grown to know since the ’90s heyday was supposed to lose.
It started with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. being filmed entering the building in a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey. Don’t these people talk to each other? Bringing a Leafs sweater to a game is like wearing a red satin poncho to the bullfights.
The Jays shook in the first inning, giving up an early run. They rattled again in the third when Julio Rodriguez hit a solo home run.
When Seattle’s finisher, Cal Raleigh, hit another solo shot in the fifth, the crowd got quiet. They’d spent the night swinging from mood to mood, but that one got them doubting.
Then Seattle made the sort of small error that has turned games in this series. They sent Bryan Woo, one of their cult heroes and a repurposed starter, out to pitch the fifth. That went fine.
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. of the Toronto Blue Jays looks on after winning Game 7 of the American League Championship Series against the Seattle Mariners at the Rogers Centre on Monday.Vaughn Ridley/Getty Images
He was back in the sixth. Not great, but fine again.
He was still there in the seventh to face the bottom third of the Jays order. That’s when things went wrong. The first two men reached base. The third moved them over to second and third. Woo was yanked, but the pin in the Mariners’ season had already been pulled.
I’m sure Eduard Bazardo is a nice guy, but he’s the new Mitch Williams around these parts. He tossed up the meatball that Springer planted over the wall. The reaction wasn’t pandemonium because that word suggests disorder.
What’s your favourite piece of Toronto Blue Jays memorabilia? Share your story with The Globe
This was organized chaos. This was three decades of expecting the worst and usually getting it being released.
Whatever the Jays end up accomplishing in the next week and a bit, they have already shed their reputation as a team that doesn’t quite measure up. For the foreseeable future, they will be automatically considered a force in Major League Baseball.
At that point, it was a matter of turning things over to a series of fill-in starters, ending in closer Jeff Hoffman. Hoffman has been a wild ride all season long, but not on Monday. He struck out the side. It was the first time he’d done that in two months.
Los Angeles Dodgers two-way player Shohei Ohtani awaits in the World Series, which starts Friday in Toronto. Ohtani is coming off of a Game 4 win against Milwaukee in the NLCS that may have been the greatest individual performance ever in a baseball game.Ashley Landis/The Associated Press
The Dodgers aren’t a mountain to climb. They’re a cliff that peels away backward once you start trying to pull yourself up it.
They’ve played 10 playoff games and lost only one. In their most recent series, against Milwaukee, they gave up four runs total. In the game that closed the sweep, Ohtani had what was probably the greatest individual performance ever in a baseball game. Ten strikeouts as a pitcher, three home runs as a hitter.
The Blue Jays won’t be underdogs in this World Series. They’ll be whatever you’d find under an underdog. The underrug or the undercushion or the underflooring.
That didn’t feel like it mattered as the Jays took their victory lap after Monday’s game. They remembered to get everyone tangentially involved in the club, including owner Edward Rogers, up on the dais before they went back to pop the champagne. They wanted to make sure they got at least one proper celebration in before things get hard. The fans who remained – every single one of them – lapped it up.
Should the Jays beat the Dodgers? Absolutely not. Every one of L.A.’s starting pitchers is better than all of their Jays’ counterparts. L.A.’s line-up features a front three who’ve all won MVP awards. They have Dodger Stadium, which is as close as baseball gets to a gladiator arena.
Thousands of Blue Jays fans poured into the streets of Toronto on Monday night celebrating the team’s first World Series berth in more than thirty years.
The Canadian Press
But can the Blue Jays beat L.A.? Of course. Toronto has proven that they are more than the sum of their parts, though the parts are increasingly formidable. They lost one of their best players, Bo Bichette, to injury and got better. Guerrero wasn’t even a factor in Game 7 and it didn’t matter. This team wins when events suggest it should not.
When he came to the Jays, Springer had the reputation as a click-and-play Mr. October. He’d been a World Series MVP in 2017.
But the Jays couldn’t get anywhere in October, and Springer, 36, started to slow down. This year, he was asked to play less in the field, and had a resurgence at the plate as a result.
Still, you would have said that his contract – at one point the largest in team history – was a minor bust. Until Monday. If he never plays again, his place in Toronto sports lore is assured.
A team like that? As long as there are games to play, they have a chance.
What's your favourite piece of Blue Jays memorabilia?
For the first time since 1993, the Toronto Blue Jays are headed to the World Series. As fans reminisce about the last time Canada's baseball team got this far, we want to hear about your most treasured piece of Blue Jays history. Is it a signed hat from your favourite player? A memento from the '90s World Series wins? Submit your story in the form below. If you'd like to include a photo, submit it through this link.