Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and the Blue Jays had Canadians rally behind them as they came within a breath of winning the World Series last year. Now they'll try to keep the good times going for a full season.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
In the middle of another dispiriting Leafs home game on Wednesday, the camera flashed to a bunch of Blue Jays on hand watching from a suite. They were lined up, most of them in hockey jerseys. They looked like the only people in the building having fun.
While the shot lingered, Ernie Clement pointed rhythmically at one of the new Jays, Kazuma Okamoto. The gesture seemed to say, ‘Meet our new buddy.’
Okamoto looked a little confused and a lot happy. For the first and last time all night, the crowd woke up. Their best pals from last October had just showed up.
What they were responding to wasn’t success. Last year’s Jays weren’t successful. Not in a way that typically lends itself to that sort of reaction. They don’t go bonkers in Montreal whenever they see the 2021 Stanley Cup finalist Canadiens.
The Jays’ magic is the romance of true friendship. Whether they intended it this way or not, this team has become the Care Bears of pro sports. Caring is their superpower.
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In order to deepen that connection with their supporters, the Jays don’t need to win this year (well, they need to win a little). What they need to do is continue to convince people that they are good guys in this for the right reasons who are worthy of your trust. Basically, that they’re your boyfriend.
On Thursday, the day before the opener, Jays GM Ross Atkins was trying, in his jargon-y way, to explain what that meant.
Atkins variously referred to what the Jays have as “cohesion,” “connectivity” and “intensity.”
He remarked on “how genuinely they are full-in for one another.”
Ernie Clement, seen here making his Game 7 World Series slide into home plate, isn't a superstar in baseball, but has the room to be vocal in the Blue Jays' environment.Mark Blinch/Getty Images
I gotta tell you, Heated Rivalry has become a hammer in the hands of anyone who thinks philosophically about sports. All of a sudden, everything looks like a nail.
Atkins is expressing the sports executive way of thinking about friendship – as a measurable data point and potential competitive advantage. What if you were able to build a team filled with people who actually liked each other? What would that do to hard-hit balls in play?
In the real world, this is as complicated as any workplace, if everyone in the workplace were in their lavishly funded galaxy. Who’s in charge, officially and unofficially? How do they handle themselves? What does that permit everyone else to do, and be like, and think and say?
The Jays are apparently a flat society, wherein everyone is allowed to have a personality and express an opinion. That’s the secret sauce.
Take Ernie Clement. He’s a 30-year-old journeyman who only became a major-league regular a couple of years ago. Even still, he’s no star and never will be. You ever notice how much talking he does?
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If the Jays are unusually caring, no one cares more than Clement. He’s the guy who said during the playoffs that the Jays were driven by “the power of friendship.” That was as big a moment as any win during that run. It turned more sports agnostics into bandwagon jumpers than any feat of baseball.
To open this season, Clement did an essay in The Players’ Tribune about his love of the game. A lot of ‘I’s in that piece.
You think the 10th or 12th best player on the Leafs, the Canucks or the Jays from five years ago would ever dream of calling so much attention to himself? He would not.
It would put him in danger of being seen as a me-first guy without me-first talent – the gravest sporting sin. Only big stars can be me-first. Their limits in that regard are proportional to the dysfunction of the team they play on.
Fans were pulled in by how genuine the Blue Jays' closeness seemed in their journey to the very last possible game of the Major League Baseball season.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
All this niceness and openness may or may not lead directly to sporting success, but it has very definitely captivated the imagination of the people who watch them.
Sports teams were once encouraged to be nice, because that was a baseline of comportment for all people out in public. TV killed that impulse, and the internet cut up the body.
Nice has become an insult. Nice is for losers. Sports stars can be wild, robotic, disaffected, criminal, self-obsessed or any other anti-social thing you could think of, as long as they’re good. Armed with cultural cache and an insane amount of money, the pros have taken off running with this sudden tolerance.
This is why last year’s Jays seemed so different. They acted with each other in ways that athletes no longer do. Goofy, sensitive, intensely altruistic, platonically romantic. They didn’t just admire and respect each other. They came off as a little in love with each other. When it ended, they all cried together.
Remarkably, this intimacy was extended to the fans. No where-were-you-when-we-weren’t-any-good grousing. Total, open-hearted acceptance of their new celebrity status and all the Johnny Come Right Nows bidding up aftermarket tickets.
The Jays made the turn from relative nobodies to big-time somebodies seem like a natural transition, when it absolutely is not. The natural reaction is to fold in on yourselves.
The Toronto Blue Jays will kick off their regular season Friday night as the reigning American League champions. Canada's lone big-league team is looking to get over the hump this year after dropping Game 7 of the World Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers last fall.
The Canadian Press
The Jays let everybody and anybody in. All of a sudden, everyone you knew was in love with this team. By the end, their failure was your failure. That must be why so many people were thrown into serious, days- or weeks-long post-Game 7 funks.
To be honest, it was kind of weird to watch. Not because of the intensity of feeling, but because, against my deeply cynical instincts, I think it was completely genuine. I see a lot of wild things in sport, but this was a new one.
The No. 1 mission for the 2026 Toronto Blue Jays isn’t winning the World Series. It’s something much more difficult than that. It’s transitioning an entire country from the October honeymoon phase into a healthy, lasting relationship that can survive a regular season.
If we accept that, then the real question for the Jays isn’t, ‘Are they as good as last year?’
It’s ‘Do I still get butterflies when I think of them?’