The World f*ckin' Series!

PLAYOFFS!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!

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Image via Mike Harrington

The Toronto Blue Jays host a World Series game tonight at Rogers Centre. I’ve written a lot of strange things over my years covering this club, but for me nothing has ever felt as strange as that.

I’m not sure that when my journey began in late 2006, the ink on Frank Thomas’s contract with the Jays still barely dry, such an idea would have felt so alien. Nor do I know at what point that all changed. The Jays’ World Series drought was a “mere” 13 years old then. Would I have guessed 19 more seasons would have to pass—nineteen years of hope, excitement, dread, anguish, anger, apathy, jubilation, and everything in between—before we’d get there again?

The law of averages alone would have said no. There were only 13 other American League teams at the time, and at least one of them made the World Series every year. We were practically due.

And then 19 years.

For me, though obviously a ton has changed, it’s also been 19 years of trying to cut through the bullshit about this team. I think that is, primarily, still what I see my job as being. It can be a bit of a cynical grift sometimes, if I’m being honest. And I’ve always found that it gets harder when there’s really nothing I could credibly call bullshit in sight. And that feels case right now. Everything is so pure.

The ups-and-downs of a full season, or of a whole era, slope so broadly—almost imperceptibly—that it’s easy to gain traction pushing back. “Nothing is ever as good or bad as it seems” is a refrain I return to time and again when I feel the ground underneath Blue Jays fandom starting to shift. Vlad will sort it out. The manager isn’t a clown. Somebody will take their money. Patience is a virtue.

But in the immediacy of the playoffs, the idea simply won’t hold. It can’t hold.

Everything now is either really bad, or really, really good.

I’ve said plenty of words about this team on numerous podcasts over the last couple of weeks, but I haven’t written enough of them here. My apologies for that. But I remember freezing up during the Jays’ 2015 run, too. Sometimes you just want to be a fan and not think too much about anything other than the next out. It’s never been my goal to compartmentalize or professionalize too much. And it’s hard to want to get into the weeds analyzing an agonizing defeat you’d rather quickly forget. Sometimes it’s just as hard to conjure much to say after a big victory than yelps of joy. Especially when the whole hip world is watching the same exact thing, having the same exact thoughts—because I want what I do to be novel, and there’s just not a whole lot of novelty in that.

But it’s also hard, I’m realizing, because the tools I prefer to apply in trying to understand the sport go out the window at this time of year. If George Springer doesn’t smash that Eduard Bazardo sinker into the left field seats in the bottom of the seventh inning back on Monday things would have been exactly as bad as they seemed—and the Jays would have been desperately running out of time to change that.

I prefer to zoom out, in other words, and right now we could not possibly be more zoomed-the-fuck-in.

What we’re experiencing is the most kind of fun you can have watching this sport, but it’s also something of a different sport altogether. That’s obvious, and I know that I know that. But I guess it isn’t always so obvious.

There are examples all over the place of what a strange and different world we’ve found ourselves in this month. Trey Yesavage being leaned on like a grizzled veteran. Chris Bassitt suddenly becoming a leverage reliever. Bo Bichette taking balls at second base.

There’s also a big one in that 2015 team I just mentioned. That was the Jays team that, until now, brought us closer to glory than any other over these long 32 years since Joe Carter touched ‘em all in 1993. And it was the team that felt most like it should have.

In our Patreon-exclusive bonus episode this week, Nick and I went position-by-position through the roster of that team and this one, and the difference was quite stark. The 2015 Jays were better all over the place. They had the horses. They were, frankly, not unlike the Jays’ opponents in this upcoming championship series, the Los Angeles Dodgers.

They also didn’t get it done.

There’s something worth remembering in that. Because as much October baseball forces us to abandon certain lenses through which we view the sport, it also magnifies the fact that this is a weird, funky, random-ass game. And as much as we like to think we know what greatness looks like, we don’t.

Those 2015 Jays led baseball with a 117 wRC+ and 232 home runs, then put up a 93 mark in the postseason and were outhomered in the ALCS by a Royals team that had finished the regular season with nearly 100 fewer. Their team ERA went up a full run in the playoffs from 3.81 to 4.81—a worse mark than this year’s Jays have had in October so far (4.36), despite having a clearly inferior staff according to mine and Nick’s analysis.

It’s a strange sport. The Dodgers have been an incredible team for a very long time, full of future Hall of Famers, not missing the playoffs since 2013, and yet they only have two World Series titles to show for it. The Yankees haven’t won a World Series since 2009. Before that they last won in 2000. That’s also the last team to have won titles in consecutive years—something the Dodgers are now trying to do.

The juggernaut doesn’t always win, in other words. And greatness comes in many shapes and sizes. That’s also something I think is worth remembering, vis-à-vis 2015.

A lot of fans got their first taste of baseball greatness when 2015’s rocketship took off at the trade deadline. I’ve long thought that many are still chasing that high. Still believing that a team can’t truly be great without giving off that feeling of invincibility—of inevitability. But, of course, they were neither.

And now here we have this plucky 2025 squad—plucky, that is, inasmuch as a top five payroll team can be—hopefully providing a badly needed corrective. It can be OK when your team doesn’t always look the part, or when you can’t see a path from there to here. Magic can happen. It is happening. To us.

Right now FanGraphs gives the Jays a 40% chance of winning the World goddamned Series. A break or two, a couple of unanswered runs, and those odds will already start being upended. Yet, even a couple of bad games out of the gate won’t, as we saw in the ALCS, necessarily doom this journey. We don’t know what greatness is ultimately going to look like.

And as intimidating as the Dodgers feel, they won fewer games than the Blue Jays this year, since mid-August they’ve lost series to the Angels, Diamondbacks, Pirates, and Orioles (and split a four-gamer with the Rockies), and no team that’s swept an LCS series has ever gone on to beat a World Series opponent that won theirs in seven. Plus, we’ve got home field advantage, we’ve got an offence that’s produced a higher playoff wRC+ than any playoff team since the 1989 “Bash Brothers” Oakland A’s¹, just enough pitching to hold it together, and vibes that are absolutely off the charts.

Time to throw out everything we think we know and just zoom the fuck in.

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1. A heavily favoured unit that, one year later, was swept in the World Series by the underdog Cincinnati Reds, I might add.