(imported from tumblr)
Every time the Blue Jays play the Kansas City Royals my brain gets thrown for a loop. I constantly mix up which team is batting and which is fielding; they both wear that beautiful royal shade of blue, matched with crisp white or boring road grey. The differences are surprisingly hard to spot at a quick glance or on a mini MLB.TV screen. The Royals sometimes feel like the Jays, alternating between unbelievably frustrating and unbelievable. Watching them now is like pretending I’m watching the Blue Jays, too—unlikely heroes in blue and white, everything I had hoped for, but also wrenching.
Somehow the World Series is already here, and those Royals are in it, and I hate it. We’re long past the point when we were supposed to have moved on from the regular season—all the recaps and think pieces written, all our wistful reimaginings stored away for the winter. Everything has already been said somewhere, but I still haven’t figured out how to put 2014 to rest. Last year I had months to craft the perfect eulogy for a lost season. I suppose the fact that the ending was so uncertain until the last days is comment enough this time around.
In every Blue Jays season, there comes that moment when you stop caring whether they win or lose. I mean, you care a little, in that winning games is infinitely more fun than losing games, and you’re at the ballpark with a hot dog and it’s sunny and a couple blasts of the dinger horn would perfectly cap off your weekend. But they’re also in fourth place, and it’s August, and the playoff races haven’t concerned them for months. They might yet play spoiler, but they’re already the spoiled. That familiar moment comes early in some seasons, like it did last year, or maybe after the break if you’re luckier. But it always comes.
This year, it almost didn’t. That’s the great hope, isn’t it? The hope that you care for 162 games and then on and on into the great beyond. The playoffs. The hope that the words mathematical elimination aren’t looming like an elongating shadow in the late summer sun.
The sun set this year on September 23, just five days before the end of the regular season. Mathematical elimination, that great deadly beast, finally caught up with us. We almost outran it.
I spent real money on playoff tickets this year. There was a Blue Jays postseason site and there were big fat charges on my credit card that went through. There was a not insignificant chance that I could hold physical ALDS tickets in my hand. The day that the inevitable refund email arrived, September 25, I had to take a second and exhale very slowly. So close. So impossibly, brutally far.
The Toronto Blue Jays have not played more than 162 games in a season since they won their second consecutive World Series in 1993. That’s a streak of 21 years, now the longest active postseason drought in the big 4 sports, thanks to the Kansas City Royals’ 2014 wild card berth (their streak went back to 1985).
And now, wild card, ALDS, ALCS, World Series. Look at them.
I hope they lose. I can’t help myself. In any other year but this—but I wanted us to do the impossible. It is hard not to be spiteful, and I will own that about myself and understand that it is unbecoming. Sports feelings are almost all unbecoming, when you look too close.
If last season was about letting go, this season was about feeling everything—rolling with the punches and emerging with the battle scars. I wanted to forget last season, bury it with the team and start fresh. It’s going to hurt for a while, unless they do something magical, but I don’t want to forget the Jays of this year and how close they got us. It was the most fun I’ve had in a long time.
The Royals have lost only one game in the playoffs this whole run. They have won a game in the World Series. If I squint, if I glance too fast, it could be us. It almost could have been.
Don’t you love it when it doesn’t work out quite the way it was supposed to
Don’t you hate it when it isn’t quite like the fairy tale that they told you
And you could hide it from my sight or drain it all away tonight
But I really wish you wouldn’t
—Stephen Stanley/The Lowest of the Low, “Dogs of February”