(imported from tumblr)
There were two times in the span of the past week when I sat in my seat at the Rogers Centre during a game started by Cole Hamels and Marcus Stroman and wished for death. One of them was the five-hour, fourteen-inning marathon on Friday when the Jays slowly, excruciatingly failed to score every way possible and fell into an 0-2 series hole. The other one was Game Five.
The seventh inning of last night’s game was the most intense experience of my entire life. Not sporting experience, any experience. There were fifty thousand extremely confused, extremely stressed, extremely volatile people under that roof and nobody had the faintest idea, when the ball ended up on the turf and Rougned Odor ended up on home plate, what was going on. I only remember it in snapshots: the ball suddenly in front of third, Russell Martin staring at something. The umps waving at each other. A conference. Another conference. Beer on the field. Riot police on the field. The “don’t throw beer on the field” scoreboard announcement being drowned out by boos and more beer. We scrolled through twitter reports and comprehended nothing. I felt nauseous.
When the run counted and we knew for real, the whole stadium looked green around the gills. I thought, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if I just shrivelled up right here and turned into dust and blew away. Maybe they could scatter my ashes on the grass if they ever put it in there. It would be better than losing like this.
Sports, I have learned, tend to make me particularly dramatic.
An eighteen-minute delay, comprising mostly chaos and flying objects and shouting. The most obscure rule I can imagine. A surprisingly excellent job done by the umpiring crew, though of course we both did not know and did not believe that at the time. And, horribly, the go-ahead run.
By the time the inning ended, the crowd was a tinderbox. I worried there would be a riot. Absurdly, it was the seventh inning stretch, and more absurdly, people kind of sang along to “OK Blue Jays” before the fifty thousand strong booed the hell out of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”. All the way through. It was like some twisted funhouse, an old-timey organ tune faintly poking through thousands and thousands of deranged voices.
And then.
After each consecutive error the incredulous shouting cranked up a couple of notches. It really did feel like karmic retribution—one baserunner, then two and three, for free. Russell Martin said later “You have to win the game at that point”. After the madness of the top of the inning, I was relentlessly pessimistic, but suddenly it felt to me like they could.
I don’t remember the bat flip. I probably wouldn’t have been able to see it anyway, had I been looking there, but my eyes were on the baseball suddenly floating above left field punctuated by the loudest sound I have ever heard in my entire life. I am moderately surprised the roof didn’t fly straight upward and away. We wouldn’t have been able to hear it tear off.
I teared up and hugged people and screamed incoherently and my heart grew one thousand sizes. There are no words for how that felt - I can try (soaring, surreal, unbelievable!) - but they pale in comparison to all of our incredulous reactions at once to what happened to that unfortunate Sam Dyson fastball.
The story could have continued - it seemed for a few minutes like Elvis Andrus was going to erase his nightmarish day by tying it in the eighth inning and we would be there, again, for hours and hours, and my heart threatened to beat a hole in my chest. There are railings in front of every row in the 500 level, and I have never gripped them so hard as I did in the eighth and ninth of that game. There’s nothing to do with your hands when you’re that terrified. I clutched at my face, and the railings, and at the air, and then Roberto Osuna, twenty god damn years old, struck out Wil Venable. And there was the second loudest sound I have ever heard in my life.
R.A. Dickey sprinted down the left field line and started high fiving fans and flopping on top of them for hugs and handing them bottles of champagne. Mark Buehrle picked Marcus Stroman clean off the ground. Russell Martin ran down into right field and started high fiving fans over there just for laughs. Everyone was screaming and jumping up and down and high fiving everyone and looking like they had no idea how to comprehend what was happening. For a second I just stared at the “Blue Jays are Division Series Champions” graphics on the screen like it was some kind of insane dream. They played Drake’s “Big Rings,” of course.
They sang “Jose, Jose Jose Jose” thousands strong outside the Skydome for hours. My ears were ringing when I got home.
Game 5 of the ALDS is one of those games that, 24 hours later, is already being called one of the craziest games in history. Baseball has a lot of history, and somehow, last night, we still managed to make some more of it. It’s the game that millions of people will soon claim to have been at, but there are 49,752 of us - minus the handfuls who were ejected for beer-tossing before the greatest moment of our lives - who were there. We were there. And the Blue Jays are still here.