2026: It wasn’t supposed to end like this

On September 27th, 42-year-old presumptive Hall of Famer Max Scherzer walked out to the mound in a Blue Jays uniform to, improbably, pitch the eighth inning. He wasn’t coming out in relief; he’d been pitching the entire afternoon, starting on three days’ rest in what might turn out to be the final game of his career. He hadn’t seen the eighth inning since August 2025, when he pitched to one batter in the eighth before being relieved, and before that, not since August 2023. None of this was exactly routine.

It wasn’t supposed to end this way for him, not if you’d been paying attention all year; he’d been ineffective, with a bloated ERA and a tendency toward unraveling in the first inning before getting it together for a few more. There were injuries, brutally short starts, hard contact. But things started to turn around in the late summer, and now here he was: striking out six, coming back out in the eighth, going toe-to-toe with Justin Verlander one more time, with their all-time strikeout totals on the line. Here he was, reaching back for absolutely everything he had left and finding there was still quite a bit, actually.

On that day the Blue Jays were out of the playoffs already, with nothing in the standings left to play for. Of course the season wasn’t supposed to end that way either, with the defending American League champs never having a shot to defend. It was supposed to be beautiful—they came flying out of the gate in March, sweeping the Athletics in a show of clutchiness and excitement that made it feel like 2025 had never ended after all. But it never really felt like that again. On the fourth day Cody Ponce’s knee gave way, and in retrospect, so did the season.

In March, if you’d asked as many people as you could find to imagine the last game of the regular season, I would hazard a guess that none of them would have come up with this combination of disappointing flop and miraculous resurgence. What do you make of that?

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I struggled to watch baseball for a lot of this season because, well, last season sure wasn’t supposed to end that way. I can still feel the texture of the padded Scotiabank Arena seats during the Game 7 watch party, where I sat with one hand in my jacket pocket holding the Blue Jays mittens I had brought just in case I, for some reason, needed to be outside for a while, maybe all night. I imagined what it would feel like when the roof blew off the building, or what I would be doing when they won. I imagined this so often, and in such fidelity, that sometimes it feels like it did happen in some alternate universe, and I’ve only got the slivers of memory left after being transported to this worse reality. I felt that feeling in this reality for one beautiful nanosecond, when I thought Isiah Kiner-Falefa was safe.

Of course, I imagined how this season would go, the way we all did. All the home games sold out, stacking win after win in front of a raucous crowd, returning to defend that pennant, finishing what they’d started… the script was predictable, you could say, but ultimately satisfying. It resolved all the narrative tension. This time they figure out Yamamoto, or maybe—in a bolder draft—they don’t have to face the Dodgers at all. The supporting character even gets to wear her mittens.

None of what happened was in that script, though. Our beloved Kevin Gausman wasn’t supposed to get traded, and Brett Bateman wasn’t supposed to make us feel like that trade actually worked out so quickly. Shane Bieber’s shoulder wasn’t supposed to do that. Kazuma Okamoto wasn’t supposed to set the Jays rookie home run record, or for that matter the single-season strikeout record, either.

For most of us this was a lost season, the slipping-away of opportunity, the failure to capitalize on a bafflingly bad American League, the waste of seasons from Springer and Gausman and Cease and so many more. But I’d argue there is still some upside amid this massive disappointment. That Scherzer start alone is such a little sparkling exclamation mark on the scorecard—what a beautiful surprise, one of the few things that surpassed our imagined realities. So many of the surprises this season were unpleasant, sour, devastating. Wasn’t it a relief to sneak a few good ones?

Lindsay Dial of Baseball Prospectus writes:

For some, the only meaningful baseball that gets played as the clock ticks down is the hard-fought, dirt-scrabbling kind that sends one team to October and the other to Cancún. Those viewers will have been well satisfied by the Phillies and Diamondbacks jostling for position and the Astros and Rangers playing hot potato with their division title. What goes on in every other game, though of little import to them, is momentous in its own way. No matter the outcome, these innings are precious to every prospect getting their first taste of glory, every Quad-A player checking how much coffee is left in the pot, and every veteran basking in the last rays of sunlight before dusk.

Meaning isn’t something you create on your own. We do nothing in isolation, least of all this. Meaning is a dialectic, both process and product, an invisible mass filling the space between us that we breathe and shape as easily as air. It’s a conversation between teammates, between pitcher and hitter, between a fielder and a fan with a particularly tasty-looking basket of nachos, between TV and radio, between writer and reader, between the audience behind home plate and the one tuning in from an ocean away. It’s a dialogue with the memories of playing catch and ripping open card packs, with the faded marks of your parent’s pencil in a scorebook, with the winners and losers of ages past, with the hopes and dreams of every soul who was shut out from the game and kept on playing anyway.

Those Jays did keep on playing those precious innings anyway, long after the standings were out of reach. Eventually, when the wounds knitted themselves together well enough, I kept watching anyway. Of course we’ll still be there, in the stands, on the couches, with the radios, wherever it is—with those memories still fresh and excruciating like an emerging bruise, impossible to touch; or those numerous dustier ones of faraway seasons; or the newest ones of Springer and Scherzer and Gausman and their tearful goodbyes. Of course we’ll be back to make new ones, and find meaning in whatever we’re given. Whether I like it or not—and to be honest, mostly I don’t—I’ll have this season’s memories forever, but I’m imagining new ones already.