Last weekend, I witnessed the biggest post-season comeback ever by a Major League Baseball team playing away from home.
To put that into context, the league began in 1876, the same year Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for an invention he was calling ‘the telephone’.
The only bigger recovery in play-off history came in game four of the 1929 World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Philadelphia Athletics, when players had names like Woody English, Sheriff Blake, Bing Miller and Lefty Grove.
The Seattle Mariners, in their first post-season berth since 2001, came from 8-1 down after five innings, to win 10-9 after nine.
As a broadcaster and journalist, these are the moments one should crave and cherish. The problem was, it was against my team.
I’ve been travelling to watch the Toronto Blue Jays ever since taking up temporary residence there in my late teens. I hadn’t been since Covid, so this was an emotional pilgrimage back to my ‘happy place’.
We had already lost the Friday game in this best-of-three shoot-out, but home advantage and the most exciting team we’ve had in a long time gave us genuine faith, and that was borne out by a terrific start.
Back-to-back home runs from Teoscar Hernandez, hits flying everywhere like confetti. Then, it all went so horribly wrong.
If the first half of the game was orgasmic, the second half was like watching your parents have sex. Still, it’s not like I’d made a 7,000-mile round trip to witness it.
The carnival atmosphere inside the Rogers Centre turned funereal, a season ended in a flash, while a pocket of travelling Mariners faithful gathered behind the away dugout in an otherworldly state of euphoria.
I was happy for them. Baseball isn’t like football. There is no segregation. Beer is served freely. The crowd is a mix of all ages. The passion still oozes from every sporting pour, but isn’t measured in confrontation. Still, this is a sporting scar I will never be able to fully erase, and there’s a damn good reason for that.
Prior to the game, my brother Christopher and I, swept up in play-off hysteria, bought Blue Jays-themed Hawaiian shirts. In the eighth inning, we watched in horror as Bo Bichette and George Springer collided going for the same catch, the latter poleaxed.
It was the incident that epitomised the game, and summed up the temporary insanity that had set in.
It was the very minute I realised the historic horror of what was unfolding before my very eyes.
It was also around that moment the TV coverage cut to a close-up of my brother and I, in our Hawaiian shirts, looking like we’d just found out that our house had burnt down. That shot was replayed ad nauseam across Canada. Over and over again.
As I sat in the departure lounge on Sunday, waiting to catch my rescheduled earlier flight home, it popped up on six screens at once, a mocking farewell as my gate number was called.
On the runway, my mind flashed back to Istanbul, 2005, when I was on the right end of a sporting miracle, as Liverpool came from 3-0 down against AC Milan to win the European Cup.
The reality is, these moments of extreme highs and crushing lows, come hand in hand with being a true fan.
I’m not addicted to the simple art of kicking, or throwing, or batting, but to the hopes and dreams conjured by them, even if, all too often, they are shattered into a million pieces.
I discovered baseball in 1995, so I have never seen my team make a World Series, let alone win one, and maybe I never will.
Regardless, I’ll be back next season, my hand luggage packed to the brim with fresh belief. Still, this time, I think I’ll leave the Hawaiian shirt at home.
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