november 3 etc

02 Nov, 2025

Baseball is the cruelest sport and no other sport comes even close, but in its cruelty it teaches you something. The thing it teaches you depends on who you are, but no one is exempt from the lesson.

This isn't a baseblog but if you only started reading it a month ago you probably wouldn't know that. I started adding a bit more baseball stuff, little by little, because the Blue Jays' postseason run captivated the minds and hearts of, well, everyone, and I am part of everyone, and I've been a Jays fan for 40 years, and if you claim to be a baseball fan but didn't or couldn't find something miraculous in what the Jays just did, you may want to check your own pulse.

Still, the season is over. The good guys lost and the bad guys won and anyone surprised by this hasn't been paying attention to the world for a while because the bad guys have been doing a lot of winning and the good guys have been doing a lot of, well, dying I guess. Why? Tradition, probably.

I'm not as bothered by the Jays losing as some thought I would be, by the way. This isn't to say I'm not in agony about it, because I am, but just that the pain doesn't bother me anymore.

Being a sports fan is to volunteer for pain. This is something you do based on an assumption. You assume you know what it will feel like when your time comes, when your team wins it all, and that this feeling will be good enough to make the pain you endured worth it. Having been there (Jays 1992, 1993; Raptors 2019), it is 100% worth it, but it's something that every individual fan needs to experience to really understand why it's worth it to them.

In my experience, winning a championship eliminates not only the pain but even the memory of the pain. The scars heal up. You find yourself stronger at the broken places but you don't know why.

This is why in an act of what can only be described as calculated masochism I spent a few days going through all the various takes on the World Series, the Jays, the Dodgers, baserunning, deferred contracts, the Ohtani rule, the Dodgers' connection to and support of ICE, the Rogers family's friendliness with Trump, tariffs, the umpiring, and all the questionable calls. (I will go to my grave saying that it wasn't a lodged ball and you will never be able to convince me otherwise, by the way.) I didn't respond to anything. I just... ingested. I have my thoughts and feelings about this past Jays season and I don't need anyone else to tell me what they are, but I also like reading other folks' interpretations of reality so I can more finely tune what I think they think about other things because of their thoughts on this one thing. People aren't as original as they think.

Also, I'm still in Victoria and my internal clock was borked even before we "fell back" this past weekend and as such my posts are going up later than usual.