Don't be afraid of the ball

The idea that baseball is a cruel, unsupportive sport doesn't need re-recognition. That notion has been around for as long as sportswriters could count to three, doing our best to ape dear, old, Tennyson on our way toward detailing how some hirsute rounder struck out on three swings.

Way to make him work, Casey. As if we can't learn from these things. As if we didn't watch Vladimir Guerrero Jr. stare down sinker after screwball after sinker on Saturday, balls dropping into the dirt, 3-0 counts his Hall of Fame father didn't want to wait for. Vlad Sr. didn't have the luxury his son enjoys, Vlad Jr. grew with some certainty, the comfort reminding him he's allowed to do it his way or his father's way, doesn't matter, there's a way. Unburdened, Vlad Jr. hustles like a no-name scrub.

Everything was done before, everything was unexpected. Trillions of viewers poring over screens on Friday and Saturday evening, waiting for another walk-off home run to win the World Series, breathless for that backyard moment to return, setting off the sepia or standard-def sparks from 1960 and 1993, expecting it, Halley's Comet but without the conclusive data.

Too cloudy, in Game 7. Guerrero's best attempt at immortality fell short of the warning track, great pitching beat great hitting, the tie went to the visitor.

The middle-aged forever rule sportswriting, and currently we dominate the (microblogging) social media promoting it, I'm not alone in perpetually picturing the 1993 Blue Jays. Finding it adorable and also adora-horrifying that the Jays feature Vladimir Guerrero Sr.'s kid and also Dante Bichette's kid and also, also, Gary Varsho's kid.

Daulton Varsho was fun. A few years ago I'm watching a ballgame and see a player with "Varsho" on his uniform and think the only time I've heard that name is on Chicago Cub Gary Varsho and then I realize this guy's name is "Daulton Varsho" and I've never heard "Daulton" as a first name before because I wasn't in a frat. On the fly we're forced to deduce Gary Varsho was a Phillie at some point and teammates with Darren Daulton and Daulton Varsho is the result.

Not like that. I know that's not how they make baseball players. They're flown in, via stork, from Dunedin, Albuquerque. Yes, the stork spits sunflower seeds.

Vladimir Guerrero Sr. worked entirely during the space I did not watch baseball, post-Nevermind (Eric Karros' entry denotes the beginning of that generation of players). My immediate Dante Bichette recollection remains the way every picture of him, every baseball card I unwrapped, made me uneasy. I won't link to one, don't ask me.

In spite of this discomfort, we rooted for the Jays because they faced the Dodgers. The Dodgers currently have the greatest baseball player ever plus a couple of other guys also in that running. The Dodgers have the sublime Mary Hart and the battered Burt Sugarman and the attending Magic Johnson in his giant, long-sleeved LA(rry Bird) shirt. But we can't root for the Dodgers because they drill oil out of Ebbets Field or something. As if Rick Monday is the one voting to advance judges in Alabama.

The Jays owners I haven't looked up, guessing it is some sort of socialist deal up there, all the weird Canadian coins in the parking meters go to Vlad's contract extension. What I can tell you is I've watched a few Blue Jays games on illegal streams from Canada and Canadians really love cheddar cheese.

Ketchup-flavored mayo as reductive cultural summation aside, Toronto is a gleaming dream, TRL Times Square on every block. Outsider visions of Ontario remind me of Grand Rapids but with London-ass architecture somehow tucked in the Benelux region. Toronto isn't actually that far away from here, I could drive there right now. Six months from now. If I apply for a passport tomorrow. And if Canada lets me, after this paragraph.

The 1992 and 1993 Jays teams always ring in my ears, easily the most unappreciated group of World Series winners in my lifetime, buried by the 1994 strike. Raw deal, for a group which held the belt for three full years.

The 1993 World Series was Letterman fodder, national MLB intrigue unlike any previous pairing I could recall.

Usually the Fall Classic was for us dweebs, kids with baseball cards and somewhere Bob Costas, probably listening on radio during the years they wouldn't let Costas call it on TV. Bob or not, the late 1980s and early 1990s were not great for ratings nor the three different national networks broadcasting World Series games.

Bellwether Dave didn't make Top Ten lists out of Kevin Tapani or Robby Thompson or Mike Davis, but did for Philadelphia's Phillies because they were full of tubby guys with exquisite taste in music:

'Sawyer Brown' is, I'm presuming, the name of John Kruk's production company.

I'm a National Leaguer, not a godless communist, so I rooted for Philadelphia in 1993. Toronto's Blue Jays were irrepressible, however, one All-Star after another. By the time Mitch Williams came up near the end, well, nobody expected a home run, but we were ready for anything.

When the home run hit, it hit: I'd just watched a home run win a World Series. I'd just seen another human do the thing that meant the most to me five years before. The role assumed when whapping that tennis ball over our buddy back's fence.

The brain runs its qualifiers and by the time Joe Carter hits second base you realize we're watching Mazeroski Stuff as it occurs, your own version in your own generation, boxes somewhere stuffed with the stats of men like Joe Carter, Paul Molitor, Tony Fernandez, Dave Stewart, poor Mitch, and as many John Oleruds as our friends would trade us.

The Jays were loaded. Best team of my youth because, unlike LaRussa's A's, those Jays won it twice.

Then you grow older and somehow dweebier and find out the Jays had the best AL record of the 1980s, which is hard to believe, you used to watch the Sox play them all the time at that green parking lot the Blue Jays worked in, how could anyone hold a bat up there:

Baseball coulda gone on strike in 1993, for the attention I gave it, but the Blue Jays' romp toward consecutive titles, pitched the year after we turned their flag upside-down like a bunch of jerks, was too much fun to keep away from.

Game 6 in 1993 – Joe Carter touching them all, 12 months before there wasn't a World Series – was for many of us The Last Baseball Game.

They're trying to bring us back. We complained about the late Tim McCarver's banal musings so much that they gave us one of our old baseball cards to talk back to us, the guy we'd throw into trades as a sweetener: John Smoltz.

Smoltz' only memorable contribution to 2025's classic World Series was chiding a once-in-a-lifetime athlete for taking too long to warm up between innings because John Smoltz' bosses didn't like the lost air.

Images of baseball's best player throwing warmup pitches in Dodger blue during a World Series Game 7 wronged the ticking watchhands at FOX. Unforgettable moments are best left off air, never shown to begin with, in favor of spaces served by advertisements for mental health medication or rash balms, each pill with severe side effects, enough warnings to take up at least seventy-five percent of each ad's voiceover copy.

(Nobody ever took John Smoltz baseball cards as a sweetener. You knew he'd be in the Hall of Fame someday, didn't matter, then and now, nobody wants a John Smoltz card.)

Luckily for us, on a night when kids could watch, we got to see Shohei Ohtani practice one of the two things Shohei is once-in-a-century-great at, show us how to grit strikes when the stuff isn't there. No Smoltz could harsh our smile. Not with fortysomething Max Scherzer pitching on behalf of everyone Max's age, watching the World Series while feeling rather washed for bowing out of the Halloween party early the night before. Not even making it to the bars in costume, hurrying back home to "sort" the kids' candy instead.

We got a bench-clearing brawl in a Game 7 of the World Series. A hit-by-pitch in the huggiest World Series in history still inspired each member of each bullpen to huff 400 feet and touch the pile, just to say they did.

Better than this? Next at bat after the pitcher hits a batter with a pitch, inspiring a melee, the pitcher is hit by his own batted pitch. A hit-by-pitch and bench-clearing brawl immediately followed by a whap up the middle smacking the pitcher.

Targeted pitcher emerges from scrum screaming expletives that are, again, luckily, available on a weeknight for children to watch and learn from. The angry pitcher walks to the mound, pitches, takes a smashed single off the leg. If you've ever seen that before, if you can remember that in any other ballgame outside of Game 7 of the 2025 World Series, keep this trivia to yourself.

And Ohtani? The starting pitcher helping erase the deficit he created on the mound but at the plate and with his bat and after that pitcher was pulled from his start? This probably happened before in an important game and it was probably Babe Ruth but they didn't nationally televise things during The Great War, if they did it would be issuance of influenza outbreak updates.

It didn't work out for Toronto, it never does when you leave teammates on base. Not everyone can be Kelly Dwyer in 1992, lacing a Walt Hrniak-styled triple off Danny Smith to score three runs and tie the little league's Big Game. Dwyer later scoring the winning run from third. Standing up.

It is no fun leaving them out there, I learned early. The same year I got into baseball I had to be told about my favorite team recently blowing the World Series. That year I watched that favorite team make the World Series again, blow it. I guess people from the Toronto area will have to figure out something to do through winter.

Who I did think about after Game 7 was Sarah Morris. Knocking out gamer after gamer, All-Century work, still living the dream.

There is nothing like baseball, summer, and then it goes away for a little while. Not everyone can live in Los Angeles.

THERE'S A WAY

Thank you for reading! If you haven't already, check out 'Stealing Home' by Eric Nusbaum.

Or is it "mayo-flavored ketchup?" Either way, I don't do footnotes. College dropouts should not get to use footnotes.

Yeah we went to the bars on Friday, closed one down, saw Max Scherzer (he was dressed as Austin Powers). I did not have any kids' candy to "sort" at home so on the way home I bought a bag of candy corn and bag of the trail mix with M&M's and mixed it, shagadelic baby.

Several longtimers re-upped this week, thank you for supporting me. I will only buy a couple of packs of baseball cards, I promise.

NBA soon!