I spent this last week road tripping to and from Toronto, Ontario with my partner and two of our closest friends. It was an excellent trip and an excellent time. Toronto is a very cool city, so big as to be overwhelming, and I think I maybe saw 0.01% of it in the five-ish days I spent there.
I love cities. Living in a small one, I don’t always get a ton of what to me is the defining city feeling, which is walking into a street and being surrounded by hundreds of strangers. I think this feeling is extremely important. You should take every opportunity you can to feel the smallness of your self and the bigness of humanity as a whole. And as cliche as it is, I do love looking at strangers and imagining thousands of different stories.
Toronto is big enough that this feeling I’m describing was available everywhere, constantly. I loved being around so many people.
All that said, though, I did come away from this trip more convinced than ever that Halifax, Nova Scotia is the greatest city in the world. That’s a little hyperbolic, but who cares. Y’know what rules? The ocean. Toronto is full of stuffy Lake Air. Maybe the average Ontarian would be less of a stark raving lunatic on the road (people talk shit about Quebec driving, but Ontario is just as bad) if they could feel the ocean breeze. And there’s also really something to be said for the myriad ways that Halifax punches above its weight. It packs a whole lot of culture and cuisine into a pretty small space.
I did eat some life changing tacos in Toronto though, and I might not experience their like again unless I actually manage to visit Mexico someday. Definitely can’t do that in Halifax.
With the traveling this week, I didn’t have time to put together a music segment. But I have been listening to and enjoying Phoebe Bridgers’ new album, so expect a review of that and probably some other stuff next week.
Now, the main purpose of this trip to Toronto was going to a Blue Jays game for my birthday. My partner arranged the whole thing and bought my ticket as a gift. This was my first MLB ballpark experience, and I loved it.
First off, it was a fantastic game. We got to see a Dylan Cease start, which was pretty lucky, and almost all of the regulars were in the lineup (we only really missed Kazuma Okamoto). The Jays won, but not without drama: they were down 1-3 at one point before coming back and winning 5-3. They did this mainly through smallball antics that really had them looking like their 2025 selves. And they didn’t hit any home runs, but we did see two near misses from Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and one from Andres Gimenez, which was torturous, but the fun kind of torture. Lastly, while the high leverage bullpen arms having a rest day meant we didn’t get to see Louis Varland, we did get to see Spencer Miles make his first save of the season, which was very cool.
Seeing Baseball live made me appreciate the game even more. On a broadcast there isn’t really any way to show all of the action at once, at least not without giving up the behind the pitcher camera angle that makes the moment to moment pitcher/batter action so exciting to watch. In the stadium, though, you can see everything at once. I have a real sense for the first time of how long the basepaths actually are, and how impressive every single throw across the field is. Routine defensive plays that look simple on television look like genuinely impressive athletic feats when you can actually see how far and fast they’re throwing that ball. And it’s much easier to follow plays as they develop in person, when you aren’t beholden to the camera’s angle and the producers’ cuts.
Part of me worried that I wouldn’t really be able to enjoy a game as normal without that good behind the pitcher, strike zone evident viewing angle. So, I was pleasantly surprised by how much of the pitcher and batter I could actually see from where we were sitting, a couple rows back from the left field wall. I had no sense of whether a pitch was inside or out, but could see the pitches’ vertical position quite well. It was only barely less riveting than watching a pitcher and a batter face off on TV, and this was more than compensated for by the better view of all the action that comes after the ball is hit.
Maybe my biggest takeaway from this game was a new love for Brett Bateman, the Jays’ everyday centre fielder since their trade deadline moves. He drove in two runs on two hits, and walked once. This was after he received scarcely any applause upon being announced at the start of the game, and after I heard the jagoffs sitting behind us being kinda racist about his name. I was determined to be Bateman’s number one booster based on these things alone, but man, his performance had me hooting and hollering by the end of the game. I was shouting his name like a maniac after both of his hits. Looking at MLB Gameday I’m seeing that he was voted player of the game, and, well, good. I hope he gets warmer reception at the Rogers Centre from here on out.
The atmosphere was also just amazing. I love being part of a crowd for reasons similar to what I was describing above re:busy cities, and as the Jays started to come back the crowd just got more and more electric. We got to be a part of the entire Rogers Centre standing up for the last out of a save, and that was maybe the highlight of the entire evening for me.
Oh, also it was a loonie dogs night and I ate seven hotdogs. I do not recommend eating seven hotdogs. I hope to return to the Rogers Centre someday, maybe even next season, but my god I will not be eating seven hotdogs again.