The Blue Jays did not win the 2025 World Series. It was a heartbreaking loss. They outscored, and, in my opinion, outplayed the Dodgers, but could not crack Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and they fell victim to a variety of hilariously unlucky moments (Varsho getting bridge troll pranked, Barger’s wedged ball double, Kirk breaking his bat to end the series, to name a few). I could spend hours being salty. I have spent hours being salty. Right now, instead, I want to sing this team’s praises a bit.
This was the year I started seriously following Baseball. I’d watched a few games here and there over the past few years, and caught all of last year’s World Series. That was enough to whet my appetite, and I knew that as soon as I finished school and got a job I’d get myself a Sportsnet subscription and start really following the game. I also knew that my team, when I did, would be the Toronto Blue Jays.
I made this choice for for two simple reasons. First, nationalism is fun when it’s for sports. Fuck Canada, but also go Canada. Second, the Jays are my family’s team. They were my dad’s favourite team, they’re my mom’s favourite team, they’re both of my Baseball watching uncles’ favourite team. I love those four people, so I was preconditioned to love the Blue Jays.
Getting a job ended up taking a long time. I didn’t get that Sportsnet subscription until August, at which point the season was almost already over. I felt a little bit like a poser, jumping on so late in the season, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to feel the same level of commitment and investment as I would’ve had I started watching earlier.
Boy oh boy, was that unfounded. If there was ever a team to pull a guy in, it was these Blue Jays. They were perfect representatives of everything great about Baseball, maybe never more so than in their final tragic defeat.
First off, the personalities involved. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is incredibly cool. He and Bo Bichette having come up through the minors together makes for a beautiful narrative. And beyond those two, the lineup is incredibly deep. There’s Alejandro Kirk, everybody’s favourite short and stout catcher with a great bat and a slow run. There’s Daulton Varsho, the man who can catch anything. Davis Schneider, who walks up to Pink Pony Club and eats something his teammates call “nasty soup”. And of course there’s October hero Ernie Clement, who summed up this whole situation by attributing the Jays’ success to “the power of friendship”. How can you not love these guys?
In terms of actual gameplay, they were incredibly exciting to watch. A lot of Baseball teams these days have a real home run-centric approach to offense. This is perhaps best characterized by the villainous New York Yankees, a team made up of big tall guys who hit the ball really hard (a child’s idea of what a good baseball team is). The thing about that sort of strategy is that if you’re always swinging for the fences you end up scoring mostly on solo home runs, and striking or flying out most of the rest of the time. This is boring! A solo home run comes after no building of tension. It is a climax without a rising action. Would anybody care about Basketball if the only way anybody scored was by shooting three pointers?
The Jays don’t exactly have the opposite strategy -- that would be something more like the smallball centric Milwaukee Brewers -- but they play a much more well rounded and exciting style of offense. They hit a lot of singles, and they don’t strike out very often. They walk a lot. Their persistent at bats mean they end up on the winning end of errors like wild pitches and hit batters fairly often. Basically, they get a lot of guys on base. This is inherently fun to watch, but it also creates a perpetual underdog dynamic, as they always look like they’re working harder for their runs than teams that rely on going long.
That doesn’t mean they don’t have power, though. Guerrero and Springer can hit home runs with the best of them. Not to mention Bichette, Kirk, Barger, and Varsho. Hell, Andres Gimenez homered in two consecutive games during the ALCS. Their home runs tend to land like the straight line piece in Tetris, though, redeeming a carefully constructed tower of runners for so many delicious points. This is the satisfying sort of climax, the kind that comes after rising action.
On the other side of the ball, they had an incredibly consistent defense this year. It was absolutely embarrassing watching the error prone (to put it lightly) Yankees defense compete against a real Baseball team in the ALDS. These Blue Jays are just really good at catching the dang ball.
Putting all of this together, you have some charming guys who play good, exciting Baseball, and always look like the underdogs against teams that love whacking the ball out of the park. They were an incredible team to root for. Their style of play accentuated Baseball’s moment to moment tension, which is my favourite thing about watching the sport. This run they had made me a fan for life.
Of course, my other favourite thing about Baseball is how it embodies pure chaos. Anything can and often does happen in Baseball. This is exactly why it’s so beautiful when you get something like a go ahead home run to win game 7 of the ALCS. That’s a narrative moment, something that fits within human order. It’s the sort of thing Baseball is designed to resist, which makes it extra satisfying when it happens. Think, how likely was it, actually, for Joe Carter to hit a walk off home run to win the 1993 World Series? The odds of something so fittingly dramatic happening are incredibly slim, and that’s what makes them special. Conversely, every time something like that doesn’t happen, every time a game ends on a ground into double play or a pitcher walking in a run, it’s a reminder that the rule of the universe is chance, and storytelling is a thing we made up. It’s good, dare I say healthy, to be reminded of that often.
These Blue Jays had a lot of Baseball chaos going on. As I said earlier, they grinded out long at bats, which let them take advantage of many wild pitches and the like. On the flipside, they made a lot of baserunning blunders. They had the most comeback victories in the league. They went from 0-2 to 4-3 in the ALCS, in a series where neither team won a home game until game 5. Vladdy’s bat fell asleep for the last month of the regular season, right before he had arguably the greatest offensive postseason of all time. Blue Jays games this season were unpredictable, which made them exciting, and which made the emerging narratives all the more exciting to follow.
The kicker to this season of unpredictability was losing the World Series on a broken bat. It was heartbreaking, but can I even complain? This was Baseball chaos at its finest. It had all the beauty of grass poking through cracks in cement. It was the sort of dumb luck that reminds us of our place in the universe, that we all live and die by things that are beyond our control and often silly. These Blue Jays were as Baseball as it gets, and that means losing because something stupid happened. It only would’ve been more fitting for them to win with a big hit from Kirk in the flimsy world of human narrative. Baseball has plans and whims we cannot fathom. Baseball operates so far beyond the realm of human order that the fact that we play it is basically coincidence. Baseball is chaos, and it’s beautiful.
As much as I loved the 2025 Blue Jays for being exciting and playing the game well, I will remember them for being extremely Baseball until the very end. Baseball is stupid, I love it, and I can’t wait for more.