Posted, October 31, 2025
As I write this the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays are gearing up for game six of this years World Series. As a person with one foot in Europe and one in Canada and having grown up in Canada of course I am rooting for the home team. The truth is, it is our only professional baseball team in Canada at this point. And that is a bit of comment on the whole nature of this being a “world” final sporting event. Outside of the United States and central America the sport only exists in pockets around the world and has had a long legacy of being challenged as an Olympic sport as a result. Not dissimilar to basketball in that regard. So the name World Series is somewhat aspirational in nature but as it is a business they get to call it whatever they want. It’s not that different to some places in the world with replicas of the Eiffel Tower claiming to be the largest Eiffel Tower in world. Sorry kids, there is only one Eiffel Tower.
Like other Canadians I am totally enthralled in the fight and hoping “our” team, which usually consists largely of Americans, Cubans, and many from central America will defeat their team of similar national heritages, with a couple of Japanese players as well. Not a lot of Canadian Content in what many are dubbing our “national” team.
For some it also has a political layer. Canada is under siege from Mr. Trump and his tariffs and threats to take over Canada and make it the fifty- first state. It has hurt us a lot, and to have a Canadian team be potentially winning this very American of games is a sweet irony.
We also ignore that as a professional team, these players may at times be a “team” but ultimately their agents will remind them that at contract time they only negotiate one on one.
But these points aside, I do love to watch any sport that is played at a high level. And this is certainly an example of that. I don’t know much about baseball but watching what some of those pitchers can make a ball do, is only a bit short of the cartoon pitches where the ball goes around the batter a few times before finding the catcher’s glove.
I was sitting watching the game and found myself having to google various terms of course. I started with slider and the references were all to hamburgers, another American thing.
Like everyone else who is enthralled by this competition right now, we know in our hearts and minds that the horrific treatment of Gaza continues, that Putin has not let up in Ukraine and that most economies are struggling. But that gets turned off for a moment while we focus on this. It is like the few times I have been sitting in procession of cars travelling from the funeral home to the graveyard and watching kids playing, birds singing and people seemingly not realizing I have lost a loved one. We all live in many worlds and for our own mental health need to have some things that give us pleasure, even when we know the bigger picture may not be as rosy. My parents told me stories from some happy times from their youth as kids and when when I looked at the dates involved realized it was in the Depression.
As the underdog, the Blue Jays are similar to that championship Toronto Raptors team from a few years ago. A few veterans, some rookies who had been cleverly acquired and more than a few overlooked seasoned players on a comeback. This is the team fighting the all- powerful team with the funds to buy the best players in the world. Sounds like a movie script to me. Probably a Hollywood production but shot in Canada.
Go Jays go, and Happy Halloween!
Django