A country holds its breath

Michale Poulin shifted quickly from foot to foot as he stood on the concrete at the World Series watch party in Nathan Phillips Square, in the shadow of Toronto city hall.

As a couple dozen diehard fans settled into multi-coloured Muskoka chairs lined up in front of a giant video screen, he adjusted his Blue Jays cap, which was precariously perched on a thick woolen toque. Small crystals of ice were already forming on his long wavy beard.

His fidgeting was designed in part to chase away the stone-sharpened edge of the Toronto cold, and partly to work off his nervous energy about whether the Blue Jays were going to do something they had not done in his lifetime.

When the 2025 season started, did Poulin, 26, think the Jays had any chance of capturing a World Series championship? “God no,” Poulin says without hesitation. “I thought it was going to be a complete repeat of last year when we finished in last place.”

When did he start to think it could happen again? “At some point in the season, it was like a switch flipped or something. They just kept winning. Couldn’t stop winning. It was like they had taken a page out of the Trump playbook: we’re going to win so much, you’re going to get tired of winning.”

For a fan, Poulin’s analysis is pretty bang on. The momentum the Jays built at the mid-season mark seemed to have no limits. Moreover, there was no reason to believe that this year the Jays would challenge for the World Series.

For the Jays to even threaten to win the World Series, and to do it while the country is facing an existential threat from U.S. President Donald Trump, is truly a triumph of hope over probability.

The Jays very nearly pulled victory out of the jaws of defeat Friday night but through a series of misfortunes — the kind of quirky incidents that define playoff baseball — the Jays came up short in Game 6. The good news for Poulin, and the legions of fans who were not around to see the 1992 and 1993 World Series championships, is there will be another chance in Game 7.

Another chance to defy the odds and to send annexation-minded Americans an unambiguous message.

---

As legend has it, poet Walt Whitman famously dubbed baseball “America’s Game” in a series of conversations with his friend Horace Traubel, published as a nine-volume biography in 1906. In these conversations, Whitman expounded on his belief that baseball embodied all that was good about America and could serve as a force to unite its people.

Whitman said baseball had “the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere; it belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly as our Constitution’s laws; is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.”

It’s impossible not to wonder what Whitman would make of the current Major League Baseball season, one that will be decided on foreign soil against a complex and alarming geopolitical backdrop?

One would hope that he would enjoy the irony.

Although none of the participants will come right out and say it, almost everyone involved understands that through a series of coincidences — the vast majority of which have nothing to do with baseball — this World Series has taken on a greater meaning. A meaning that has cast a shadow that reaches beyond Downtown Toronto’s Rogers Centre and Dodger Stadium at Chavez Ravine.

Even greater than the historic back-to-back championships won by the Blue Jays in 1992 and 1993. Greater than Canada’s triumph in the 4 Nations Face-off last February. Greater because it comes at a time when our sovereignty and economy are under threat by America’s despot-in-waiting.

---

It may not be the first place you think of when looking for a bar to watch the World Series. But what the Motel Bar on Queen Street West lacks in profile, it makes up for in pure personality.

The tiny cocktail bar in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood is owned and operated by Daniel Greaves, lead singer of the iconic Winnipeg rock band The Watchmen, and his wife, Lisa Black. Over the 15 years they have run the Motel, it has slowly, perhaps inevitably transitioned into an opportunistic neighborhood sports bar.

Part of that is due to the fact that Greaves shows every Winnipeg Jets game on the bar’s smallish big-screen TV. But more recently, as Blue Jays fever has gripped the city, Greaves and Black have made sure the bar is open and the TV is working for all the playoff games.

“As the playoffs went on, the excitement was growing,” Greaves says prior to Game 6 as the tiny bar is starting to fill up. “We’ve been surprised about the number of people who are coming in here — we’re not really a sports bar. But this has become such a big deal, here and across the country.”

The excitement that has built around the Jays is predicated on an irrefutable reality: when all of the numbers are crunched, there is no good reason for the Jays to be where they are.

The Jays are not just underdogs, they are a Frankenstein’s monster of a team made up of a handful of bona fide superstars who are surrounded by a few aging legends and a supporting cast of players that nobody else wanted. Bill Plaschke, the incomparable baseball writer for the Los Angeles Times, wrote on Thursday that the “supposedly greatest collection of Players in Dodgers history … could lose the World Series to the Toronto Blue Jays, a hearty band of overachievers.”

Plaschke is not exaggerating.

Outfielder Nathan Lukes spent 10 years in the minor leagues before becoming a mainstay of the Jays roster. Utility infielder Ernie Clement nearly left baseball in 2023 after he was released by two teams, and is now hitting nearly .400 in the World Series.

And then there is outfielder Davis Schneider, an alarmingly short and stocky utility man with a push-broom moustache who was drafted in the 28th round of MLB’s entry draft. Schneider, who hit a home run on the first pitch of Game 5, finally made it — to the majors in 2023 after seven years in the minors with a used glove that he took from a lost and found bin at a baseball training facility in New Jersey where he coached in the off-season.

The Jays did not win the American League pennant and earn a trip to the World Series by blowing teams away. The Jays led the major leagues in comeback victories, scratching and clawing their way back from early deficits. While star-laden teams competed to see which one could hit the most home runs, the Jays took pride in being among the best at fielding the ball.

All in all, the Jays were hard working, gritty, tough-nosed and the opposite of flashy. In other words, the kind of team that Canadian sports fans could really love.

On the other side of the diamond, you have the Los Angeles Dodgers, one of the most successful teams in MLB history and as such, are also among the most hated.

The team comes from the most populous state. Its fan base includes who’s-who of the glitterati of music, movies and television. All of which is to say that this would not have been as good a story if the Jays were playing the Milwaukee Brewers or Cincinnati Reds, two other very good teams that made the playoffs this year but could not make it to the World Series.

Still, is this really Canada’s team? Can we say with certainty that all of Canada is cheering for the Jays?

First, it deserves to be noted that we only have one dual Canadian citizen on the team — the aforementioned Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who is Dominican but was born in Canada when his father, Vlad Sr., played for the Montreal Expos. Other than Vladdy, none of the current Blue Jays are Canadian. There are 22 Americans, one from Mexico (Alejandro Kirk), one from Venezuela (Andres Giménez) and one from the Dominican Republic (Seranthony Dominguez).

Even without players who can claim citizenship, this is a team that acknowledges and welcomes national attention and expectations. Game 6 starting pitcher Kevin Gausman, whose decision in 2022 to come to Toronto as a free agent was foundational for this year’s team, has frequently talked about how he has grown to love and appreciate Canada. He claims a special fondness for Kokanee beer and has let his fashionably trimmed beard grow longer because it’s the playoffs.

“I think now I understand we have one team for an entire country,” Gausman said recently.

Manager John Schneider joined Gausman in acknowledging that the Jays are, especially now, Canada’s team. And that Canadians can be demanding fans. “When you’re feeling a country, it kind of gets a little dicey at times,” Schneider said in a TV interview. “Like the sixth inning, bases loaded, nobody out and Aaron Judge hitting, you feel like people in Nova Scotia might want to come murder you.”

It doesn’t hurt that record numbers of Canadians are watching the games on television.

While American sports media were lamenting the fact that this year’s television ratings for Games 1 and 2 were 14 per cent lower than last year, when a battle of titans involving the Dodgers and New York Yankees drew an average American audience of 14.5 million viewers.

However, in a potent display of American myopicism, those reports buried the lead: when you consider total viewership in Canada, Japan and the U.S., more than 30 million people — including seven million Canadians — watched those games, a ratings record for the World Series.

So, yes, it’s Canada’s team.

That is not to say that Canadians have used the World Series as an excuse to vent their anger towards Trump. In fact, politics has been largely absent from the series. There may have been some concern prior to Game 1 in Toronto that Canadian fans would boo the American national anthem, as they had at hockey games — including some in the 4 Nations Face-Off — in the immediate wake of Trump’s first comments about annexing Canada.

Nothing of the kind happened. Canadians summoned their deepest “Elbows Up” sentiments during O Canada, but also cheered during the Star-spangled Banner. The Jays had arranged for performers to hold coloured placards to create a living Stars and Stripes in centre field; when it was time for O Canada, those placards were flipped over to create a vivid Canadian flag.

The symbolism of those gestures were not lost on fans or journalists.

There was a flutter of concern when Trump announced, on the eve of Game One, that he was cutting off trade negotiations with Canada to protest an anti-tariff television advertisement featuring Ronald Reagan that Ontario Premier Doug Ford ran on U.S. networks.

Those concerns were later exacerbated by a post on Truth Social in which Trump appeared to be disparaging both the Jays and Dodgers. “No matter who wins I will refuse to invite either baseball team to my ballroom as they are both run by highly inept officials from California and Ontario Canada,” the post, shared by a meme account on Instagram and widely shared on social media, read. “I don’t host losers. We are actively investigating MLB. This World Series is rigged, probably by the Dems & Mafia.”

Despite the fact it sounded authentically Trumpian, it turned out the post was completely fabricated.

When it’s all said and done — and regardless of the outcome of Game 7 — this World Series will forever be known as a one-of-a-kind event. A global sports spectacle involving two teams in two different countries that are joined by a common history.

The only certainty about today’s Game 7 is that both teams will be ready to wage battle, and the diehards will be back to brave the cold in Nathan Phillips Square.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca