In his recap/warning to Blue Jays fans following their quasi-singularly traumatic World Series Game 7 experience, Defector’s Barry Petchesky, referencing the Yankees loss against the Diamondbacks in 2001, put it thusly:
So let’s have a little heart-to-heart chat, you, the grieving and traumatized Jays fan, me, a fan who was on the wrong side of what was probably the best and most dramatic World Series until this one. Maybe I can help:
You’re screwed. You will never get over this. You will never fully recover. The sharp pain may age to a dull ache, but it will never go away. You will go hours, then days, then weeks without thinking about how close you came—and then something will remind you, and it will hurt all over again. Who you were last week is not who you will be for the rest of your life. You are ruined; you are a ruined human being. Something that was whole and good in you is irrevocably broken now.
How can you not love baseball?
The Yankees were 3-time-repeating World Series champs at this point, mind you. But he’s not wrong. Losing hurts more than winning owns, generally. I’d be lying if I said cared too much about Game 7 in 2003 outside of being humiliated on my walk home from Yankee Stadium by Youthful Passersby In A Car; I wasn’t yet 10 years old in 1986 and didn’t even see Game 6 — we were camping — but that one stung more than most. So much so that until last week, I would have said that despite some serious competition, it was still the harshest World Series loss ever, but I no longer believe that. A new challenger has approached and won. Lost, that is. Won at losing.
Unless the Blue Jays pull some Kansas City Royals “lose in Game 7 one year but dominate the next season” shit, Barry is right. Who Blue Jays fans were last week is not who they will be for the rest of their lives. We have been there so we know, but also we’re only human. I am not a Blue Jays fan, and I have post-traumatic stress about what happened. At some point, every day, I will think about it and shudder. The sheer number of coinflips that landed for the Jays not on Tails (“never fails”) but on ALL THE PATHOS is singularly brutal. I’d only wish this on Yankees fans — and I’m thrilled Barry still thinks about 2001, that’s fuckin’ right! — and probably Rats fans, but the Jays? Absolutely not.
In a dogsend for Major League Baseball, this game reset the clock on the demise of the sport as a cultural institution. How could it not have? The big, bad guys won in freakish circumstances, led by their once-in-several-lifetimes star, and just barely, at that. All they did was destroy a country, in that country, in the cruelest way possible. Sounds bad, surely. But aren’t we going to tune in to see what’s next?
For the Dodgers, yes. For the Blue Jays, I’m worried. There’s bad and there’s bad. This was the second one. Max Scherzer probably gonna retire. Bo Bichette could be gone. Beyond that, it’s just hard to compete, and that’s before you get to the whole “traumatized by coming as close as pretty much anyone could to win the World Series against one of the best teams of all-time” and having it come up ALL THE PATHOS four, five, six times in a row. Buckner was what, four at worst?
The only upshot of all this is that despite what I’ve written until now a depleted and sad Blue Jays team next year would help us (the Over the Monster readership) quite a bit… as would Shota Imanaga, to throw out a name at random. It’s been 72 hours, and everything is lookin’ up. How can you not love baseball?
