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| the time has come for one and all |
Well here we go! And how are we feeling about it, Vladdy? About the whole state of affairs we find ourselves in as we approach the 2026 season, the fiftieth summer of Blue Jays baseball? "We acquired new players, great players," he said through an interpreter (his English has really come a long way, but I get it; I get it). "I think this is going to be more fun. I’m actually happier than last year. For whatever reason, I’m happier and feeling great. I have good feelings about this year." Oh man, me too, Vladdy! I'm so glad we are in agreement on these important matters! Like you, I am just so stoked! Even this super short offseason (let us note, however briefly, that the WBC was great [Canada, tied for fifth? I will take that just about every time, honestly]) was starting to feel a little long, and I must admit that I have already checked out on a good deal of Preseason Blue Jays Discourse, which has largely focused—understandably, and yet to my light chagrin—on some version of the question, "have they done enough to be better than the team that almost won it all last year?" Of course not! There is no such thing as that! That's as good as a baseball team gets, two outs away from beating the 2025 Los Angeles Dodgers! There aren't other steps you can take! That's as good as we have ever been, in the entire two-time World Champion history of the team, a history of which I am acutely aware (as I am pretty old) in minute detail (as I am a man of focus [not in the John Wick sense {though we both enjoy judo and making friends there}]), and as good as we're ever going to be, and it just didn't quite happen ("that's baseball," one might well say): you come off a seventy-four-win, last-place season with largely the same guys, win ninety-four and the AL East through the power of friendship, knock the Yankees out of the playoffs on a bullpen day (a bullpen day), overcome our 1977-expansion cousins from Seattle on a Game Seven homer off the bat of old man/certified "unc" George Springer (born anew, it would seem) in the seventh (three straight strikeouts on an infinity of Jeff Hoffman sliders in the ninth [oh my god Julio is swinging at all of these; please just keep throwing them; oh my god he did just keep throwing them) and then play an historically great Los Angeles Dodgers team (the top third of their lineup is going to the Hall of Fame! the top third of it! the very the instant that they are eligible! and that's not their only Hall of Famer [Clayton Kershaw for sure too]! what the heck!) to actually eight-plus games worth of innings in one of the greatest World Series that there has literally ever been, and that's it; that's as good a baseball team as you are going to have, guys. Any prolonged experience of baseball (either the baseball of the primary world of our experience, or that of the secondary world[s] of sub-creation [we speak here of simulation and/or simulacra) is that any great season, any truly great season is, if you will forgive the frankness of my language in this instance, an absolute fucking miracle. That's what last year was, and that's what this year will almost certainly not be, and I do not say that as someone somehow insufficiently stoked about Kazuma Okamoto and Dylan Cease and a returning Max Scherzer who is touching 96MPH on the strength of playing piano every day (in my experience, that's fun to do even if the rewards are just the music itself, rather than velo; maybe try it if you haven't!). Last year gave us the most possible baseball, as Ernie Clement compellingly wrote, in any number of senses; it is almost certain that this year will give us less. And yet, to borrow a phrase from Andrew Stoeten, "if I'm the Toronto Blue Jays—and I fucking am," I look at this year like I look at every year since the start of 2021: this is a good enough team to win ninety, if things more or less go our way. And even if they don't, there'll still be baseball, and plenty of it.
In closing, for now, I wanted to note, if only for a moment, the recent passing of the great Rodger Brulotte, who, alongside his colleague and friend Jacques Doucet, is one of the true legends of French-language baseball broadcasting. The meticulous Doucet (whose Il était une fois les Expos with Marc Robitaille I have mentioned many times before) was the straight-man to Brulotte, who provided endless colour. Brulotte's passing was received in the French-language media as a doubly sad event, as it served as another occasion to lament the loss of the Expos (post-Expos, Brulotte was an essential part of French-language Blue Jays broadcasts until his health no longer permitted it, but he is inseparable from the Expos). There was a lovely video tribute and moment of silence at the Habs game last Friday, and Youppi, appropriately, was front and centre.
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