My first memory of baseball fandom was watching Saturday afternoon television broadcasts – the only ones – in the early Sixties, with commentary by Dizzy Dean and Peewee Reese. It was obvious that they both knew a lot about baseball, but I was too young to know that they were living legends.

Forty years later, one of our kids developed a deep interest in baseball, and I took him to quite a few Jays’ games in the late aughts and early teens. For a few years we even had ten or fifteen game packs in the section behind home plate, for a relatively inexpensive $62 (CDN) per seat. Those were not the Jays’ greatest years as a team, though we did get to see Jose Bautista and Roy Halladay.

More years passed, our son is now studying abroad, and tickets are much more expensive. In recent years I have paid less attention to the Jays, especially when they were last in the AL East last year. But, with the Jays in contention since June this season, I started paying attention and watching their games on television. When I returned home after my heart surgery in late August, watching Blue Jays games became one of my favourite activities, particularly in the evenings, when I was more fatigued than usual.

The Secret Sauce

As a management scholar, I was fascinated by two great virtues of this Jays team. They didn’t give up when they were behind in a game or in a series. They had 49 come-from-behind wins in the regular season, more than any other team. Towards the end of the season, they lost their 5-game lead over the Yankees, and I was sure they were going to fold. But they won their last two games against Boston, also a contender, and the final three games of the season against Tampa, to win the division. After losing the first two games in the American League Championship Series to Seattle, they came back to win. They did this in dramatic fashion with Springer’s iconic homerun — yet another comeback. Repeated come-from-behind wins demonstrates persistence, determination, and grit on the part of the players and, on the part of management, creativity in deploying position players and pitchers.

The legendary Yankees manager Casey Stengell, a contemporary of Dean and Reese, said, “the secret of successful managing is to keep the five guys who you know hate your guts away from the four who haven’t made up their minds.” I interpret this is an observation on the intrinsic difficulty of achieving teamwork in a sport in which so many measures of performance are individual. The Jays seemed to achieve a unique level of teamwork. When Bo Bichette was injured in early September, many other position players compensated for his absence both in the field and at the plate. The players batting later in the lineup (Kirk, Barger, Clement, Snyder) all became increasingly productive as the season went on, giving the team a lineup that was strong from top to bottom. The members of this team appear to have enjoyed playing together, encouraged one another, and celebrated each other’s achievements. I hope that authors who are now writing histories of this magical season provide a comprehensive explanation of these two aspects of the story.

Echoes of Peewee and Dizzy

In addition to the performance of the team, I greatly enjoyed the way the Sportsnet announcers, especially Buck Martinez and Dan Shulman, called the games. Baseball is a complicated, even intellectual, sport, as epitomized by the term “inside baseball.” Martinez, a former catcher, and Shulman, embrace the complexity, unlike announcers on other networks or, even worse, the announcers on Apple TV. They pay great attention to the strike zone (helped by computer graphics) and are willing to second-guess the umpires. They discuss pitchers’ strategies as they select among their fastball, curveball, changeup, cutter, or slider to trick or overpower batters. And Martinez and Shulman explain the pitching errors that lead to hits and home runs. This season, I finally came to understand the differences among all these types of pitches. Thank you, Buck and Dan!

My Favourite Ad

Part of my pedagogy in narrative courses was to show students noteworthy ads that tell stories in creative and concise ways. I saw one ad that I liked well enough to use in class, were I still teaching. It’s from the Home Hardware chain and I encourage you to watch it here.

The ad uses a well-known earworm from the Canadian rock group Trooper, “raise a little hell.” It shows a group of either actors portraying Home Hardware workers or (I would like to think) actual Home Hardware workers. They are imitating baseball players, for example wielding a 2 x 4 like a bat, or a welder’s mask like a catcher’s mask, or doing the celebratory ice-water dump on the player-of-the game. They are evoking the ways so many fans fantasize. The last worker in the ad, a blond woman, puts on eye black, and then winks at us, a reminder that, at the end of the day (or the end of the season), it is still a game.