Wasn't really rooting for any specific team this time around but that was one of, if not, the best game of baseball I've watched. Yamamoto absolutely deserved that World Series MVP. Absolutely...
Wasn't really rooting for any specific team this time around but that was one of, if not, the best game of baseball I've watched. Yamamoto absolutely deserved that World Series MVP. Absolutely insane he came back out for multiple innings after throwing 96 pitches yesterday.
That must've been awesome to watch from a neutral perspective. I was neutral in 2011, which had one of the most exciting games I've ever seen. I never really had a team growing up, so I was mostly...
That must've been awesome to watch from a neutral perspective. I was neutral in 2011, which had one of the most exciting games I've ever seen.
I never really had a team growing up, so I was mostly an anti-Yankees nomad until 2020. That was the year I moved to a place that was a few blocks from Dodger Stadium and watched Jon Bois's masterpiece on the Mariners. Since then I've been about 60-40 Mariners-Dodgers. This Blue Jays team took years off my life. My stress eating/nicotine lozenge consumption from tonight has to have cost me at least 6 months. When the post season started, I had Mookie's physique, now I look like Alejandro Kirk.
God that Mariners doc was so good. I was rooting for them to get to the World Series, but knew they probably would have been slapped down by either of these teams. Still. What a series. Joked...
God that Mariners doc was so good. I was rooting for them to get to the World Series, but knew they probably would have been slapped down by either of these teams. Still. What a series.
Joked tonight that this is kinda the 8 and start of the 9th games of this best of 7 World Series. 18 innings was nuts.
I'm a Toronto fan, so it was pretty hard to watch, but I was 99% sure after Barger caught the stupidest out at the end of the 6th game that they were done for. Yamamoto was a machine and really...
I'm a Toronto fan, so it was pretty hard to watch, but I was 99% sure after Barger caught the stupidest out at the end of the 6th game that they were done for.
This whole World Series has been fantastic. Lots of close games, including one of them that went to 18 innings. Both teams did very good and kept us at the edge of our seats!
This whole World Series has been fantastic. Lots of close games, including one of them that went to 18 innings. Both teams did very good and kept us at the edge of our seats!
Those tags. That has to be one of the worst losses in any sport ever. The Blue Jays outplayed the Dodgers in every aspect of the game and somehow let it slip through their fingers. When Rojas hit...
Those tags.
That has to be one of the worst losses in any sport ever. The Blue Jays outplayed the Dodgers in every aspect of the game and somehow let it slip through their fingers. When Rojas hit the home run in the 9th I remembered that the Dodgers were the bad guys, because that was some shit that only happens for the bad guys in sports. Sorry, OP.
I was holding off on making a post about Ohtani's brilliance - really, it's unbelievable - but after tonight he somehow seems human compared to Yoshinobu Yamamoto. If you told me about a team that won the World Series behind the efforts of a two-way player and a guy who started game 6 and closed game 7, I'd have guessed it was from the 1920s not the 2020s.
Alas, the World Series title is where it belongs. It's America's pastime, it belongs with an American team that's made up with the finest Japanese and Latin American players in the world.
I tried to give enough comprehensive tags without being too much. I wasn't sure if it should be defeats.soul crushing though because I lost track in the last discussion about hierarchical tagging....
I tried to give enough comprehensive tags without being too much. I wasn't sure if it should be defeats.soul crushing though because I lost track in the last discussion about hierarchical tagging.
My son is 11 and this was the first time he was pretty into a Toronto team and how they were doing, and I got to explain to him that this is generally what it is like as a fan of Toronto sports teams.
This reminded me of an old Bill Simmons column: The 13 Levels of Losing TRIGGER WARNING: POSSIBLY TOO SOON This was a level one, with both guillotine and stomach punch moments. At least his odds...
Definition: This one combines the devastation of the Broken Axle game with sweeping bitterness and hostility ... your team's hanging tough (hell, they might even be winning), but you can feel the inevitable breakdown coming, and you keep waiting for the guillotine to drop, and you just know it's coming -- you know it -- and when it finally comes, you're angry that it happened and you're angry at yourself for contributing to the debilitating karma ... these are the games when people end up whipping their remote controls against a wall or breaking their hands while pounding a coffee table ... too many of these and you'll end up in prison.
Best Example: Game 7 of the '97 World Series (Indians-Marlins), when Cleveland's Jose Mesa gave up the game-tying run in the ninth inning. Every Indians fan knew it was coming. Of course, the '97 World Series never happened, so it's probably a moot point. We need to get that one wiped out of the record books.
Personal Memory: Just about every crucial Bruins-Canadiens playoff game from the '70s, especially the unforgettable "Too Many Men on the Ice" game in '79, when the B's blew a chance to advance to the Cup finals by getting called for one of the lamest penalties in hockey (Guy Lafleur tied the score in the final minute, then the Habs finished us off in OT). One of two games that actually made Young Sports Guy cry in the '70s (along with the '78 Yanks-Sox playoff game); I couldn't figure out how I was 8 years old, yet I knew the Canadiens were coming back. Just excruciating.
Level II: The Stomach Punch
Definition: Now we've moved into rarefied territory, any roller-coaster game that ends with A) an opponent making a pivotal (sometimes improbable) play, or B) one of your guys failing in the clutch ... usually ends with fans filing out after the game in stunned disbelief, if they can even move at all ... always haunting, sometimes scarring ... there are degrees to the Stomach Punch Game, depending on the situation ... for instance, Sunday's Kings-Lakers game and Monday's Celts-Nets game featured agonizing endings, but they weren't nearly as agonizing as Cleveland's Earnest Byner fumbling against Denver when he was about two yards and 0.2 seconds away from sending the Browns to the Super Bowl).
Best Example: Wouldn't it have to be the Titans-Bills playoff game from '99, when the Bills kicked the alleged game-winning field goal in the final seconds, then Tennessee pulled off that miracle Wycheck-to-Dyson lateral play for the game-winning TD (on the kickoff, with no time remaining)? Not only was that a Top 5 Stomach Punch game, it doubled as the greatest Gambling Moment of all-time (since Tennessee ended up covering by a half-point). That was un-beeeeeeeeeeeeeee-lievable.
Personal Memory: Magic draining that baby sky hook to topple the Celts in Game 4 of the '87 Finals, capping off a Celtics collapse and preceding Bird nearly saving the game at the buzzer (he missed a 25-foot prayer by about 1/100th of an inch). Fifteen years have passed and I still haven't fully recovered from that chain of events. Unreal.
Level I: That Game
Definition: Game 6 of the 1986 World Series ... one of a kind ... given the circumstances and the history involved here, maybe the most catastrophic sports loss of our lifetime.
Personal memory: The only game that actually combined The Guillotine and The Stomach Punch. No small feat. Let's just hope we never travel down that road again.
This was a level one, with both guillotine and stomach punch moments. At least his odds of going through something this bad again are pretty slim.
Great read - I just read the whole source - and yeah, I agree, this was a level one. I"m actually going to put back the soul crushing defeat tag, I think your comment makes it a worthwhile addition.
Great read - I just read the whole source - and yeah, I agree, this was a level one.
I"m actually going to put back the soul crushing defeat tag, I think your comment makes it a worthwhile addition.
I hear this sentiment a lot, and leafs aside, I think that ("what it is like as a fan of Toronto sports teams.") is pretty common to most cities. Aside from like Boston and LA, how many cities...
I hear this sentiment a lot, and leafs aside, I think that ("what it is like as a fan of Toronto sports teams.") is pretty common to most cities. Aside from like Boston and LA, how many cities actually see repeated success? Toronto won the NBA chip just 6 years ago, and came within centimetres of a world series win (after winning back to back 30 years ago). Compare that to somewhere like Cleveland, where of their 3 big teams (Cavs, Browns, Guardians), only one has won anything in my lifetime, and that was a single time that required a generational (perhaps best of all time?) talent putting in the absolute series of his lifetime to narrowly win in a game 7, with 3 straight wins when down 3-1.
Most teams just don't do well, only 1 of the 30-32 teams can win each year, and most cities are just shit outta luck.
I don't disagree in general with what you are saying, but it's really hard to put the leafs aside, as they are our (and by "our" in this instance, I mean my immediate family) primary team that we...
leafs aside
I don't disagree in general with what you are saying, but it's really hard to put the leafs aside, as they are our (and by "our" in this instance, I mean my immediate family) primary team that we have typically supported in our primary sport that we have watched.
There's loads of teams and only 1 wins is very true though.
Poor kid. Must have been a rude awakening. Ah well, at least he can learn from his mistake of allowing himself to feel hope that a Toronto team might actually win a championship. Now he can...
I got to explain to him that this is generally what it is like as a fan of Toronto sports teams.
Poor kid. Must have been a rude awakening. Ah well, at least he can learn from his mistake of allowing himself to feel hope that a Toronto team might actually win a championship. Now he can finally just give into the despair like the rest of us Jays/Leafs/Raptors fans... or he can always start cheering for the Argonauts or Toronto FC, since at least they have less teams to compete against so have more of a fighting chance. ;)
Well, it is the WORLD series, not the US series, sooo... I personally would like to have more international teams involved in the league--Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean--if the US ever gets back to...
Well, it is the WORLD series, not the US series, sooo...
I personally would like to have more international teams involved in the league--Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean--if the US ever gets back to being a decent place for foreigners to travel. Baseball is a great sport for fostering international connections and I would love to see that expanded.
I did watch most of the series and I think the one thing the Blue Jays absolutely did not do better than the Dodgers was base running. It cost them quite a few runs, and possibly the world series....
I did watch most of the series and I think the one thing the Blue Jays absolutely did not do better than the Dodgers was base running. It cost them quite a few runs, and possibly the world series. That close play at the plate, a better secondary lead on the pitch, maybe running through instead of sliding, and he's safe, and they win it.
But otherwise yeah the Jays played a fairly complete series. Base running and probably timely clutch hitting were the two biggest issues.
Maybe the best game of baseball I've ever seen. What a series, and I can't believe Yamamoto survived that. Excellent play by both teams. With that said, I'm so glad I am not direct fan of either...
Maybe the best game of baseball I've ever seen. What a series, and I can't believe Yamamoto survived that. Excellent play by both teams.
With that said, I'm so glad I am not direct fan of either of these teams, because I think the stress would have killed me. If not of the World Series itself, then definitely this game.
Boy that sucked ass, was a great game of baseball and a great series, but not the way I wanted to end it. Really had no expectations of the Jays going that far and was pleasantly surprised, only...
Boy that sucked ass, was a great game of baseball and a great series, but not the way I wanted to end it. Really had no expectations of the Jays going that far and was pleasantly surprised, only one team can win it and we brought it down to the absolute wire, which is more than the yankees could do last year.
Now with that being said, I'm going back to my regular baseball opinion of "I haven't liked this sport in years and the ohtani contract was the nail in that coffin, no enthusiasm for the sport where the best player takes a backloaded flexible contract so his team, which is the crosstown rivals of those he used to play for, can scoop up the best players with their huge payroll* and go on to back to back world series."
* yes I'm aware the Jays are also one of the top payrolls, and I don't think that changes much, the sport still remains in this weird state where the bottom few teams either have no chance, have cheapskate owners so they'll never have a chance, the fat middle of teams that have a decent payroll but not big enough to go far, and then the top teams that own their own sports networks (like the Jays) and have enough brand appeal that they can have a huge edge on the rest of the teams just by payroll size.
Sidebar: How funny was that comebacker to Wrobleski? I mean, what in the heck are the odds of that happening right after a controversial HBP after 2 close up-and-ins. I was laughing out loud a...
Sidebar: How funny was that comebacker to Wrobleski? I mean, what in the heck are the odds of that happening right after a controversial HBP after 2 close up-and-ins. I was laughing out loud a whole minute after that.
Anyway, I guess over a billion dollars in star pitching contracts really can buy you victory. Credit to the Dodgers. Jays made it close, but came just short.
Who knows what the Jays roster will be like next year. This is probably as close as Toronto will get in another long period of time. They were the underdogs, and they overachieved this year, but who knows when all the little parts and lucky things will happen all at once again.
I am a Dodgers fan, but the Blue Jays have been one of my second-level teams for a long time, too. I thought I'd be neutral, but I ended up really hoping the Blue Jays would win it. I'm glad...
I am a Dodgers fan, but the Blue Jays have been one of my second-level teams for a long time, too. I thought I'd be neutral, but I ended up really hoping the Blue Jays would win it.
I'm glad Scherzer had a good outing. I have been a Will Smith fan since he came in as a rookie and was able to maintain control and composure against so big ego pitchers, so I am happy he played such a big part this series. Yamamoto has been amazing and hasn't gotten attention he deserves in Ohtani's shadow, but that is no longer the case, so good for him.
Honestly this was the best World series I can remember. It seemed like it could go either way until that last play. I hope the Blue jays will eventually be proud of what they have accomplished and find a way to build on it for next year.
To my fellow Canadians, I apologize. I was going for the dodgers and only watched bits here and there, but every time I did, the Jays were winning. I was watching a little of this last game and...
To my fellow Canadians, I apologize. I was going for the dodgers and only watched bits here and there, but every time I did, the Jays were winning. I was watching a little of this last game and decided that I might as well be patriotic... and the bat broke.
Wasn't really rooting for any specific team this time around but that was one of, if not, the best game of baseball I've watched. Yamamoto absolutely deserved that World Series MVP. Absolutely insane he came back out for multiple innings after throwing 96 pitches yesterday.
That must've been awesome to watch from a neutral perspective. I was neutral in 2011, which had one of the most exciting games I've ever seen.
I never really had a team growing up, so I was mostly an anti-Yankees nomad until 2020. That was the year I moved to a place that was a few blocks from Dodger Stadium and watched Jon Bois's masterpiece on the Mariners. Since then I've been about 60-40 Mariners-Dodgers. This Blue Jays team took years off my life. My stress eating/nicotine lozenge consumption from tonight has to have cost me at least 6 months. When the post season started, I had Mookie's physique, now I look like Alejandro Kirk.
God that Mariners doc was so good. I was rooting for them to get to the World Series, but knew they probably would have been slapped down by either of these teams. Still. What a series.
Joked tonight that this is kinda the 8 and start of the 9th games of this best of 7 World Series. 18 innings was nuts.
I'm a Toronto fan, so it was pretty hard to watch, but I was 99% sure after Barger caught the stupidest out at the end of the 6th game that they were done for.
Yamamoto was a machine and really earned his MVP.
This whole World Series has been fantastic. Lots of close games, including one of them that went to 18 innings. Both teams did very good and kept us at the edge of our seats!
Those tags.
That has to be one of the worst losses in any sport ever. The Blue Jays outplayed the Dodgers in every aspect of the game and somehow let it slip through their fingers. When Rojas hit the home run in the 9th I remembered that the Dodgers were the bad guys, because that was some shit that only happens for the bad guys in sports. Sorry, OP.
I was holding off on making a post about Ohtani's brilliance - really, it's unbelievable - but after tonight he somehow seems human compared to Yoshinobu Yamamoto. If you told me about a team that won the World Series behind the efforts of a two-way player and a guy who started game 6 and closed game 7, I'd have guessed it was from the 1920s not the 2020s.
Alas, the World Series title is where it belongs. It's America's pastime, it belongs with an American team that's made up with the finest Japanese and Latin American players in the world.
I tried to give enough comprehensive tags without being too much. I wasn't sure if it should be
defeats.soul crushingthough because I lost track in the last discussion about hierarchical tagging.My son is 11 and this was the first time he was pretty into a Toronto team and how they were doing, and I got to explain to him that this is generally what it is like as a fan of Toronto sports teams.
This reminded me of an old Bill Simmons column: The 13 Levels of Losing
TRIGGER WARNING: POSSIBLY TOO SOON
This was a level one, with both guillotine and stomach punch moments. At least his odds of going through something this bad again are pretty slim.
Great read - I just read the whole source - and yeah, I agree, this was a level one.
I"m actually going to put back the
soul crushing defeattag, I think your comment makes it a worthwhile addition.I hear this sentiment a lot, and leafs aside, I think that ("what it is like as a fan of Toronto sports teams.") is pretty common to most cities. Aside from like Boston and LA, how many cities actually see repeated success? Toronto won the NBA chip just 6 years ago, and came within centimetres of a world series win (after winning back to back 30 years ago). Compare that to somewhere like Cleveland, where of their 3 big teams (Cavs, Browns, Guardians), only one has won anything in my lifetime, and that was a single time that required a generational (perhaps best of all time?) talent putting in the absolute series of his lifetime to narrowly win in a game 7, with 3 straight wins when down 3-1.
Most teams just don't do well, only 1 of the 30-32 teams can win each year, and most cities are just shit outta luck.
I don't disagree in general with what you are saying, but it's really hard to put the leafs aside, as they are our (and by "our" in this instance, I mean my immediate family) primary team that we have typically supported in our primary sport that we have watched.
There's loads of teams and only 1 wins is very true though.
Poor kid. Must have been a rude awakening. Ah well, at least he can learn from his mistake of allowing himself to feel hope that a Toronto team might actually win a championship. Now he can finally just give into the despair like the rest of us Jays/Leafs/Raptors fans... or he can always start cheering for the Argonauts or Toronto FC, since at least they have less teams to compete against so have more of a fighting chance. ;)
AFC Toronto has gotten our support and we did enjoy their win over the Montreal Roses today, and he's going to the next post season game in person.
Well, it is the WORLD series, not the US series, sooo...
I personally would like to have more international teams involved in the league--Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean--if the US ever gets back to being a decent place for foreigners to travel. Baseball is a great sport for fostering international connections and I would love to see that expanded.
I did watch most of the series and I think the one thing the Blue Jays absolutely did not do better than the Dodgers was base running. It cost them quite a few runs, and possibly the world series. That close play at the plate, a better secondary lead on the pitch, maybe running through instead of sliding, and he's safe, and they win it.
But otherwise yeah the Jays played a fairly complete series. Base running and probably timely clutch hitting were the two biggest issues.
Maybe the best game of baseball I've ever seen. What a series, and I can't believe Yamamoto survived that. Excellent play by both teams.
With that said, I'm so glad I am not direct fan of either of these teams, because I think the stress would have killed me. If not of the World Series itself, then definitely this game.
Boy that sucked ass, was a great game of baseball and a great series, but not the way I wanted to end it. Really had no expectations of the Jays going that far and was pleasantly surprised, only one team can win it and we brought it down to the absolute wire, which is more than the yankees could do last year.
Now with that being said, I'm going back to my regular baseball opinion of "I haven't liked this sport in years and the ohtani contract was the nail in that coffin, no enthusiasm for the sport where the best player takes a backloaded flexible contract so his team, which is the crosstown rivals of those he used to play for, can scoop up the best players with their huge payroll* and go on to back to back world series."
* yes I'm aware the Jays are also one of the top payrolls, and I don't think that changes much, the sport still remains in this weird state where the bottom few teams either have no chance, have cheapskate owners so they'll never have a chance, the fat middle of teams that have a decent payroll but not big enough to go far, and then the top teams that own their own sports networks (like the Jays) and have enough brand appeal that they can have a huge edge on the rest of the teams just by payroll size.
Sidebar: How funny was that comebacker to Wrobleski? I mean, what in the heck are the odds of that happening right after a controversial HBP after 2 close up-and-ins. I was laughing out loud a whole minute after that.
Anyway, I guess over a billion dollars in star pitching contracts really can buy you victory. Credit to the Dodgers. Jays made it close, but came just short.
Who knows what the Jays roster will be like next year. This is probably as close as Toronto will get in another long period of time. They were the underdogs, and they overachieved this year, but who knows when all the little parts and lucky things will happen all at once again.
I am a Dodgers fan, but the Blue Jays have been one of my second-level teams for a long time, too. I thought I'd be neutral, but I ended up really hoping the Blue Jays would win it.
I'm glad Scherzer had a good outing. I have been a Will Smith fan since he came in as a rookie and was able to maintain control and composure against so big ego pitchers, so I am happy he played such a big part this series. Yamamoto has been amazing and hasn't gotten attention he deserves in Ohtani's shadow, but that is no longer the case, so good for him.
Honestly this was the best World series I can remember. It seemed like it could go either way until that last play. I hope the Blue jays will eventually be proud of what they have accomplished and find a way to build on it for next year.
To my fellow Canadians, I apologize. I was going for the dodgers and only watched bits here and there, but every time I did, the Jays were winning. I was watching a little of this last game and decided that I might as well be patriotic... and the bat broke.
Sorry.