This moonlighting

How joy and generosity of feeling are held and expressed in high stakes baseball versus basketball.

It’s been a strange start to the NBA season because I’ve been watching so much baseball. The Toronto Blue Jays are in the World Series and by the time you read this Game 7 will be finished, the champs decided, the October baseball tipped into November done.

I’m not ashamed to say I’m a bandwagoner of this particular iteration of the Jays. I can’t say that about the Raptors, a team that quite literally hatched to life when I was in grade five and whose naming and early competitive days I felt an active part of; a team with an existence I can recall the before and after for and so place myself on either end of. But the Jays, as a Toronto kid, I was born into. They existed, were established, a whole hierarchy and history I could absorb via osmosis, via the hand-me-down hats and gear from my brother. Not as active a fandom but ubiquitous, everyday, as equal parts comfortable and forgettable as the city.

So maybe it’s more accurate to say this run has been less bangwagon than refamiliarization for me, for many. Leaning back into the rhythms of fandom felt in the bones, learning new customs as we go.

Part of that has been witnessing the quality of joy carried by the Blue Jays, a live trait they hold easily and lightly. In every round they’ve advanced they’ve celebrated the way an NBA team will when they win the title. To the point where I can remember back what seems like months but was only weeks, when they won their last game of the season, clinching first place in their division. They were spraying beer in the locker room, celebrating full-tilt and freed from the wildcard series. I thought they’d already won something, my brain so structured around the hierarchy of playoff basketball.

In the NBA there’s a grim determination that settles over teams as they advance through the postseason, a stern shroud. You begin to hear, Job’s not done as a refrain; the focus of athletes so zeroed in that certain questions in postgame pressers become taboo without needing to be enforced as off-limits. No one mentions contracts, certainly no one mentions bad results from the last game. Questions prefaced with How do you feel get scrapped for more technical assessment, the feeling only ever comes back when the last game is won or lost. In-game, the celebrations lessen, the bench quiets; rare to see the whole thing clear because everyone is suddenly on their feet, cheering and excited.

I think of the Raptors in their 2019 Championship run, how everyone on the team took on a steely demeanour, faces fixed in a shared expression of determined impartiality. Even Kyle Lowry, so often the smirking showman of that group, was flinty. With every round they advanced the expression deepened, nary a whoop was heard echoing down a tunnel or in the locker room with a win, even with the doors closed.

But the Jays! Chris Bassitt showed up to Game 6 in a full ghillie suit, wielding a flamethrower, with a sign that said “I party with Sasquatch” hanging off him — costume itself unclear. On the field Vladimir Guerrero Jr., having just secured a late-game base hit, looked back to where Bo Bichette was waiting to hit and pantomimed him through breathing exercises — moving his hands up in the air for an inhale, and slowly down for the exhale. George Springer, who’d been out two games with an injury, made a base hit and turned to the stadium with a cartoon shrug when he got to first.

This was all just in Game 6, but in every round they’ve won (even every inning, with their handshakes and hugs and full participation celebrations) the scenes from the locker room are like an NBA Finals win unto themselves. They are also incredibly sweet with each other. I’ve heard so many of them say how this is the best team they’ve ever been a part of, how it’s like playing with 30 of your best friends every game, how they’ll be sad to end the season — whatever happens — for that reason.

There are a lot of games in a baseball season, and while every little thing can matter in a World Series game, there are so many games throughout a season made languid with the ethos of “next time”. It isn’t that the stakes are lower, or lost, but there isn’t the same worry or superstitious fear that celebrating, letting the weird, funny, strange steam off that the pressure of playoff competition builds, will bring the entire effort collapsing down. It might be as simple as the lack of days off between World Series games making everyone squirrelly, but with that exhaustion and relentlessness comes a forced awareness of the moment. Everything becomes suddenly so immediate, even in games that stretch on for 18-innings.

Athletes are different, and different sports bring out the nuance and clarity of that. The NBA and its players are singular entities as much as they make up their teams, that’s the way the league has moved in its evolution. More focus on the individual means more judgement, more judgement means increased pressure to draw less negative attention to oneself and we’ve decided, for whatever reason, that doing too much in NBA basketball is the conduit for negative attention. So: trying too hard, looking too carefree, being too much the centre of attention.

When the Bucks won the NBA Cup last season and left a room stocked with champagne untouched, the tarped off plastic walls dry, Doc Rivers said it was because the team was focused on the rest of their season. “Guys who celebrate this, we never know if we’ll be in this stage again,” Giannis Antetokounmpo said, a little morbidly. Later, Rivers said part of the reason why any postgame public celebration was forgone had to do with how much the Lakers were criticized for celebrating their win of the Cup the year before.

In its first year the In-Season Tournament, now the NBA Cup, was either seen as superfluous or inconsequential, you could make the argument it still is but recurring events of consequence and their celebrations don’t just start that way. To me, the level of disdain for celebrating something like the NBA Cup, how strong that negative reaction can be, stems from fear rather than rigour. Fear of ease, maybe, or pleasure. Fear of expression, certainly. That emotions must be bound tight and only let loose in sports at the right moment and that moment exactly, never mind that that moment took years to establish in the sense of its expectation and subsequent release.

It’s certainly weird to look at baseball and NBA basketball side by side and wonder if NBA basketball isn’t the more puritanical one, at this point. We could point to money, the huge infusions of it in the NBA, the valuation of its teams and athletes, but that exists in the MLB too. It could be exposure. The way NBA athletes are encouraged (now from high school on) to create and animate the brand version of themselves, a public-facing avatar always available, always on, the separation of that version more difficult to parse from their private self the longer they spend in the league — in essence, the more successful their careers.

Going back to Doc Rivers, in the Raptors home opener last Friday, before I zipped over to SkyDome for Game 1, I sat for his pregame availability to media. He’s always chatty but this went long, a little looser. He talked about the World Series; about his friend Dave Roberts and how when he goes to Dodgers games and Roberts chats with him from the dugout, it makes Rivers anxious as a coach because Roberts isn’t watching the game. He talked about wanting to coach in Europe, eventually. He also said something that stuck out for me so much that I wrote it down right away: “The world isn’t feeling very generous right now.”

I haven’t exactly found a new refuge in baseball. I’m feeling exhausted, like life for me and much of the country has been put in stasis on behalf of the Blue Jays (I have a newfound appreciation for the NBA’s days off between playoff games). I feel anxious, nervous, I want very badly not only for my city’s team to win but for this exact version of it. These people.

It’s been an illuminating experience, this moonlighting. Standing in my seat for most of Game 1 except when I had to do a lap of the concourse to wake myself, shift my energy, and the Jays hit their first home run. Hearing the rumble of the cheering stadium and the primal wooooooo’s echoing from everyone else on the concourse who’d chosen that stretch to stretch their legs.

Or Halloween, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with thousands at City Hall for Game 6, watching the game projected on a giant screen in Nathan Phillips Square, the mayor leading us in Let’s go Blue Jays chants. Clusters of too-cool Gen Z fans alongside people dressed up in inflatable, glowing alien costumes; the older crowd in their folding chairs, couples, families, strangers striking up nervous conversations. Looking up at the illuminated windows of buildings south across Queen Street, making these little bargains with some higher, superstitious force. Saying to myself, If I look up and see a person in the window looking out, this will go our way. Pointing to the bulging half-moon to Dylan, swung back out from behind the Sheraton where it hid for all of Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s innings, now free, nodding and saying, This will go our way.

These little pleas for luck, which are really hopes for generosity from the force we hand ourselves over to when we’re watching the teams we love and want them to win.

The force the same across all of sports, no matter what you decide to call it. Not religious, heretically devout, an uncontested unanimousness. Knowing that everyone who roots for a team, a person, has felt that. Has made those little bargains. Felt the losses and great, rollercoaster-drop disbelief (a wedged ball?!) but felt too the giddy pop of joy at a game breaking how you wished it would, the certainty of your gut, the electric zips in the air on the night of a game that feels destined. There’s a lot there to go around.