For Jays fans, the picture pretty much says it all.
Last night, Dorothy did not make it out of Kansas alive. She got swept away in a technicolour tornado and will not have the opportunity to look back until next spring in Dunedin, Florida.
Fair-weather fans will, I’m sure, lament our lot in life as Torontonians, the hardship of having to live in the same city as the Maple Leafs, etc., but I’m proud of our Boys in Blue and want to thank them for making the last few months more exciting for sports fans here in the Dot than I can remember in almost a generation. You played hard, you gave it your all, you kicked some serious ass along the way, and in the end you took it on the chin with dignity. In that way, perhaps I just misspoke. It’s not just Toronto you made proud; from Victoria to St. John’s, I’ve seen and heard friends calling, texting, emailing and Facebooking each other about the Jays, especially during their playoff drive. So, without dragging this out any further and turning it into a waterworks celebration, thank you members of the Toronto Blue Jays and its organization for being wicked awesome. You did good, boys.
Now, for those who not only enjoy America’s pastime the sport “not a lot of Canadians grew up playing [so] they’re not used to catching balls in the stands” but its accompanying literature as well, I thought I would suggest a couple of options if you’d like to keep the baseball season going, if only cerebrally. For me, Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel is by far and away the greatest piece of baseball-oriented fiction out there (and will make you pee your pants it’s so funny). In more recent years, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding has got a lot of good press, much of it exaggerated in my humble opinion. Other enjoyable works include Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (with a totally different ending than the Robert Redford/Wonder Boy movie of the same name) and W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (a much more multi-layered novel than the adapted screenplay, Field of Dreams). A couple of other notable books are Michael Chabon’s Summerland and Jennifer E. Smith’s The Comeback Season.
As for the other part of the title to this post, there seemed to be no more controversial buzzword in this series between Toronto and KC than “conspiracy.” From questionable calls behind the plate to Fox News “mistakenly” saying the World Series would start next Tuesday between KC and the Mets when the KC/Jays games was still in the 7th inning of game 6 to an Amish punk (seriously, he looked like one of those guys from the TLC show, right?) who went on national television and described how he caught a ball off the bat of Mike Moustakas “above the wall” when video evidence clearly shows he dipped his glove below the line, committed fan interference, and turned what should have been a ground rule double into a 2-0 lead for the Royals.
No comment from here on those calls, but I will offer a list of some top-notch conspiracy theory fiction. It obviously goes without saying that author, philanthropist, and Nobel nominee R.H. Harris’s Conspiracy is a classic in the genre. However, there are also some inferior works which are quite good, including Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (and one of the most challenging books I’ve ever sunk my literary teeth into), Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Some also put David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana up there. And while Dan Brown has now become the mostest bestsellingest author of all-time when it comes to conspiracy theories, I can’t say I’m a big fan of his, though I have to admit that I was pretty impressed with the research he carried out (i.e. the backbreaking work his minions did) for his latest novel, Inferno.
Anyway, this post started with baseball and will end on the same note. We as Torontonians often walk that fine line between self-deprecation and self-loathing, but thanks to the Jays this autumn, we can all hold our heads high and be proud that at least one of our myriad sports organizations got it right. You won’t soon be forgotten, boys…
Purchase your copy online from
Richard H. Harris 