The collective joy and sorrow of the Blue Jays season

I’m not normally a “baseball guy.” I have the bandwidth for basically one sports fandom and one team and that’s reserved for my beloved Edmonton Oilers. But, like millions of other Canadians, I got on the Blue Jays bandwagon this fall. It took until halfway through the Yankees series for me to get interested, then halfway through the Mariner’s series to get excited, and I was “there” (so to speak) for the start of the World Series. Go ahead and despise me for being a bandwagon fan if you’ve been a long-suffering devotee for years; I can only say that, as an Oiler’s fan, I know all about suffering.

If I’m not really all that “into” baseball, why did I get on that bandwagon? The simple answer is that I realized I was starved for collective joy and I didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to share in it. I spend a lot of time paying attention to the “public life” of my city, my province, my country (and of the country down south that is partly “mine”), and my extended church family. The public realm is always a realm of contestation, argument, bargaining and compromise. In many ways, that’s a sign of health in a pluralistic democracy: we’re not all the same and we don’t all have the same values or interests and working those differences out is hard – and often frustrating – work.

But for at least the past year (guess why… I’m writing this column on Nov 4), our public life has been, frankly, brutal and deeply dispiriting. Even in my own neighbourhood and city the recent municipal election campaigns were marked by a degree of resentment and anger that I hadn’t felt before. I helped organize a candidate’s forum for my area. I was deeply shaken by the applause generated by some candidates for utterly unfeeling characterizations of their poor and unhoused neighbours. The appetite for dehumanization and scapegoating was palpable amongst my fellow middle-class homeowners gathered to hear out our prospective representatives.

Shared joy (and sorrow)

In this context, seeing what seemed like my whole country erupt in uncomplicated shared joy was irresistible; I felt I had to share in it. If it’s a sign of health that we disagree with our neighbours, that we are different from them, and that we contest our differences, we also suffer when we are fundamentally divided from them emotionally. Our public sphere is not devoid of laughter, but so often it’s the mirthless laughter of contempt, derision or triumph. This kind of joy comes at the expense of others – my joy in thwarting you is constituted by your loss or humiliation. What the Jays offered was a joy we could feel together with people with whom we had little else in common or even with whom we felt little “public” sympathy. Sports can do that. They are not as uncomplicated as they seem on the surface (there is much that’s wrong with pro sports), but for a moment it’s a non-zero-sum shared joy. That was balm for my weary soul.

Too bad that shared sports-joy comes with shared sports-sorrow. Ah well. Worth it.