Best of BP 2025: Wearing the Hat

My brother—my younger brother—bought me a new Jays hat. One of the Cooperstown Collection ones, powder blue with the old logo, a matching white one for him. He was stuck in Toronto for a bit between flights and he couldn’t get to a game but he could hear it, and the closest he could get was close enough to get us hats. From outside the open dome you could hear the elated roar: the stadium was full; they were winning, again, because that’s what they do this year, this team, they win, you think they won’t be able to do it this time but they do. When I wore the hat to work Adam said I see you’re bandwagoning. Joking, because he only knows me as a Dodgers fan; I started working here late July of last year, the Jays were nothing to speak of, and the Dodgers had Ohtani and the Dodgers won the World Series, there was so much to say about them. No, actually, the Dodgers were the bandwagon, nine years ago, watching them because they were on at 7:10 and because they were good, you knew they were going to be good. The Jays are the team I grew up with. “My team.” I don’t like using the possessive about sports teams but if I had to use it about any team it would be them.

The Jays of this year, the team that wins, comes back and wins, possessed suddenly of a cohesion and believability they lacked in previous years—the Jays of George Springer returned to unbelievable life, Ernie Clement and Addison Barger, Vlad a Blue Jay forever, Daulton Varsho soaring and tumbling in the outfield. The Jays I’ve watched in snippets. Through box scores. Condensed games after I get home, in the car right after I leave work, Gameday in a slow moment at the circulation desk. I’ve watched maybe a handful of games as they happened. Maybe. Ten years ago I hung on every pitch, every moment I wasn’t watching in real-time was excruciating, the seconds lost on the laggy streaming sites, carrying a radio around to hear games on the bus. Ten years ago, when the long-dormant fandom came to delirious, concrete-shaking life. When I go to games at Nat Bailey, the jersey I see the most besides number 27 is number 20. In my closet hangs the pristine royal blue number 2. Compared to the person who received that jersey, October 2016, for their 19th birthday, I feel like I hardly have a right to call myself a fan.

I wear the hat. I watch the condensed game. This one a blowout: Springer (I remember the day they signed him, the joy I felt, always a player I liked on a team I hated), over and over, where did this bat speed come from, the power returned, the ball disappearing once more into the vibrating seats of the dome, the dark blue I’m still not used to seeing. The Orioles boot the ball. The Jays make slick play after slick play. The ground ball squeaks through, the blooper falls in the gap, the outstretched foot beats the throw to first. Vlad punches the air. Even in this now-blowout I feel their urgency. They know, like I know, that it’s real this year. This is the coming-together, finally finally finally, after all the expectations and the failures of them. The despondency of last season. Springer crumpled in the outfield, 2022, humiliation complete. That image fades with each passing day. It was a different Springer, a different stadium, a different team; the high-definition replay of 2015, the loop of it, replaced by the future that is at long last here, in front of us, it’s happening right now, it could still happen. Soon. It really could be this year.

The Jays won the World Series in 1993, the year my brother—my older brother—was born. After he died last June I walked into the apartment where he lived with the rest of my family and saw a sticky note on the dining table where he had been trying to draft a better lineup for the Jays, which was hopeless, a hopeless endeavor, it wasn’t going to work, the problems ran deeper than where Schneider was batting Spencer Horwitz. In those last few months the Jays seemed to be the only thing we were able to have even a fraction of a conversation about, conversations that nonetheless went nowhere, like all the other ones, because the team was going nowhere, because we couldn’t understand each other. It wasn’t going to work.

Then he was dead. The team that was bad continued to be bad. The offseason passed. He continued to be dead. But the team that was bad is wonderful. One of the best I’ve gotten to watch, even though glimpses are all I can get. The joy passes through these glimpses, through me, and touches the absence of someone else, makes me remember its hollow shape. I took the baseball thing and ran with it, 19 and thrilled to blog about the Jays for free, but it wasn’t mine first, it was his, in that way it happens with siblings, you try to make it your own but really it’s: look, I can be like you, I can know the things you know, we can do this together. I can be real in the way that you are real. Maybe out of the corners of our eyes we can see each other by staring at the same thing. I watch the highlights. Out of the corner of my eye I see nothing.

My brother—my younger brother—we talk about going to see the Jays in the postseason. Not just possible but likely. Can you imagine?  I wouldn’t be able to, not this year; the shapes of my life, the things that make me not able to spend hours a day watching games anymore, are taking me somewhere else for October. But he could go by himself. You know, I tell him, I was your age when I started taking the bus to Safeco by myself. I was 19, like you are now. Was it that long ago? Am I that much older? It seems impossible that a baseball team could continue where a person doesn’t, but they do. They were hopeless until they weren’t. They are young like I am young: 27, my favorite number as a kid. The number on the jersey I see everywhere now. The age I am right now. This could really be the year. Of all years. This could be it.

I keep wearing the hat.