Everyone I know is still hurting from the Toronto Blue Jays’ World Series loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 7 on November 1st. With only one Canadian team in the MLB and the Dodgers’ polarizing repute among American sports fans, it felt like the whole world was cheering for our team, to the point where I was genuinely surprised when my LA friends cheered for their home team! Canadian sports fans are pretty good sports (when it doesn’t come to hockey), but the highs of this year’s World Series were so high, sports fans are still feeling the loss nationwide eight days later.
It’s strange, though: when Americans comment on Canadian life, they always resort to wintery stereotypes, even when they’re talking about fans of a summertime sport. Former Philadelphia Eagles centre Jason Kelce issued a statement apologizing for reducing the Blue Jays to a “Canadian baseball team” on his podcast, “New Heights”, which he cohosts with his brother Travis Kelce. He questioned why he would care if the “Canadian baseball team” went up against a team who could buy and sell the rest of the league: in his clarification he stated he was dismissing the inequity of the investments behind the teams, not intentionally reducing the Jays. But before the correction, he wrote some extremely reductive crap about our national identity: “How could I not love poutine, maple syrup, and beavers!!”
How important are poutine, maple syrup and beavers to the Toronto Blue Jays? How important are these things to Canadians? The first is a great lunch, the second a profitable contribution to the food industry, and the third are a keystone species in our ecosystems, once almost wiped out by colonial hat fashions of the Victorian era.
These things are important, but we’re more than that. Canadian baseball is more than that. It’s lifelong fans, it’s patriots who are just happy to stand a chance against the U.S. in a game as American as apple pie, and it’s a hell of a lot of hard work, dying of heat in the sun to pursue greatness. Canadians are cute, and our interests are sweet, but we’re serious competitors. If we can stand a chance against the richest Americans at their own game, we should stand tall and proud: we gave them a home run for their money.