6ix Baggers — №82: Almosts Don't Count.
Five outs from immortality. One swing from history. Until they were just another team watching someone else's celebration.
Dear Drink Carters and Blue Jays fans since October 2025.
I’m not ready for baseball to be over. Even though I am exhausted from all the late nights. We had the maximum amount of baseball we can get. A seven game World Series that goes into extra innings doesn’t happen every season.
As Jack Vita wrote, “The Detroit Tigers suffered a heartbreaking loss to the Seattle Mariners, who suffered an even more tragic loss to the Toronto Blue Jays, who suffered an even more gut-wrenching loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series.”
Despite all that, I am greedy. I needed more baseball. More to get over the fact that the Toronto Blue Jays pushed the Super Team Los Angeles Dodgers to the very last out. And still came up short.
When there’s nothing left but the long winter ahead, there’s always Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in 1942’s The Woman of the Year.
I love the set up. Hepburn plays a sophisticated political columnist who falls for Tracy’s sportswriter Sam Craig, a man who loves baseball with the kind of pure, uncomplicated devotion that feels like medicine after a heartbreak in the 11th inning.
Watch it for the sparkling banter, stay for the scene where Sam tries to explain extra innings and find solace in the reminder that baseball, like love, has always been about the beautiful agony of caring too much about something that doesn’t care back. It won’t fill the void left by a lost World Series, but at least you’ll remember why we fall for this game every spring, ready to have our hearts broken all over again.
Since the movie had just enough politics in it, I’m not going to swing and miss and sneak in a few political story lines. Like how the city of Toronto, on the night of the biggest event in the city in years, still stopped Go Train and TTC services at 1:30, stranding people downtown. The Mayor was talking about parade planning the day before, but didn’t plan later services? That is not a serious government.
Perhaps it’s time to codify what every superstitious fan already knows: the Keep Your The Political Photo-Op Prevention Act (a more important feature of the constitution than the notwithstanding clause), barring politicians from locker rooms and pre-game photo ops—because when the Prime Minister is 0-3 after meeting with teams before major events, that’s not bad luck, that’s a national crisis and a policy failure we can actually do something about. That goes for Drake too.
In baseball there’s always stats. Like this one. There has been a “Will Smith” on the winning team for the last six World Series. This one hurts the most the day after: “The Blue Jays had a 91.7% chance to win Game 7 up 4-3 at the top of the 9th inning.” For all the talk about bullpens, the Jays gave up three home runs in the late innings, and now we have this sequel end credits roll from Nike .
How would Ken Burns recap Game 7?
The winter of 2025 would be remembered in Toronto not for what was won, but for what slipped away in the cold November night.
Game Seven. The Toronto Blue Jays and the Los Angeles Dodgers. One hundred and eighty games had led to this. Six contests that had tested every assumption about which team wanted it more.
The Blue Jays had outscored the Dodgers across the series. They had shut down Los Angeles’s vaunted offense for innings at a stretch. Max Scherzer, at forty-one years old, had given them everything he had left in his right arm.
The game remained tied through nine innings. Then ten. The tension in Rogers Centre was, witnesses would later say, almost unbearable.
In the top of the eleventh inning, with the championship hanging in the balance, Dodgers catcher Will Smith stepped to the plate.
One swing.
The Dodgers took the lead, five to four. The Jays couldn’t find an answer to that in the bottom half.
The Dodgers became the first team to win back-to-back World Series titles in twenty-five years.
And Toronto was left to face the winter. Alone.
Walkoffs
A few last quick fastballs for the season, but rest assured, there will be more baseball content in 2026.
Time to break out the post game seven hot cocoa Hallmark
I also spent time with Sora making Hallmark style movies in the aftermath of the heartbreaking loss. And i did like the pre-loss version titles Swing and A Kiss.
Some rivalries are meant to be broken.
When die-hard Toronto Blue Jays fan Emma Harper scores tickets to Game 7 of the World Series at Rogers Centre, the last thing she expects is to literally bump into charming LA Dodgers fan Jake Martinez in the hotel lobby.
As their teams battle for baseball’s ultimate prize over eleven tension-filled innings, Emma and Jake find themselves drawn together despite their fierce rivalry—sharing nachos in enemy territory, debating the infield fly rule over 7th inning hot chocolates, and discovering that sometimes the biggest win isn’t on the scoreboard.
But when the series comes down to one final, heartbreaking swing in the 11th inning on Toronto’s home turf, can their love survive when only one of them gets their happily ever after? A home-run romance about finding love in the most unexpected places—even across the aisle in enemy colors.
The Great Buck Freeman
On a recent baseball walking tour through Toronto led by historian Adam Bunch, I was captivated about the story of Buck Freeman, a name that should probably be etched in bronze instead of Ted Rogers outside Skydome, but has faded into the kind of obscurity reserved for men who played before cameras could capture their mythology.
Freeman’s story is pure baseball myth. As Eric Enders puts it, “The first legitimate home run hitter in baseball history, Buck Freeman escaped the coal mines of Northeastern Pennsylvania to become one of the premier sluggers during the first decade of the American League.” He lied about his age at eight to work that coal mine, became a mule driver by twelve, and loved swinging a bat more than breathing clean air.
In 1897 and 1898, Freeman played for the Toronto Canucks (renamed to Toronto Maple Leafs in 1896) and terrorized Eastern League pitching, clubbing 20 home runs one year and a league-record 23 the next—numbers that sound quaint now but were practically Ruthian for the era. But his time in Toronto wouldn’t last.
Toronto manager Arthur Irwin brought him to the Washington Senators in 1899, where Freeman hit 25 home runs—a number that shocked the baseball world and stood as the legitimate major league record until Babe Ruth arrived.
He changed what home runs meant, swinging from his heels when the establishment said sluggers were worthless compared to slap hitters. He worked out in gyms, walked twelve miles a day, studied his swing mechanics like a scholar, and eventually won the 1903 World Series with the Boston Americans.
The question now is what will the team look like next year? Freeman knew what every Toronto fan learned Saturday night: baseball is designed to break your heart. But you show up, you swing from your heels and you make them remember you tried.
The last out
“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.” - A. Bartlett Giamatti.
The good news, pitchers and catchers report in 99 days. And the World Baseball Classic starts in 123 days.
See you next week for The Drink Cart’s Wednesday and Friday editions.