The last time Adam Lind was on a team that won a pennant, he was playing single-A baseball in Dunedin.
It’s a good memory, if a bit distant, and not quite what you might imagine winning in professional baseball might be like:
“The champagne was fake,” said Lind, the designated hitter Tuesday night as the Blue Jays opened what baseball fans across Canada hope will be championship season.
“Some of the guys are too young to drink and the club don’t want to spend the money anyway,” said Lind. “We had to pop the bottles outside because they didn’t want us to get the locker rooms wet. They didn’t want to pay to clean them.”
There’s no doubt that if the Jays actually win something – anything – this year the club will spring for some decent bubbly and likely a few dry-cleaning chits. Presumably they’re line items in the club’s $128-million budget, right under ‘extra large catcher’s mitt’ for Arencibia, or as he suggested, a fishing net big enough to catch a big fish or R.A. Dickey’s knuckleball.
On the most hyped opener in franchise history, the Blue Jays served up a non-descript 4-1 loss to the Cleveland Indians, a game in which they were out-pitched, outhit and out-played as the energy of the sold-out crowd of 48,857 that was primed to bathe in some nostalgia two decades past — rather than August circa 2012 — slowly went pffffft.
“I know people are all disappointed, we’re not,” said Jays manager John Gibbons. That’s part of baseball. They’ll be back. We got outplayed tonight but we have a good ball club, [the fans will] be back. They’re going to have a fun, entertaining year.”
Unfortunately, the packed house and a television audience that was expected to top 1.5 million was hoping for a fun, entertaining night. They were denied.
Arencibia had a tough night behind the plate, chalking up three passed balls and some swings and misses at several other dancing offerings from Dickey who took the loss with a line of five hits, three earned runs and four walks in six innings pitched.
To Arencibia’s credit he laughed it off even as some hecklers started getting on him all of two innings into the season as balls began trickling to the back stop with some regularity.
“It’s easy to play from the stands. That’s being a fan,” said Arencibia. “There’s no hard feelings. Hey, I want to catch it too. When they’re screaming, ‘catch the ball’ I’m trying. I’m not trying to miss them. It’s a tough pitch.”
Similarly, the Blue Jays didn’t set out to quiet the home crowd. They just did.
“What’s tough is we’re not going to go undefeated this year. Going into it I thought we had a chance to be the first 162-game winner,” said Arencibia. “But sometimes you have to look at yourself in the mirror and figure hey, maybe we can go 161-1 … unfortunately my dream of 162-0 is not going to be real.”
Of course not, and it’s not reasonable to go through a long season living and dying with every win or loss.
But there’s only one Opening Night and the Jays came up flat, leaving a nation of baseball fans primed to believe that this year will be different than the previous 19 to wait a little longer for their fix. Maybe Wednesday.
It’s hard to imagine a fan base pouring more of themselves into a team than the Jays faithful have into their club this off-season, fueled by Alex Anthopoulos’ magic act.
But now comes the hard part. Now comes the games, and nothing is given and winning is promised to no one. For all the talent the Blue Jays brought in, only Mark Buehrle and Melky Cabrera have been on the field to celebrate a World Series win.
On the field before the game were all kinds of reminders of the fickleness of baseball and the fluttering knuckleball that is winning in pro sports.
On hand was Duane Ward, who was the rock of the World Series winning bullpens for the Jays in ’92 and ‘93. He came up with bicep tendonitis the following season and pitched just four more games in the big leagues.
The core of the Jays vaunted offence remained largely intact over the next few years but they never came close to contending again.
Joe Carter, who will forever remain a franchise touchstone for his World Series winning homerun in Game 6 (and not to mention a touchstone for more reasons than one: “There are a lot of 20-year-old people out there named Carter, or Carter-Joe,” he said when asked about some of the stranger stories he hears about where people were and what they were doing during the big moment) was on the field before the game too.
He’s 53 now. Like any other Jays fan he says he can’t believe it’s been 20 years and counting since the club was on top of the baseball world and 30 years since they started their run of being contenders deep into every September.
“Here in Toronto, if you had told me in 1993 that it would have been the last time the Jays would be in the playoffs I never would have thought that in a million years, but that’s what happened,” Carter said.
“You’d think it would ever end, but it does,” he said. “You have to be realistic. Every dog has his day, but if you get a chance to play in a World Series and win a World Series, you better do it, because you never know when you might get that chance again.”
There’s optimism that it could happen here once more, that the likes of Adam Lind will get to celebrate his first major league pennant and maybe more, this time with real champagne.
“I’ve read about it. I’ve had a lot people tell me about it,” he said. “People have told me they met their wives, met their husbands [when the Jays last won]. ‘We were on Yonge Street that night’, whatever the case may be.
“It’ll be fun. The city will know, we’ll know. It’ll be an exciting moment and a time in your life you remember for the rest of your life."
But that’s all six or seven months into an uncertain future. For now there’s just hope and another 161 chances to get it right.