On the meaning of that wild and truly glorious seventh inning

By Stephen Marche

I’ve watched the seventh inning maybe 30 times by now.

The number sounds high, but if I’m being honest, it’s probably low. During the grim Toronto winter, I would leave it playing in the background when I was in the middle of busywork—doing dishes, typing in changes to manuscripts, catching up on emails, that sort of thing. Partly, it was a chance to bask in the memory. Outside was the absurd grey ugliness of January in this city; inside, on YouTube, it remained the late-summer stretch when the Blue Jays were playing with boyish glee. I recognize that it’s a strange activity, rewatching a single inning of baseball over and over again. Games are supposed to be ephemeral, revisited, if at all, in the form of highlights. And one of the main pleasures of being a spectator is not knowing the outcome. But the seventh inning is different—unique, even. The events of that inning possess qualities that are usually associated with art and literature. The seventh inning meant something.

Nobody reading this, I imagine, has any doubt which inning I’m talking about: the seventh inning of game five of the American League Division Series between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Texas Rangers on Oct. 14, 2015. Writing those facts down, I cannot help noticing how bizarre it is that an inning in such a game would matter. It was a playoff game, true, but it was not a World Series game, not even a game in a series to get to the World Series. It wasn’t a game between historical rivals, either. There are, perhaps, dozens of games every year that are more significant, at least on paper, than the ALDS.

That’s how different this inning was. When we speak of meaningful games, we are usually talking about their results. Canada took Olympic gold in men’s hockey in 2002 after a 50-year drought—we remember the stakes and the drama. Germany humiliated Brazil at the World Cup in 2014—we remember how each goal increased the host country’s national despair. The seventh inning was both less and more; its meaning was separate from its importance.

The craziness of the events will be remembered. There will be oral histories. There will be films. Ten years from now, there will be other oral histories, other films. But a mere recitation of the events will always be insufficient to describe what occurred. To understand the seventh inning, you have to understand Toronto, and you have to understand, specifically, the Toronto of October 2015. The context was crucial. Because of the state of the city in which the game was played, because of the state of baseball itself, the seventh inning crashed into the world like an epiphany. Which is why the more you watch it, the more you find to watch in it.

Until the seventh inning, game five had been just a wonderful game. Cole Hamels was pitching a classic for the Rangers, threading his way through a lineup that was scarier than any in baseball. Marcus Stroman was showing signs of future mastery, but he wasn’t quite there yet. It looked like Hamels was going to grind out a win on the strength of a few minuscule mistakes by Stroman, but then Edwin Encarnacion launched a homer into the second deck at the end of the sixth to tie it at two. So it was a great game, a tense game, as it entered the seventh. Still, there was no sign, no warning whatsoever that it would become what it became.

After you watch Russell Martin throw the ball into Shin-Soo Choo’s hand 30 times or so, it loses its shock. The play was really not all that complicated, but it took them 18 minutes to work out the call. The ball was live and there was a freak accident—it’s that simple. If the ball had hit a bird or been caught in a sudden gust of wind, or if God himself had lowered a finger from heaven to brush it away, the result would have been the same. Rougned Odor was smart to run in from third. That was all.

The crowd stirred ominously as the call was disputed. When it went against them, they gasped. And then the craziness started. Beer cans started raining down on the field, on children in the lower decks whose mothers had to shield them from the barrage. The glorious energy of the fans that had lifted the team for the previous two months curdled instantaneously into outrage.

To understand that outrage, to understand the crowd’s sudden ugliness, its sense of cosmic injustice, you have to know the history of losing at sports in Toronto. Toronto instructs its fans in the meaning of losing from every imaginable angle. Robert Benzie, the Queen’s Park correspondent for the Toronto Star, tweeted a communal experience: “A Toronto tradition passed from father to son: leaving a ‘Leafs lost’ note on my sleeping boy’s desk just as my Dad did on mine.” They have made the playoffs once in the past 12 years, and even that playoff appearance ended up worse than a simple losing season. A novelist friend of mine, Andrew Pyper, was driving back from a reading in Grimsby, Ont., during game seven against Boston in 2013, and because the Leafs were up by three as he started back, and because he was driving with a friend, and because he’s polite, he didn’t bother to turn on the radio. When he got home, his wife met him at the door. He thought at first that somebody had died. She just showed him the television. “The experience had the true quality of a nightmare: the twisted surrealism, the hopelessness, the horror,” he wrote me. “And then I remembered this was the Leafs. This is what it meant to love this team. To leave them up by three and drive through the night for an hour and come out the other side a loser.”

It’s not just the Leafs who produce such lyrical despair. Toronto FC has offered plenty in the way of dashed hopes. The Raptors are built to make the playoffs and then lose.

So Martin throwing the ball into Choo’s hand had a sense of inevitability to it. Of course that’s how this glorious season would end. It’s so Toronto—finding a way to lose more deflating than anybody thought possible.

These Jays were supposed to be redemption from the old Toronto, from that Calvinist white Toronto of grinding losses, undertaken like a kind of public demonstration of self-abnegation. The team had come to represent changes far more important than baseball. For once, a Toronto team was the national team. People were flying in from the Northwest Territories for Jays games. Montrealers were wearing Toronto gear. Albertans were on Toronto’s side. They were manifestations of the fact that Toronto had become the first city of Canada, and others within the country were starting to acknowledge that fact. The game took place at a moment when Toronto was in the middle of becoming, for the 21st century, what Chicago was for the 20th: a city of the future, comfortable with post-industrial existence and celebrating its diversity.

So when the beer cans started raining down, the hunger that was rising in the city was not the residual hunger of long-suffering fans. It was the deep hunger of a city not yet proven. It was not just the rage of defeat. It was the rage of people denied recognition.

That rage, after you’ve watched the game a dozen times or so, is just another aspect of the dramatic structure. The seventh inning has three acts, just like a Hollywood script. The first ends with the disaster at the top of the inning, and we need that cosmic injustice to justify what follows. We need the tang of catastrophe to relish the subsequent glory.

The bottom of the seventh inning—the second act—offers a fascinating précis of why baseball is such a great game. It’s a game of situations. Routine plays are not routine when the situation is not routine. The Jays didn’t win so much as the Rangers lost. It probably did matter that they made things ever so slightly more difficult for the Rangers; rewatching, you appreciate the precision of the Jays’ play—Russell Martin cutting down the angle on the throw to second, the pace of Ben Revere running to first. The key play is Dalton Pompey’s slide into home to take out the catcher. He had to angle himself precisely to make it happen while keeping his body on the plate. If he was off either way, it was a double play. And then the order would not be what it was—neither the batting order nor the cosmic order, which in the seventh inning were much the same.

Order is what gives the inning its literary quality, I think, although of course if you wrote it the way it happened, no one would find it believable. That’s the magic: The events had to transpire in their exact pattern for meaning to occur. Each Ranger error brought Hamels, who had thrown more than 100 pitches, ever closer to Donaldson and Bautista. And then, even when it happened, it looked like it was going to fizzle out: Donaldson hit his flare. Donaldson thought he was out. Revere turned back to first because he thought Donaldson was out. In one of the inning’s many ironies, Odor, who had so cleverly scored on Martin’s error in the top of the inning, misplayed turning back to catch the ball. Tie game. Two out. Runners on first and third. Sam Dyson came in for Hamels. And then Jose Bautista stepped up to the plate in a boiling city. End of act two.

If you watch closely enough, you can see that the cameras started to vibrate slightly at this point. The building itself rumbled. The commentators, whose job is to exaggerate the significance of the slightest fluctuations in the game, started to realize they were, for once, watching something genuinely weird, something they didn’t understand, something they perhaps couldn’t understand as visitors to Toronto. The crowd had not calmed from the Donaldson fluke as Bautista fouled off the first pitch. He took the second for a ball outside and down. Then Dyson threw a 97-mph fastball over the inside of the plate, and Bautista smashed every molecule of the thing with an uppercut swing.

Between the crack and the roar of the crowd, there was a tiny hiccup, maybe a quarter of a second. On contact, before the crowd could even register the blast, Bautista’s whole body relaxed. Bautista just stood. The roar itself started out as a collective release, a big “mmmnnnnaaah” before it shifted into the more conventional “rrraaaaahhhh.” Bautista didn’t look at the pitcher. He didn’t look at the ball. His gaze passed from the centre-field wall to the right-field wall, where nobody else in the world was looking, as if he were scouting for the spot in the stadium where they would write his name.

There followed the bat flip, an image that appeared, framed, on the walls of bars in Toronto within days. The meaning of the gesture only emerged in the aftermath, after Dyson objected to it, and after virtually every commentator in the world took Bautista’s side. I will only point out that Bautista ran around the bases quickly and with his head down. It took 22 seconds from the hit to home base, which is how long a typical Mike Trout home run trot takes. This is also the sort of thing you notice after you’ve watched the inning 30 times.

That bat flip may have ended one of the unwritten rules of baseball. Because everyone, everyone who loves baseball, couldn’t help but recognize that its joy was real and should not be suppressed. USA Today, that same month, had reported that 87 percent of bench-clearing incidents over the previous five years resulted from disputes between antagonists of different ethnicities. Baseball was in culture clash, as it has always been. The history of baseball is Yankee soldiers bringing the game to the South as they conquered it during the Civil War, and then to the Caribbean as they conquered there, and then to Korea and Japan as they conquered there. And in all those other countries, they flip their bats even though the white Americans do not flip. Bautista’s bat flip said: For this moment, the game belongs to the ones who were conquered as much as to the conquerors.

This gesture could only matter as much as it did in Toronto, from a player from such a team, in MLB’s most diverse city. If he had flipped his bat in New York or Los Angeles, it would have been a New York moment or an L.A. moment, subsumed by America or by the history of the teams. In Toronto, it stood apart—a gift of joy being returned to the game.

The meaning of the seventh inning was never a question of winning or losing. If Toronto had lost, it wouldn’t have been unexpected or even that upsetting. If Toronto had eked out a one-run victory, it wouldn’t have been that great. As I said, it wasn’t that important a game.

The majority of the largest riots in Canadian history have been sparked by sporting events. But the connection between sports and politics was not explicit in the seventh inning, as it has been at other times in our history. This turmoil was submerged. It was the shifting ground underneath the crowd. The seventh inning came out of nowhere, but it also came out of everything. That’s why it remains so mysteriously powerful.

One thing is clear: The seventh inning is what sports are for. All the empty regular-season games, all the depressing years of futile boredom, all the beer and all the hot dogs and all the bobblehead dolls and all the call-in shows and all the cameras—they are there because of what was revealed in those 53 minutes. The seventh inning is the point of the whole ludicrous business, the rare encounter with meaning. The rest is just waiting around.

This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. (Photo credits: Photo illustration by Marc Lauriault; Getty (8); istock; Tom Szczerbowski/Getty)