KANSAS CITY— About 18 hours removed from the wildest game any of the Toronto Blue Jays had ever played in, the madcap events of Game 5 were still at the front of everyone’s mind as they filed into the visitors’ clubhouse in Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium.
A group of Blue Jays reclined on couches in the centre of the clubhouse, watching the MLB Network reaction to the game and reacting themselves to every opinion and every take, as everyone even somewhat within the trajectory of this team seems to have something to say about what happened Wednesday night.
“No, not at all—not even a little bit,” said Chris Colabello, asked if he’d been able to digest the events of Game 5 since the final pitch was thrown. “It was a pretty surreal inning. Just everything that happened was… I don’t know, crazy, is I guess the word for it.”
Crazy is the word for it. Consider that, over the past 24 hours in Blue Jays land the following has happened: Marcus Stroman, who wasn’t supposed to pitch this year, shut down the AL West champions for the second time in six days; Edwin Encarnacion, who the Rangers pitched around all series, hit an incredible, game-tying, meteorite of a home run that has since been completely forgotten; Russell Martin was nearly at the centre of the most unfortunate, most bizarre, most of-course-this-is-happening-to-a-Toronto-sports-team moment since the third period against the Bruins, when his return throw to Aaron Sanchez bounced off Shin Soo-Choo’s bat, allowing the go-ahead run to score; Jose Bautista hit the biggest home run of his life—the biggest Blue Jays home run since Joe Carter—before launching his bat into orbit and sparking The Great Bat Flip Debate of 2015; The Toronto Blue Jays—this insane, improbable, unrelenting team—claimed their third straight must-win game and broke the Texas Rangers into a million jaded, upset, shocked pieces, like all those tall boys raining down from the 500 level.
It’s been a lot. And now they get the Royals, a team the Blue Jays traded bean balls and bon mots with after a near-brawl in early August’s tense four-game series at Rogers Centre. Somehow, someway, the emotion is only going to climb from the supernova that was Game 5.
“It’s weird, people think we’re an emotional team, huh?” Colabello said, his tongue bursting through his cheek. “I think you’re looking at probably the two best teams in the American League. Obviously there was a lot riding on that series back at home. I think it was really a time where we established that we were going to want to be taken seriously. I don’t think any of it will carry over into this series. But, I say that now—you never know what’ll happen.”
That’s certainly how it’s felt throughout this Blue Jays post-season run—don’t look away, because anything can and will happen. Even Blue Jays manager John Gibbons, who famously stays up late into the night watching every last west coast game and east coast highlight, couldn’t help but pass right out when he got home following Game 5.
“I fell asleep pretty quick. There was no fall asleep, wake up, fall asleep, wake up,” Gibbons said. “Look, we’d been staring at it for three games. Really, it was kind of a relief.”
Even Troy Tulowitzki—who’s only played for this team for two-and-a-half months yet seems to fit in so well, to the point that he’s completely scrubbed the memory of the eccentric guy who played shortstop before him—is just looking forward to playing a normal game of baseball.
“We had our backs up against the wall three times. If we lost, we went home. And we’re sitting here today—that proved a lot,” Tulowitzki said. “So it’s nice to kind of have a fresh slate. You feel like you can throw that out the window and say we’re on to the next series.”
The next series, of course, starts Friday night in Kansas City, with the best team in the American League playing the second-best, which is really the way it should be. Both teams do what they do with a great deal of emotion and intensity—bright fires lit beneath them that will only grow fiercer with the added pressure of the post-season.
Before that late-August series between these two teams—which ended up in Toronto’s favour, three games to one, by the way—the Blue Jays talked amongst themselves about using the Royals as a barometer of how good they could be, measuring themselves against the American League standard and seeing if what they had was for real. The Blue Jays opened the series 51-51; all they did from that point forward was go 42-18.
“We figured if we could compete with those guys and win that series that people were going to start taking us more seriously. And I think that’s what happened,” Colabello said. “I don’t necessarily know if [the Royals] felt it at the time, but it meant a lot to us.
“We’re a pretty unique group. I think everybody’s noticed that about us. It’s a special group of guys,” Colabello continued. “We believe in each other. And I think we’re all so focused on taking care of our own business that all the other stuff doesn’t matter.”
How much other stuff this series will provide remains to be seen, as the Royals have vowed to pitch inside—“aggressively,” asserted their manager Ned Yost—while the stubborn Blue Jays are determined to fight their way to their pitch. But if the Blue Jays’ post-season to this point (which has been only five games but has felt like weeks) is any indication, there will be no shortage of it. When it comes to extraordinary, heightened, fist-clenching baseball, Game 5 may just have been the start.