The 2025 World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays ended in elation or devastation, depending on what side of the ball and the 49th parallel you happened to be on. For us–two friends, former colleagues, and Filipino North Americans–the series’ 146 innings across seven games formed a tether of anxious codependency that could have easily toggled over into toxicity and bad blood. Instead, it deepened our mutual love of baseball, a dastardly game of inches (or as Adrian might say, centimeters), fickle momentum, painstaking rituals, and good old fashioned luck. It also reminded us why we each love Los Angeles and Toronto. One is a city besieged by relentless immigration raids against the Latinx fans who love the Dodgers most, putting the city and many of the team’s members at odds with its owner. The other is a city of immigrants from the Global South and elsewhere across the former British empire, held hostage by kleptocrats and landlords, whose sports teams are owned by the very telecommunication monopolies that make everyday life unaffordable.
As a way of making sense of it all–the big feelings, the huge hangovers, the agony and the ecstasy, as Howard Cosell used to say–we’ve written an extended chronicle of our remote intimacies through this epic fall classic. It’s a love letter to our teams and our cities, and a glimpse at everything it takes for us, the fans, to help win a World Series.
THE PREQUEL
KT: The origins of my Dodgers fandom emerged, as it did for many Angelnxs my age, during peak Fernandomania in the early 1980s. My family immigrated from Manila to Los Angeles in 1983, just as I was about to turn ten-years-old. We landed at LAX in March amidst a catastrophic El Niño that brought a tornado to South Central Los Angeles. The part of me prone to mythologizing would take all the credit for finding my way to the boys in blue, especially Fernando Valenzuela, whose Brown, stocky frame and shaggy hair offered a heroic mirror for my tomboyishness during that era; a fresh-off-the-boat gender trouble that isolated me from the white suburban girls in my Inland Empire subdivision.
Because I’d been on the road with my musician parents for the better part of three years, I took Calvert School correspondence courses. Were it not for the tutor my parents hired named Mike Thurman, who suggested I cultivate an interest in baseball to help juice my math lessons and my English writing skills, who knows what would’ve become of me. (My dad loves the Lakers, and prefers basketball to baseball, though he has since evolved into a bigger baseball fan thanks to his kid).
My most treasured Dodger relic came to me as a result of Mike’s assignment to write a fan letter to my favorite player asking for an autograph. I picked the great Dominican 3rd baseman and the first Dodger ever to hit 30 homers and steal 20 bases, Pedro Guerrero. Pedro was the hero of the 1981 World Series clinching game 6 against the Yankees, with 5 RBIs and 8 total bases.
Cut to forty-two years later and the only Guerrero on everyone’s minds is Toronto’s’ Vladdy, Jr. (no relation to the Dodgers’ Pedro, though he does have a much younger half-brother with the same name who can also ball, according to viral videos on the internet). Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. and the Blue Jays came off the ropes in the ALCS against the Seattle Mariners in 7 games, having been down 0-2 and 3-2, before clinching their World Series berth at home in front of a euphoric Rogers Centre and all of Canada.
After cruising through the Wild Card against the Cincinnati Reds, and a taut but efficient NLDS against the favored Phillies, the Dodgers punched their ticket to the World Series with an NLCS sweep of the Milwaukee Brewers, the team with the most wins in the regular season. Needless to say, I was anxious AF as the World Series was about to begin. The Dodgers had been loafing around with a week off: plenty of time to get into their own heads before facing the Blue Jays, who just completed the kind of mojo making comeback that carries teams all the way to a championship. I knew Adrian was excited for the Jays’ first World Series appearance since 1993 (before he was born?), and we were communicating largely through Instagram stories and messages. I wasn’t sure how it would play out for either of us, our hometowns, or our friendship.
ADL: So I was alive during the Jays’ last World Series, but I was still a kid in Manila! It would not be until 1998 when my family decided to leave our barangay (neighborhood) forever and make the journey across the Pacific. There was, I think, a future in which we could have moved to the US, and I could have been raised a Dodgers, Cubs, or Yankees fan. But for many reasons (like healthcare), we landed in Toronto one rainy Spring night, and bounced around the city’s immigrant and working-class east end of Scarborough.
Now I confess – and anyone who knows me can attest to this – that, in terms of sports, my first love is basketball. My dad, who idolized Larry Bird, was a – puke – Celtics fan, and only once did we begrudgingly overlap, when Kevin Garnett won his championship. Outside of the Vince Carter-Tracy McGrady Raptors, I followed a hodgepodge of players, mostly power forwards like Garnett and Tim Duncan (my favorite basketball player of all time after Jimmy Butler). On the playground, everyone wanted to be an Allen Iverson or Kobe Bryant, as our frequently-sprained ankles attested.
If basketball was the reliable main squeeze, baseball was the secret and passionate affair. And I mean secret, literally. My first baseball game was the first time I ever journeyed to downtown Toronto without my parents (with the blessing of a permission slip, of course). In my second and third (and fourth and fifth, ad nauseam) games, I eschewed bureaucratic approval, and commuted down with friends on the putatively free GO Train, which taught me the exquisite art of fare evasion. What began as the thrill of escaping a Very Catholic Household turned into an odyssey of being chased around the double-decker train by inspectors, sprinting off the train and jetting across Union Station, and snagging the cheap seats paid for by the parents of one of our token white friends, and jeering (and honestly, nervously so) at the Montreal Expos’ all-star designated hitter, Vladimir Guerrero…Senior.
But it was the height of the Vince Carter Raptors, and I had no one to talk about how the fear that The Impaler struck into my heart, so MLB became something of an uncool thing to follow in those doldrum years. My fandom would have to be nourished elsewhere.
On intramural softball, I was a middling third baseman, tolerated for my decent catch, later prized for my notoriously obstructive wide base (I was and remain a big boy). And, just as a piece of Canadiana for this write-up’s inevitably American audience, as kids, a popular game in gym class (which became intramural and local tournaments) was called Soccer Baseball. It wasn’t until this year that I learned that y’all Americans call it something else: Kickball.
Then came 2015. Yes, I’m talking about the greatest and most swaggerific Jays team ever assembled before the 2025 season. Yes, I’m talking about icons Tulo and Pillar, and the imperturbable Donaldson. Yes, I’m talking about the invisible parrot perching on Edwin’s Edwing. Yes, I’m talking about Joey Bats.
Yes, I’m talking about The Bat Flip.
It is hard to overstate the intra-/inter-/trans-galactic convergences that imbued José Bautista’s iconic moment with the raw energy that exploded throughout the city after the repression of many disappointing years. For this Scarborough kid, that seventh inning was (and to me, remains) the greatest moment in Blue Jays history: tied at two apiece, after a 53-minute inning, Josh Donaldson on first and Kevin Pillar on third, Bautista at bat, one ball and one strike, Sam Dyson threw a fastball, and in the roaring din of the crowd – gone. While the American media was up in arms about the impoliteness (lol) of the gesture, we were passing around screenshots of our Dominican king in the group chats. For the kids from the ends, in other words, Canadian niceness was white people shit. Bautista was who we were, and who we wanted to be, at the same time.
To this day, I can still recite the call: Bautista with the drive–Deep left field–NO DOUBT ABOUT IT!
A couple of years after the 2015 ALDS, my relationship with my Jays would have to become a long distance one. I was about to move to Honolulu (and then to Seattle) on a Fulbright Scholarship. At my going-away party, one of my best friends surprised me with a Bautista jersey to wear on my sojourns. This is, incidentally, the only photo I have of me in Jays gear before this year. I gave the Bautista jersey to my brother, who still lives in Scarborough, and who wore it for the 2025 season.
I know it sounds a little both-sides-ist, but by the time the World Series rolled around, and the Prince That Was Promised, Vladdy Jr. led my hometown team to new heights, I was torn. Half a decade (including the entire pandemic) in Los Angeles, along the esteemed artery of Temple Road that sutures Silver Lake, Echo Park, and Rampart Village into a Filipino enclave, and I had learned to become a Dodgers fan. Or more accurately, it was the deep Echo Park-ness of my former colleagues, especially Karen (superfan of all things Dodgers) and Natalia Molina (neighborhood historian and Los Doyers faithful) and Ana Iwataki (Little Tokyo curatorial nerd and consummate Asian American jock), who situated me in space.
Being in that neighborhood, especially during 2020, taught me how to fall in love with Los Angeles. I bought my first car (whom I named Hybrid Jesus), took lockdown joyrides up and down the coast, went on my Stupid Mental Health Walks around the lake, and – most importantly – paraded down Echo Park loaded with cases of beer to hand out on the street. It was the year of the Lakers championship, the Dodgers championship, the presidential elections, and I came to adore the anarchic smell of burning rubber from the pickup trucks doing donuts on Sunset. Once the city “opened back up,” it was Dodgers games over spicy fried chicken at Crawfords, and dancing at Short Stop.
Nonetheless. I can’t lie: it felt damn amazing to flaunt my Jays gear in New York, heckled by Public Enemy Number One (Yankees fans) and supported by the Charming Disasters (Mets fans). When Springer hit the homer that clinched our first World Series appearance since my former-non-Canadian ass was eleven months old, it was time to go to war. Even if it was against my other former home city.
Game 1: LAD @ TOR (TOR W 11-4)
AdL: Man, I was WORRIED about this one. For a casual fan, it was easy to be optimistic. The Jays were locked in and warmed up, the team Loved Each Other, and they were riding the momentum of an epic ALDS on the back of the heroics of George Springer. But there was so much about the writing on the wall that made me uneasy: it would be Springer’s return to a playoff match against the Dodgers, and I feared (rightly) that the bad karma from the 2017 World Series would be Houston’s chief export to the city of Toronto. Not to mention that at the end of the day, the Jays are still A Toronto Sports Team: infamously unlucky. The perpetual underdog, and deservedly so, because for the most part, our teams tend to suck.
I watched the game at the lobby bar of an indie theater in Williamsburg, where my partner was running the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. With much foresight, she asked the theater to project the game onto the wall above the staircase, and I booked it to Union Square to catch the ironically-named L train, which I had hoped was not premonitory for anything. The theater ebbed and flowed with Brooklyn arts types and queer goths, often both at once, and at the bar, it became clear that I was the outlier sports fan when I was yelling at the wall with a Fernet in hand, long after everyone else had shoved their way into the auditorium.
My god, did this game have some great story lines. After his meteoric rise from rookie in the minor leagues to playoff darling, my beautiful Pennsylvanian son (no relation) Trey Yesavage started for the Jays in Game 1. It wasn’t the dominant repeat of his surprise start in G6 of the ALCS, but he managed to hold his own for a respectable four innings. The bartender, who knew nothing about baseball, enthusiastically congratulated me, a Filipino dude in my young thirties, for My White American Son’s (no relation) successes midway through the third.
Nights like G1 made me nostalgic for Old Twitter. I’d have been lighting it up across the feed on my old account, Swagapino Studies. Bluesky, the liberal suburb of microblogging platforms would have to do. And pleasantly, it turned out that other Skeeters (yes, that’s the unfortunate and legitimate Bluesky slang) had the same hankering, and on that platform, I found a decent dupe for the dopamine hits of a Night On Twitter.
So when, at the bottom of the sixth, with bases loaded, my son (no relation) Addison Barger pinch-hit for Davis Schneider (for whom my partner yells GREAT MOUSTACHE whenever he shows up on screen), I knew what to do.
Reader, I skeeted.
KT: I didn’t like the vibes heading into game one in Toronto, especially because I had to watch in snippets while I was away at a conference in Houston of all places. Like every true Dodgers fan, I still carry the trauma of the 2017 World Series, in which the Houston Astros cheated the Dodgers out of a ring, adding insult to injury by doing it at Dodger Stadium in game 7. For these reasons, George Springer (the hero of the Jay’s G7 victory against Seattle in the ALCS) was my–nay every–Dodgers fan’s enemy number 1.
Despite Blake Snell, aka Snellzilla’s (lol) dominance against the Phillies and the Brewers, I wasn’t sure how he’d fare against the Blue Jays’ relentless offense. With me and the Dodgers both on the road, I couldn’t hunker down for my usual obsessive-compulsive regime of superstitious rituals. The anxiety led me to drink way more beer than I intended (3 tallboys of Lone Star before first pitch) at the West Alabama Ice House known for their “ice cold” brew. Ricardo Montez, a Rice alum and Texas native brought me there because he thought I might “appreciate a place devoted to cold beer.”
Reader, I am NOT a beer drinker. Not even at the stadium for home games. I do, however, appreciate the misrecognition, and I do love a “San Mig Ice” from the subzero coolers they use in Balikbayan bars in Manila. I appreciated it a bit too much that evening, despite drinking with a group of gays who also avoid beer (bc carbs), and who didn’t give a shit about baseball.
I was already in poor form, matching Snell’s own, by the time we got to a celebratory dinner for a friend’s new book around the middle innings, as I vainly tried to resume my rituals, which involved drinking mezcal and soda ONLY WHEN the Dodgers were at bat. You can imagine how impossible it was to keep eyes on the game seated at a fancy dinner with eight other people.
I only go to the bathroom when the Dodgers are at bat: one of many, painstaking game-watching rituals. Don’t ask me why (you don’t want to know). I’ve been doing it since 2020.That night, I couldn’t wait for a break because of the aforementioned tallboys, so I got up and went to the bathroom while the Jays were up in the bottom of the 6th. It was at that moment of sloppy “game management” on my part (or at least that’s what my twisted brain told me) that the Jays’ Addison Barger hit a grand slam off Anthony Banda, the lady Dodger fans’ favorite presumed “fuckboi,” who came in for Snell in relief. Barger made it 9-2 and essentially put G1 out of reach for the Dodgers.
Many of you are probably aware of the idiom, “beer before hard, you’re in the yard,” meaning if you drink beer before hard liquor, you will (as the other saying goes) never be sicker. That night, beer before hard led to the Jays going yard multiple times. At least that’s what my twisted, superstitious psyche told me. Not even the lucky Dodgers tee tucked under my conference-appropriate button-down was going to save us. It was time to reset all the rituals and pass out back at the hotel, much to the chagrin of my friends and my spouse who witnessed my full descent into despair as I instructed the Uber driver to play TSwift’s “Father Figure” at full volume, while I sang along.
Game 2: LAD @ TOR (LAD W 5-1)
KT: This was the first game that Adrian and I let ourselves chat beforehand. I interpreted it then as a magnanimous gesture from someone who felt really good because their team was up 1-0 in the series after a dominant performance. Other “casuals” who were watching the WS for the first time were not so kind to me on other social media platforms, with the Dodgers being the so-called ruiners of baseball for our Daddy Warbucks payroll. My public posture after G1 was that I was “too blessed to be stressed,” but the truth was I was languishing in the kind of depressive hungover state I’d experienced before in my younger days of conferencing, especially when my panel was scheduled at 9am local time as it was the morning of G2.
I threw my now unlucky clothes and totems into a dirty laundry bag in my suitcase, and surrendered to the conference, knowing full well that I had another group dinner scheduled while G2 was scheduled to air. I was much more cautious and undertook a regime of rest and rehydration to prepare. Yoshinobu Yamamoto was on the mound that night, and he’d just thrown a complete 9 innings in his last start for the NLCS. Derek Jeter emphatically stated on the pregame show that Yoshi wouldn’t be able to do it again. Since everyone knew–and witnessed in G1–how the Dodgers’ bullpen was absolute ASS (and had been for most of the season), Yoshi’s unlikely capacity to “do 9 innings again” spelled more trouble for Los Doyers in Toronto.
Yamamoto had a shaky start and I was worried he was on the path to Snellsville; but he managed to get out of a jam in the first with some heads-up defensive plays behind him. I exhaled and took up a new viewing ritual in the process: I reasoned that we’d make it through clean innings if I didn’t watch while we pitched. This was a convenient ritual to take up just as we arrived at a group dinner at the classic Houston Tex-Mex joint, Ninfa’s Original. Football was on all of Ninfa’s TVs, so I was in no danger of an errant glance a la Lot’s wife.
Turns out the game was a pitchers’ duel between Yamamoto and Toronto’s Kevin Gausman, so I missed a lot. At one point, Gausman retired 17 Dodgers in a row as the game was knotted at 1, and it was looking bleak as our offense seemed flaccid once again. By the top of the 7th inning, I stopped hiding my phone and rudely propped it up against my modified lucky drink: mezcal and soda with THREE ORANGE SLICES (representing three clean outs for Yoshi), which was to be sipped only during Dodgers at-bats. It was at that moment that our fresh prince, Will Smith, the Dodgers’ catcher who opened the scoring earlier in G2 with an RBI single, homered for the go-head run putting the Dodgers up 2-1.
Shortly thereafter, Max Muncy, “that funky Muncy” (sung to the tune of the Beastie Boys’ “Brass Monkey”) followed up with another solo homer to put the Dodgers up 3-1. The Dodgers went on to score two more in the top of the 8th after an extended Jonas Brothers’ performance of “I Can’t Lose” as part of the Mastercard-sponsored “Stand Up to Cancer” segment featured every year during the World Series. Some Toronto fans complained about how limber the 7th-inning-stretch was, allowing their pitcher to get cold. Of course, I tucked that song away for future use, turning it into an emergency totem. Yamamoto closed out all 9 innings of G2 for a final score of 5-1. Adrian reached out to me that night to call Yoshi’s performance a “master class,” and we traded photos of the “bad Yama Mamma” (sung to the tune of Carl Carlton’s “She’s a Bad Mama Jama…”) striking his own stretch like a “bad bitch,” as Dodgers fans love to say.
AdL: Yeah, we got wrecked by Yoshi, or as Karen called him via text, “My Bad Bitch.” It was one thing to know his worth from that fat contract he signed, and it was another thing to witness why mercenaries (including pitchers) are one of the world’s oldest and best paid professions. And don’t get me wrong, I love Kevin Gausman. He earned his keep by shutting down the Dodgers offense early on. But I fear Yoshinobu Yamamoto more.
After my brimming (oozing, overflowing, really) confidence after G1, I had to send Karen a text at the end of that game to congratulate her on behalf of her Bad Bitch, and I was certain that she was curled up and happily scrolling like that meme:
The real suffering that night, though, was that one of my reliable neighborhood spots, my go-to hookah lounge, which was usually a font of good juju, was completely off. The live stream didn’t work, and I tried logging into my own accounts to find a decent stream, and ended up settling for a free seven-day trial of (yuck) Fox One. The entire time, a British woman kept yapping in my ear, complaining to me about how slow the food was taking five minutes after she ordered, ridiculing me for not being able to set up the stream (while admitting that she’d never worked a Roku her entire life), ranting about how grimy the East Village is, and groaning about how the establishment – a hookah lounge – smells like smoke.
Yes, I blame Good King Charles’s loyal subject for this game’s seventh inning. But what’s baseball if not arbitrarily blaming inconveniences and constellational misalignments for your team’s loss?
Game 3: TOR @ LAD (LAD W 6-5 in 18 innings)
KT: Both the Dodgers and I were back in L.A. for G3 on Monday the 27th. I was feeling good and loose about the next three games, especially because after the Dodgers stole one in Toronto, wrenching back the home-field advantage, and turning the series into a potential “best of 5.” I didn’t reach back out to Adrian that day, probably because I was feeling as smug as he did after G1. Plus, I didn’t want to jinx anything by consorting with a rival, especially because I had my whole set-up ready at home: Madre Mezcal Espadin on hand with limes harvested from my backyard, and a giant bottle of Tajin. Snacks were locked and loaded, and I even had a couple of chops defrosting in the fridge to make a wholesome dinner at home after a long day of teaching on campus.
I dared to wear the same non-Dodgers clothes I wore for G2 at the Houston conference, and went to campus knowing the game would start just when my spouse and I had to drive home at 5pm. Our house is only 1.4 miles away from Dodger Stadium (I typically walk to games), and we were ensnared in the World Series traffic compounding an already gnarly rush hour down Alvarado into Echo Park. We listened to the first inning and a half on the car radio, and made it home in time to pour a lucky mezcal drink just before former-Blue Jay, Teoscar Hernandez homered to put the Dodgers up by 1 in the bottom of the 2nd. Shohei Ohtani followed with another towering solo shot at the end of the 3rd.
Max Scherzer was on the bump for the Jays, and while I harbor less antipathy for him than for Springer, there is no love lost for “dead arm” Scherzer in Los Angeles. He acquired that reputation during his brief stint with the Dodgers in 2021, after he refused to pitch in the NLCS, citing his supposed “dead arm.” Many speculated he was just preserving himself for a monster free agency because his contract was ending.
That evening, our foster cats’ “real parents,” Chelsea and Nick Berkofsky began texting us about the game. We ended up with their litter-mate tabbies, Speedy and Amelia, after the Altadena fires consumed their home in early January. The family had to downsize into a studio apartment in Echo Park with their other cat, their dog and their toddler. As bereaved cat parents who lost both of our beautiful littermates Lily and Corky within a calendar year, we offered to help the Berkofskys out with a long-term foster situation for at least two of their brood.
The Blue Jays’ catcher, Alejandro Kirk clocked Tyler Glasnow with a three run homer in the top of the 4th, flipping the game upside down as the sports announcers like to say. It was then that Chelsea, a diehard Latina Dodgers fan, and I fully converted our group chat for Speedy and Amelia into a Dodgers anxiety thread. I changed my clothes back into my recently laundered lucky Dodgers shirt (featuring the 2024 World Series championship trophy), and stuck to my neurotic routine of not watching our pitching halves each inning. I also convinced myself that vigorous texting with the cat thread and other friends like Oliver Wang should be added to my many superstitious rituals.
It seemed to work, because we’d tied the score again with “ribeye steaks” (i.e. RBIs) from Shohei in the 4th, and Freddie Freeman in the 5th. The Jays pulled ahead 5-4 again in the top of the 7th, and I knew it was time to experiment with an untapped resource: the Jonas Brothers’ “I Can’t Lose.”
It worked.
Shohei homered for the 2nd time in the bottom of the 7th to tie the game at 5-5. The score stayed stuck that way for another 11 innings.
You can see the line of palm trees ringing Dodger stadium’s western slope from our living and dining room windows. With each passing inning and hour, the beleaguered “awwws” echoing from beyond the palms tipped me off around 30 seconds before each play aired that we hadn’t managed to walk it off yet. I also heard the roars of relief when Clayton Kershaw came in from the bullpen and got out of the jam in the top of the 12th. That single, crucial out would constitute his last appearance on the mound in his baseball home. The rest of the game unfolded as a blur of intentional walks to Shohei, a fruit platter delivered to the Blue Jays’ dugout, and guys whose names we never heard of deep in the roster. (L.A. sports teams’ fruit platter game goes HARD, as I learned from being an Angel City Football Club season ticket holder).
Adrian and I had to break the tension, risking whatever bad juju might come for either of us as a result of talking to each other DURING a game instead of before or after.
Despite the conciliatory tone of his final message, I knew Freddie’s walk-off homer in the bottom of the 18th, with shades of G1 in 2024, must’ve eviscerated Adrian as much as it elated me. It was time to shut up and go to bed.
AdL: Already anxiety-struck with the dread of three games in Los Angeles, I came into the game doubly anxious about not being able to finish preparing for class. To ease the pain, I met my boo in downtown Brooklyn to watch the new Chainsaw Man movie, and indeed, animated gore was the perfect prelude (and unfortunate symbology) for the game after. We found a sports bar nearby, and wanting to live up to my reputation as a Devoted Undergraduate Instructor, I resolved to make the bar my office, and accompanied G2 with a side of light-hearted readings on Japanese imperialism across the Pacific.
At the top of the ninth, tied at five apiece, I had finished class prep, and hastily wrote out the lesson plan along the margins of the back page, because I had forgotten my notebooks, and for some reason, it felt like bad juju to dig through my bag when, at any moment, the Jays or the Dodgers could win the game by some complete fluke. But the boo had fallen asleep in the bar booth, and I knew it was time to go, because we had to Go To Work the next day, but not before she snapped this live react, somewhere between the top of the tenth and the bottom of the twelfth:
In between stretches of subway tunnel, I refreshed my ESPN app frantically, trying to follow along. (Incidentally, we agree that the MLB interface of the app is the best one, far superior to the cluster—- that is the NBA page’s nonsensical statistical spreadsheet.) Up the steps of all five floors of our walkup, I played the live audio off my phone. By the top step, my New York BBL was fully engaged, but my brain was complete mush. The boo suggested (very strongly) that I not stay up too late, because I had to teach both lectures the next day, with meetings and a dissertation prospectus defense in between. Naturally, I did not listen to her, and I lay in bed watching the game on my phone, and occasionally texting Karen, because in the stupor of the sixteenth inning, somewhere between 2 and 2:30am, who else would understand the maniacal delirium than my dear friend across the continent?
Alas, when Freddie, my fellow Canadian, murdered his country with a walk-off, I sent that farewell text, and like Stewie from Family Guy, turned over in my blanket, and there was a non-zero chance that I let out a tiny sob.
Game 4: TOR @ LAD (TOR W 6-2)
AdL: At this point, my work wardrobe was designed around all my Jays merch. The boo offered to wash my jersey that night, and I almost accepted because it was getting kinda dank, but we reminded ourselves of the preeminent value of ritual, and left it sufficiently grimy.
My senior colleague, who was the chair of the dissertation prospectus defense I attended that afternoon, stared his impenetrable stare at my outfit, and I was concerned that he might have been a hostile die-hard Dodgers fan. Then I remembered that he had just come out with a book about suburbanization in his Pennsylvanian hometown. That relief was confirmed after we wrapped up our student’s defense (which was, unsurprisingly, quite stellar), and he asked how I was feeling about the series, and insisted that the Jays were destined to win, because billion-dollar payrolls were bound to crash and burn. “I can’t stand the Dodgers!” he proclaimed, and I gave him a thumbs-up and a forced smile, because like the former theater kid I was, my superstitious ass couldn’t shake the bad vibes from anything other than a break a leg. “Good luck tonight!”
My students, fortunately, were also cheering for my home team, but more out of a commitment to anti-Dodgerism (there were, predictably, many Yankees fans who still couldn’t get over how badly we rocked their shit during the ALDS), and less out of support for Toronto. But one of my students, from the potato-rich province of Prince Edward Island, offered generous solidarity as a fellow Canadian passport-holder. I expected that this would tide over the foreboding misfortune that came with the copious well wishes, and I welcomed his cheers wholeheartedly.
For some reason, I can’t remember the game, probably because I spent the entire time ranting to the boo about my evening class, which was, admittedly, not my best work. I was trying to teach a brief history of American colonialism in the Philippines, but couldn’t get my head out of how utterly exhausted I was after eighteen innings of head-on-wall-banging baseball. The photo evidence of that day I do have, though, was that, despite all odds, I somehow managed to produce a banger of a whiteboard:
Cue the anime guy looking at a butterfly meme: Is this…professor-ing?
KT: I can barely remember G4. I was driving home from campus when the game began, feeling hopeful but depleted, knowing Shohei would take the bump after hitting two homers and four extra base hits, and reaching base a grand total of nine times less than 24 hours earlier. I was gobsmacked that Will Smith was catching again after his thighs of steel held it down behind the dish all 18 innings the night before.
Adrian and I exchanged pleasantries throughout the day. I sent a laugh/cry emoji to the meme he posted of a fat Blue Jay bird labeled “Alejandro Kirk.” We talked about what positions we played when we were kids (I was a catcher; Adrian played third).
The Dodgers opened the scoring early after Mr. Kiktober, Kiké Hernandez hit a sac fly to make it 1-0 in the first. Then Shohei was bested by Vlad in the top of the 3rd: junior dinged a 2-run, 395 foot homer over the left-centerfield wall. Despite some shakiness, Shohei pitched a decent game that kept us competitive at a score of 2-1 heading into the top of the 7th.
My liver couldn’t handle the magic mezcal regimen after G2, so I sipped bitters and soda hoping it might still summon some offensive pop from the boys in (Dodger) blue. I cooked another meal using the same spice blend for the chops in G2. All of this was to no avail. The magic was gone.
In a fit of desperation I relented to more alcohol, but with less booze-by-volume: Madre “Desert Water” seltzers. I texted furiously with Chelsea, Nick, Oliver and whoever else would listen to me to no avail. I turned on the Joe Bros “I Can’t Lose.” Turns out we can.
Another disastrous torrent of Toronto runs against our frail bullpen made it 6-1 entering the final third of the game. We eked out one more run, making the final score 6-2. All my now unlucky clothes were again tossed into the laundry for another hard reboot. I couldn’t even muster up a congratulatory message to Adrian, before trying to “eternal sunshine” the ick that just happened at Dodger Stadium from my mind.
Speedy Berkofsky Glowers at Dodger Stadium
Game 5: TOR @ LAD (TOR W 6-1)
AdL: I started the day at the dermatologist’s clinic, after an evening of relief over my team’s victory, followed by an anxiety-laden Google search for the symptoms of skin cancer, and a frantic self-inspection, and I grew concerned over a dark spot on my left leg that, by midnight, I was convinced was melanoma. (WebMD really messes you up.)
After the doctor’s good news (that mark on my leg was literally just hardened skin that developed from me picking at a mole), I was on the verge of tears, and walked south to Manhattan’s Koreatown to find something good to eat. On 30th Street, I came across a place called Okdongsik, a hole-in-the-wall with room only for bar seats, and their slim menu drew me in. One of the cooks behind the counter motioned me over to the end of the table, first to serve me a bowl of dweji-gomtang (a clear soup with slices of pork atop a pillow of rice porridge), and then to talk shop about the World Series. Fortunately for me, he was sporting a blue and orange Mets hat. He assured me that the Jays would win tonight, because as good as Shohei was, the Dodgers were built for high-variance home runs, and my own team’s terrifying offense – “The Jays play baseball right, and your guys work the count” – was far more sustainable in the long run.
Later that evening, the boo and I went on an IKEA run in Red Hook, and I was on a mission to drive her to madness with my incessant name-brand puns (“If the Jays lose the series, what do you think they…LACK?”), and after a quick dinner of Swedish meatballs and gravlax, we took the bus back to downtown Brooklyn to get on the train home. This was a mistake: our bus got stuck behind some asshole van driver who parked his vehicle in the middle of the street – during rush hour – and I was coming down with a bout of motion sickness, exacerbated by the fear that we’d miss a fat chunk of the game.
Thankfully, we got home just in time for the middle of the first. We sat down on the couch, and turned on (puke) Fox One, and were treated to a pair of homers, first from Davis “Beautiful Stache” Schneider, and the second from Vladdy Jr. The candles (and other flammable organics) were lit, the barley tea was poured, and we were locked TF in.
Stepping up to the mound was my beautiful White American son (no relation), Trey THEE Savage. And as the sports history books will surely write one day, this was to be the apex of his unlikely rise, but no one could have anticipated exactly how historic it’d be: twelve strikeouts with zero walks, the most in a World Series not only by a rookie pitcher, but by any pitcher ever.
No one except for me, his proud Filipino dad (no relation), who spent the entire game blessing him with some sage, knew this would happen, so I’d like to think that I had an important role to play:
KT: For the first time since the Dodgers returned to L.A, I was home when the game started at 5pm Pacific. I decided to bust out of my routine a little bit, hoping that the slightest rearrangements to the material world might help jumpstart our anemic offense. I re-established my mise-en-place on the kitchen counter: limes from the backyard, Madre Espladin, Tajin. The Los Angeles Athletic Club cocktail tumbler I used to sip my beverages during the Dodgers’ half of each inning was ready for use.
I even purchased some new snacks from the Filipino mega-grocery, Island Pacific Market, including garlic-flavored “cornnick” (basically corn nuts with crispy slivers of garlic mixed in), vinegar-and-garlic-flavored chicharron, and a bunch of other stuff chock-full of palm oil that I have no business eating or drinking because of my chronic health conditions. As I was acquiring my bounty at the market, I was struck with the fear that busting out the Pinoy goods might actually backfire and help out Adrian instead of me…
It turns out I was right: the game started with Blake Snell tossing two back-to-back meatballs to Schneider and Vladdy to put us down early 0-2. Snellzilla’s mojo from his earlier playoff run was gone. Our stanky (pejorative) bullpen would have to ride again tonight.
Meanwhile, it was Trey Yesevage’s night for Toronto. The Jays’ Cinderella story pitched flawlessly, giving up only one home run to (who else), Kiké Hernandez. Otherwise, we whiffed a total of 12 times, and Yesavage set the World Series rookie record for strikeouts. We went down 6-1 with the great Sandy Koufax watching. He was presumably there to see the GOAT, Clayton Kershaw toss his final innings at Dodger Stadium, a scenario that would’ve only been possible if the score line was reversed.
Beneath the shadow of another loss, Kersh lingered on the field with his family soaking it all in before the whole team went back to Toronto down 2-3 with their backs against the wall, fighting to live another day. Another team stalwart loitered after everybody was gone in the dugout: Miguel “Miggy” Rojas stared off into an empty stadium looking forlorn. Maybe it was the competitive anguish in his eyes, but I knew then that Miggy–a clubhouse leader beloved by the Dodger faithful, if relatively unknown amongst casual WS watchers–might just be our only hope.
Game 6: LAD @ TOR (LAD W 3-1)
KT: Backs against the wall. Do or die. On Halloween no less. I was up early, because I had to bring my wife Sarah in for a routine medical procedure at 6:30am Pacific. All the nurses, docs, anesthesiologists, and other patients were chattering about what might happen in G6 and a potential G7. One doctor even went so far as to say he was considering canceling his birthday dinner reservation at Hippo in Highland Park the following night if game seven came to fruition.
A baseball fan’s superstitions, especially when their team is facing elimination, carry the same potency, and demand the same fastidiousness as a religious zealot’s rites. My spouse understood this and was kind enough to let me drag her around town as “the good drugs” wore off to re-stock my ceremonial essentials: Madre Espladin, a particular brand and flavor of potato chip which we ran out of at the end of G3, and a magic item I hadn’t considered to incorporate since Yamamoto’s last victorious start in G2: oranges. Clearly the backyard limes weren’t doing their thing. I also opted for new vestments, and wore my “L.A. Strong” wildlife relief tee.
I’m ashamed to admit that most of L.A. had more confidence in Yoshi’s capacity to redeem us than I. Wasn’t he sick of doing all the work for the group project? How fresh could he be after another complete game within less than a week? I prayed to a god I’d long ago alienated that the oranges would work.
He and the Jays’ starter Kevin Gausman carried on much as they did during their first head-to-head battle in G2, keeping it scoreless on both sides through three. I observantly replenished my three orange slices each inning and scurried away every time we pitched, keeping track of the game through its ambient sounds from the other room, while refreshing my MLB app nonstop for live updates that were about 30 seconds ahead of the TV feed in the other room.
As my therapist and I have discussed, baseball superstitions provide a convenient screen for a person’s obsessive compulsive tendencies. Mine have worsened through each passing postseason, and I can’t help but wonder if the Catholicism I was conditioned to observe with greater reverence hasn’t somehow been reanimated in all the practices I’ve taken up on behalf of Dodger baseball.
The boys finally pushed through in the top of the 3rd with RBIs from Will Smith and the sleeping giant, Mookie Betts, who admitted after G5 that he had been “terrible” all series long. With a small lead, Saint Yoshi went back to work, but it wasn’t long before the devil himself, George Springer brought in the Blue Jays’ first run with a single in the bottom of the 3rd. At this point I had to clean out all the oranges accumulating in my L.A. Athletic Club cocktail tumbler, but wondered desperately if I might be cursing us in the process.
After getting out of a jam in the 6th, Yoshi left the game for our bullpen to finish, leaving me scant hope for a game seven. I missed the dawgs of last year’s pen, the true MVPs, when we had no starting pitching to speak of other than a less polished Yoshi, and the hot L.A.-born himbeaux, Jack Flaherty, borrowed for a year from the Detroit Tigers. Throughout G6, Miggy Ro’made a couple of spectacular defensive plays at second base, including a barehander to first in the bottom of the 7th to keep the Jays’ rolling offense at bay.
Justin “Wrobo” Wrobleski kept things clean from the bullpen and handed it over to Roki Sasaki, the Japanese wunderkind who the Dodgers signed as a rookie starter, but who ended up flourishing in the postseason as a closer. “Bailalo Roki” (as Miggy Ro’ nicknamed him after DJ Roderick’s “Bailalo Rocky”), worked his way out of a jam in the 8th, only to hit Alejandro Kirk by a pitch to send a runner on base in the bottom of the 9th. Kirk was taken out of the game for a swifter pinch runner, Myles Straw.
Addison Barger, the same guy who staked Dodger hearts with a pinch hit grand slam in G1 came to the plate and hit a towering fly into center field over Justin Dean’s head. That hit, likely a double or even a triple, would’ve tied the game with no outs, putting Barger in scoring position to win it all for the Jays. As if commanded by the (Dodger) baseball gods, the ball simply dropped dead into the padding of the Rogers Centre outfield. Dean flung his hands up into the air to signal the umps for a dead ball.
The home field advantage that was supposed to bring the Blue Jays their first title in thirty-two years pulled some Freaky Friday, Halloween, “Fall of the House of Usher” type shit with the Rogers Centre’s padding. The wedged ball was an automatic ground-rule double, freezing the runners at 2nd and 3rd with no outs, and keeping the score locked at 3-1 Dodgers.
Tyler Glasnow, the presumptive starter for a possible G7, came in for young Roki, as all of Los Angeles collectively girded its loins. The next Jays batter, the red hot Ernie Clement, hit an infield pop up on Glasnow’s first pitch securing at least one measly out. Andres Gimenez took his place in the batters box with the Dodgers’ most loathed, George Springer looming on deck. Gimenez flared what looked to be a bloop single towards shallow left field when Mr. Enrique Hernandez, our October trickster, came charging in from nowhere to make the grab, following-through with a swift, targeted throw to Miguel Rojas for a game-ending double play.
I saw none of this and only heard it, of course, since I was hunched over anxiously in the other room observing the sequestration demanded by this year’s liturgy for the World Series. In so doing, we were granted another day. Amen to that.
AdL: Drake just had to ruin everything, didn’t he? After my beautiful White American Son (no relation) struck Shohei out in G5, Toronto’s National Disgrace decided to troll the greatest baseball player of all time (and I say that with zero irony) with a couple of dumbass Instagram stories. And this, my friends, is when I first had an inkling that we might lose the World Series:
Instead of dwelling on the disastrous double play (and the doubly emphatic primal screams) at the end of the game, and instead of talking about the fact that I spent a good chunk of the game explaining the intricacies of the Jays’ and the Dodgers’ shades of blue to an Australian acquaintance, allow me to talk shit about Drake.
I’m the kind of kid from Toronto that has an encyclopedic knowledge of the first half of Drake’s discography, but not the second half, when he decided he’d levitate away from the city’s potholed streets and perch himself atop the former tallest freestanding structure in the world. This included his unreleased tracks on YouTube, those urban anthems with the gritty circulatory undercurrent of a mixtape, as well as the features that he scattered to the winds (his early collabs with now-enemies Kendrick Lamar and Rick Ross were notable masterpieces).
To put it in local geography: everything before and up to the album on the left (If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late) is music you can listen to while napping on the late night bus to Scarborough after a line-cook shift downtown, or bump windows-down from a late night drive in your 1997 Honda Civic after a break-up with your situationship. Everything from and after the album on the right (Views), after the first three tracks, is down right unlistenable for anyone not a regular at a bottle-service-only club on King Street West (for my Angelenos, this is a street with the manicured aesthetics of the Arts District but the diversity and energy of the Venice Erewhon).
This drop-off was unfortunate, because while Drake’s stocks plateaued (as he shifted towards maximizing Spotify streams instead of crafting albums), Toronto sports skyrocketed to their eminent place today. The spring after Drake released If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, the Raptors repeated as Atlantic Conference champions for the first time in team history, and later that fall, the Blue Jays flipped bats and took names all the way to the ALCS. It was with some personal trepidation, then, that when the Raptors were to face (and beat) the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals in 2019, I had to watch Drake take credit (in the Royal We) for momentum that was far greater than he.
For a solid year after Mr. Kendrick Lamar vivisected his middle-class Canadian counterpart, I was questioned about my feelings on the Kendrick-Drake “beef” (which was really a slaughter). Toronto’s beloved sports alumni, Angelenos first (like Demar DeRozan, more loved than Drake would ever be in the city) snubbed the metropolis’s most eminent washed rapper. When Drake laid low for a while, and started teasing snippets from his yet-to-be-released album over the summer, the chatter seemed to die down. But by October, when it became clear that the Jays were to go head to head with the Dodgers, I thought: here we go again!
All I wanted was for the guy to keep his cursed social media thumbs off the Jays. By G6, it was clear that Aubrey had lost his touch. One might blame it on Kendrick’s clinical dissection of an October Scorpio (I’m a November Scorpio, we don’t claim him), but at the end of the day, like the Rogers Centre’s walls that wedged the ball into themselves, it was Mr. Graham who was his own worst enemy, and the thorn in Toronto’s foot.
Game 7: LAD @ TOR (LAD W 5-4 in 11 innings)
KT: As I mentioned earlier, part of me (all of me?) never got over G7 in 2017 against the Astros. One of the things I did wrong that day–as if it had anything to do with me–was schedule a huge campus event on the TV show UnReal. That event ended with the saddest stream of texts, and a drive back to Echo Park through an abject eerie silence, when I’d hoped to be dodging fireworks and crowds streaming onto Alvarado Blvd from all corners.
Cut to 2025, and my calendar was clear except for a BBQ earlier in the day at my friend and colleague Natalia Molina’s place in South Pasadena. Natalia grew up in Echo Park (her family still lives here), and their Dodgers fandom is beautifully chronicled in several pieces Natalia has written, including one on this year’s series amidst the ICE raids and bifurcated feelings of its fans: a love for the team and the city vs. our vitriol for its primary owner, Mark Walter, who has investments in ICE detention centers.
Most of us were wearing Dodgers gear as we supped on the tri-tip Ian, Natlia’s husband, made special for the day. I was made painfully aware of the fact that my wildfire relief “L.A. Strong” tee signified differently in that neighborhood, where so many homes were lost or damaged in January. Los Angeles had been besieged by both fire and ICE in 2025. Would we make it to the other side of all that to experience the balm of a much-needed win?
Even though I packed a little tote to bring to Natalia’s in case I wanted to stay and watch the game (with a tub of sliced oranges, Madre Espladin, the lucky potato chips, and a complete outfit change into a Japanese Dodgers tee and Aussie pajama pants that acquired some magic late into G6), I decided I needed to be in the comfort of my own home for whatever chaos might come. I also wasn’t sure I wanted to expose a beloved colleague to the true bonkersness of my game-watching routines.
We dashed home and got settled in time to watch “dead arm” Scherzer give up a hit to Shohei which yielded nothing. My G7 traumas were reactivated when Springer clocked a solid single off Shohei, who was starting again on very short rest (just 3 days). Sho somehow got out of the inning not only by striking-out Vlad with a 100 mph fastball across the plate (Vlad clocked a pitch like that for his 2-run homer against Shohei in G3), but by virtue of Will Smith’s head’s up double-play, that took advantage of Springer’s deliciously bad base-running error.
Shohei looked sweaty and spent, but he managed mightily through the first two innings without giving up any runs. I was convinced this was contingent on the miracle of Yoshi’s oranges, which I kept in my own G7 lineup. By the bottom of the 3rd, however, he surrendered a three run no-doubter to Bo Bichette, the Blue Jays’ wounded hero (I miss his Jesus hair and beard), whose contract is up at the end of the year. At that point I was still sequestered in the other room, listening to the ambient sounds of Rogers Centre crescendoing with the taste of victory on the tip of their tongues. My body slumped backwards into a “Death of Chatterton” pose.
I was studiously avoiding any communication with Adrian or peeping on social media. Instead, I texted anxiously with the Berkfoskys, Rhys Ernst, Oliver Wang and others. I decided a kind of ascetic, sectarian approach to stimulation from the outside world was the only way to approach this most volatile of scenarios.
Baseball is a long game, as G3 and this epic tome we’ve written, remind us. By the top of the 4th, the Dodgers managed to take one back. By the bottom of the 4th, the benches and Dodgers’ bullpen cleared as “Wrobo” dinged Gimenez who (I still insist) dangled his hand in the zone on purpose in the previous sequence. After the dust settled with two on and two out in the bottom of the 4th, the Dodgers activated their starting rotation from the bullpen and sent Glasnow in to continue the game, despite having pitched in relief the night before.
There was action on the bases every inning. Dead arm Scherer was pulled in the top of the 5th, and by the top of the 6th the Dodgers narrowed it to a 1-run game on a Tommy Edman sac fly. By the bottom of the 6th, the Jays stretched the lead back up to 4-2. Covered in chip crumbs, and reeking of Madre Espladin muddled with freshly squeezed oranges, I realized I hadn’t eaten any dinner. It didn’t matter. I persevered and continued my rituals. At one point I considered busting out the wood rosary I bought at Quiapo cathedral in Manila in 2016.
I finally peeked at social media, and I noticed Adrian was also silent. I wondered where he was watching and how he might be doing. I envied the position he and his team were in, with a two run lead and only a handful of outs left to go. For some reason I toggled over into a strange sense of calm. Is this what they mean by “letting go?” Is this the sensation of one’s soul leaving one’s body? Or was it simply my mezcal-ravaged, nutrition-deprived frame, lapsing into a state of homeostatic survival?
We reached the top of the 8th with Trey Yesavage in relief for the Jays. The thing I love about game sevens is that teams are forced to empty out their dugouts and bullpens. There’s no hoarding the talent, and the fans are treated to ace starters in relief, and the utility heroes known only to their respective hives coming in to fulfill their specialty roles.
Joe Davis and John Smoltz wondered aloud about Yesavage still working when the real Mad Max, aka that Funky Muncy, clobbered a solo home run to bring us within one. I YAWWWWWWPED and sent the foster kitties scurrying into safe spaces under beds and sofas.
At this juncture, Sarah was on her way home from a friend’s art opening with a couple of other pals in tow. “Do you need anything?” she asked via text.
“We need more oranges,” I replied, forgetting about real food because I was newly feasting on hope.
Emmet Sheehan and Blake Snell came through by holding it down on the mound in the bottom half of the 8th, then in the flash of an instant we were down to only two at-bats left in our season at the top of the 9th. Miggy Ro’ was batting in the 9-spot with one out and nobody on. Miggy worked the count to 3-2 against Hoffman. Hoffman threw a hanging slider, and Mr. Miguel Elias Rojas Naidenoff (where did that last name come from anyway?) sent it over the left field wall into the glove of a Jays fan holding a Canadian flag. The most cursed of souvenirs, courtesy of Los Angeles. The game was tied at 4-4.
I hate to be THAT guy, but I always knew it would be Miggy Ro’. This was the same Miggy Ro’ who held onto Kiké’s throw at the end of G6 to turn the double play that sent us to G7. This was the same guy whose defensive prowess got us out of multiple jams through G7; the same guy who lingered in the dugout after we pooed the scrooch in G5, contemplating if his career with the Dodgers wouldn’t end with a giant, ignominious “L.”
Miguel Rojas is also a Venezuelan player whose family members weren’t granted visas to watch him play, because of the United States’ fucked up immigration policies and travel restrictions.
In other words, the man had STAKES, and he did what so many hard-working unsung immigrants do and lifted us off the mat to give us a fighting chance with his most unlikely and unbelievable blast of destiny.
With our holy trinity of Shohei, Freddie and Mookie failing to tack on insurance runs, we headed to the bottom of the 9th with Blake Snell still on the mound. Dave Roberts made another key substitution in the home half of the 9th: Our Cuban outfielder, Andy Pages was sent into center field for his rocket arm. Pages also shares Miggy’s predicament insofar as no one from his family other than his wife has been granted a visa to see him play in a Dodgers uniform.
The bottom of the 9th felt dangerous AF with the heart of the Blue Jays line-up due: Vladdy, Bo Bichette, and grand slam Addison Barger (the name of Adrian’s future spawn). Vladdy popped out, and Bichette knocked a single to left. With Barger working a walk to put runners on first and second, Snell was pulled from the game. Yoshinobu Yamamoto emerged from the dugout a mere 24 hours or so after he saved our skins with a 96 pitch, 6-inning performance.
Yoshi hit Kirk with a pitch to load the bases with only one out. Varsho flared a ball to Miggy Ro’ (of course) who threw a laser to Will Smith at home despite falling backwards. Kiner-Falefa, who represented the World Series winning run, was forced out at home. The call withstood a review showing Will Smith’s foot barely tapping the plate before IKF’s foot crossed the threshold.
I was having an out of body experience, and I decided to throw all caution to the wind. I abandoned my sequestration and began to watch in earnest as Sarah returned home with some shrimp fried rice, and our friends Fonz and Sabsi.
Yoshi and the Dodgers were not out of the woods yet with two outs and the bases loaded. The Blue Jays’ winning run remained a mere 90 feet away when Ernie Clement came up to bat and hit a soaring fly ball over Kiké’s head. Oh shit. That was it…
Then Andy Pages barreled over from out of nowhere. He knocked Kiké out cold and made an unbelievable grab to send game seven to extra innings. It looked like we’d be riding Yoshi’s back the whole way: whether it was into the abyss, or off into the sunset remained to be seen.
Miracles kept accruing in extras, not at the hands of our MVP $uper$tars, but through the pluck and hustle of our immigrant utility players like Rojas and Pages. Wobbly and surfeit of shrimp fried rice after 10-innings of lucky mezcal sips, I lit some incensio de Santa Fe I restocked from Stories Bookstore in Echo Park–another ritual I haven’t even bothered to mention–right before Will Smith came up to bat in the top of the 11th against Shane Bieber. With the count at 2-0, Smith (who I’ve affectionately called a “zygote” for his baby-faced, nay, fetal features), went YARD on a two-seam slider from the Biebs. Cue Justin’s “Sorry.” We heard Echo Park roar through our windows. A few fireworks prematurely popped off.
We still had to get through the bottom half of the 11th. Vlad, first up, doubled off Yoshi and was sac-bunted over to third, bringing the tying run 90 feet away with only one out. Yoshi walked Barger, leaving runs on the corners with only 1 out. Then Alejandro Kirk came up to bat: the same thiccc Blue Jay Adrian and I spoke sweetly of earlier in the series. I found it hard not to root for him, even as I wanted–needed–our team to cross the threshold into dynastic glory so that Yankees and Giants fans would finally STFU about winning three in a single decade (still not gonna happen, but…)
Yoshi’s splitter broke Kirk’s bat. The thiccc Jay grounded into a game and series ending double-play fielded by Mookie Betts. I’m pretty sure my soul fled my body long before that, only called back into this mortal coil when massive fireworks erupted next door and across the city, as car horns announced our back-to-back victory. According to my friends, I made humping gestures at the TV (a la Kiké’s 2024 celebration) and spewed a tirade of joyous profanities into the phone when my World Series text circle FaceTimed to celebrate.
Deliriously HYPED w/ my friend Fonz at the end of G7. My hair is long and crazy because
I refused to cut it until the end of the series, a la Kiké, Sho and others.
Adrian and I didn’t talk until the next day, when I posted a fish-in-a-barrell meme about how Drake’s presence cost the Jays the World Series. I presented my theory about why the Blue Jays couldn’t close it out ,even after coming home with a 3-2 lead. Ironically, the fact that they came from behind to win the ALCS when they were down 3-2 to the Mariners saddled them with a memento mori. They learned teams could come back from the brink of death. Having done it themselves left that kernel of doubt in their minds, that little fracture in their own faith, when faced with the task of closing it out.
I’m certain the Blue Jays will be back in the thick of things at the end of next season. I know it’s been said, and most people don’t mean it, but it truly was a heartbreak for anyone to lose this series which unfurled, as the kids say, as CINEMA.
Before I, too, ride off into the sunset singing that Yoshinobu Yamamoto “ace anthem,” it bears acknowledgement that this wild up-and-down season was owed to some very bad karma the Dodgers invited by visiting Trump’s White House (against many of the players’ will), and responding terribly to ICE’s siege of Los Angeles before trying to make up for it with an ambiguous million dollar donation to “support immigrant families.” The excessive trust Doc Roberts placed in our raging MAGA reliever, Blake Treinen (who wrote Charlie Kirk’s name on his hat, and who many Twitter/Bluesky Dodgers fans call “BlaQe” for his Q-Anonish proclivities), made the prospect of our repeat victory in 2025 less palatable for everyone but us diehards. Last year, we had several storylines propelling our victory against the Yankees, who may be the only team more loathed than us at this point. In 2024, our wounded warrior Freddie Freeman, whose kid nearly died, sacrificed his ravaged body for our redemption.
This year we were the “American” team playing against all of Canada. The fascist USA didn’t deserve a win, even if the brown people of L.A. could surely use one. As it turns out, a dogfluencer named Air Corgi predicted we would win it in 7, and we did. As I said in a sweet exchange of messages with Canadian Jeopardy superchamp, Mattea Roach the morning of November 1: “I’d be sad if my team lost the World Series, but I wouldn’t be mad if the Blue Jays won.”
Part of me can’t fathom going through all of this again next year, though I liken our willful forgetting of baseball’s exquisite anguish to what people say about childbirth. Pressure is a privilege, in the immortal words of Billie Jean King, part-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Let’s run it back.
Illustration by Yunemo Six (@yunemosix) on Bluesky, inspired by the press pool photo I think of as “Yoshi’s Rebirth”
AdL: The first of November began with the following New Yorker interaction: a young cashier and I bickered at the GMC while I was picking up Vitamin B12 and D, and when I dared speculate that the Jays might have a real shot at this (which, let’s be real, they were all around the better team). He bellowed, “BUT HAVE YOU HEARD OF SHOHEI OHTANI?” Yes, kid, I hm and judging from his hat, I realized that he was a salty Yankees fan, still incredulous we’d beaten his team. But he did teach me a valuable lesson. The key to loving a baseball team is to drown oneself in delusions of the future. The Yankee variant of this delulu, though, comes down to some good ol’ Appeal To History, my logical fallacy of choice, and that their team would always have a chance at winning because, well, they have the most World Series wins out of any team in history.
To spiritually realign myself before G7, I walked north to a bakery that has, begrudgingly, earned my respect. The day, blustery and sunny in equal measure, seemed to demand the soothing balm of a fifteen-dollar fried chicken sandwich from a Frenchman who decided, in defiance of his stern Taiwanese mother-in-law, to specialize in Asian baked goods. They had just launched their cold-weather replacement for their tomato sando, and I include this work of simple genius below, partly to make you jealous and hungry, my kind reader, but also to index what was probably the best part of an otherwise extremely sad day.
I’m not gonna rehash my own play-by-play of G7 because, quite frankly, it still sucks to think about. The boo and I were to head to Park Slope to attend a friend’s birthday, vampire themed (broadly construed, but always already queer), and not realizing that the party had monopolized the patio all the way at the back of the bar, we opted to sit at a booth and stream the game on my phone from the (puke) Fox One app. We kept the stream going even when we discovered that the shindig had been going on for a solid hour, and the celebrant was handing out ‘zines and admiring the Sinners-themed vampire costumes, and we kept the stream going in the short two-minute walk across the street to the sports bar, where we would gather with about a hundred fans to watch the seventh game of one of the greatest World Series in history.
Up until the end of Trey Yesavage’s inning, I was an absolute riot. But as the Dodgers crawled back up, I set my phone on Do Not Disturb, and I retreated to the corner with unyielding focus on the screen. And when Yoshi walked up to the mound, my fellow Jays faithful (and many allies) noticed my silence and my praying hands, whispering to some god that I stopped believing in when I was eighteen. Not to get too emo, but I saw in Jeff Hoffmann’s face a look of self-disappointment that I knew too well, and when the Dodgers finally won, I tried not to walk up to the Latino man screaming FUCK CANADA all over the silent bar. Even as we caught the Uber home, which we rode silently back into Manhattan, I still wondered if I should have punched the dude in the face with the force of the 49th parallel. This is the closest I’ve ever felt to anything one might call patriotism.
Allegedly, as I was informed the next day, we missed a make-out conga line at the party, but neither of us were in the mood to contract mono regardless of whether or not we were celebrating or grieving. And grieve I did. I was inconsolable that night and all the next day, a modicum of the sorrow of my fellow Torontonians must have felt at home, a mere sliver of a sliver of what must have been running through Vladdy’s mind, as he sat in the bullpen after the game alone. I opened my inbox and noticed that my student from Prince Edward Island wrote to me in support during the game, and on Sunday, I wrote him back:
At the time of writing, Shane “The Other” Bieber just exercised his player option. I anticipate that other pieces will fall into place, and that the Jays are going to run it back. I hope that, truly, this is their 2014 San Antonio Spurs moment, and they come back with a surgical vengeance and topple the Heatles Dodgers because, as that GNC cashier taught me, these delusions are the ingredients to the most World Series pennants in history. We’ll catch up one day, Yankees, if the planet doesn’t burn first.
My dear Echo Park comrade reminds me that a baseball victory is completely arbitrary, and that is the game’s thrill and tragedy. Decades of growing up with losing sports teams were cured by that 2019 Raptors championship, but in that case, it took the efforts of a disgruntled mercenary who ended up moving to the lesser Los Angeles NBA team (for an allegedly illicit deal) after that championship.
I wanted this World Series for the Jays because I wanted it for my city, or what always remains of it, in spite of the influx of monied conservative transplants and the violent xenophobia, in spite of a grifting premier more interested in funneling public funds to his cronies instead of making lives more livable. I wanted the World Series for the Jays because I wanted it for Vladdy, especially his childhood self kicked-out of the diamond by a racist Yankees staffer, and for Yesavage, who hotel-hopped for the opportunity of his lifetime, and for the hilarious possibility of an Addison De Leon, any and all genders, any and all species. And most of all, I wanted this World Series for myself, so that my parents and I could have witnessed a Jays victory together before their bodies gave out.
(Incidentally, as someone who rocks with the Dodgers when it’s not in the context of going up against the Jays, I can’t really share the same feelings for Springer, I’m sorry to say.)
Baseball, as the literary scholar and former MLB commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti once wrote, breaks your heart; it is designed to break your heart. And if you – the multiple yous, from my friend Karen to our editor Sarah and to our future readers – may permit me a moment, please allow me to riff on the late professor’s words here:
The Jays’ season began in spring, at the blossom of Vladdy Jr.’s new 14-year contract, filling the airwaves with our Dominican Canadian’s joy, and then as soon as the frigid Toronto torrents came, they stopped and left me to face the hardest autumn of my life alone. I counted on my team, relied on them to buffer the pain of my ailing parent, to keep the memory of train-hopping hooky and living-room cheers alive, and then, just when the days and elderly lives were at their twilight, when I needed them the most, they lost.
Karen Tongson‘s gender is Totino’s Party Pizza.
Adrian De Leon is a writer and a shit disturber, which is Canadian for “double Scorpio.”
Lead image: Via WikiMedia 2025 World Series Toronto Blue Jays and Los Angeles Dodgers New Era 59Fifty caps NEW ERA SHIBUYA 2025年11月10日の渋谷 202511101805 IMG 2150.jpg