Toronto Blue Jays: 3 for 3 in ’92

The 1992 Toronto Blue Jays’ season opened with guarded optimism. Despite the team’s winning the first six games of the season for the first time ever, avid fans who had followed the team for most of its recent history knew that enthusiasm and lofty expectations for the Blue Jays in April were often cruelly rebuked by underachievement and disappointment in October.

In 1985 Toronto won a club-record 99 games to win its first American League East Division title. The Blue Jays took a 3-games-to-1 lead in the American League Championship Series only to lose three straight games to Kansas City, dashing their hopes of winning the pennant.

Two years later, the Blue Jays appeared even stronger, winners of 96 games with seven remaining and a 3½-game lead in the division. Yet the unthinkable happened: seven straight losses, including three one-run defeats in Tiger Stadium on the final weekend of the season to hand the East crown to Detroit.

Then, in both 1989 and 1991, Toronto lost in five games in the ALCS to Oakland and Minnesota respectively, leading many to wonder if the Blue Jays could ever come through under the pressure of postseason play.

So it is understandable why fans watched the 1992 season unfold with a degree of trepidation. However, if Blue Jays fans lacked confidence in the team’s October prospects, its players were assured that this campaign would finish differently. To remind themselves of their present identity and their attainable future identity, the team developed a simple series of slogans that were printed on T-shirts worn by the players.

On the front: 3 FOR 3 IN ’92.

On the back: We Are. We Can. We Will.

We are the East Division champions. We can win the American League pennant. We will win the World Series.

Utility player Pat Tabler and outfielder Joe Carter are credited with creating the team slogans and the Blue Jays affirmed the first part of the trifecta when they clinched their second straight East crown – auspiciously – on the birthday of clubhouse leader Dave Winfield.

It seemed everyone in Toronto and across Canada held their breath as the postseason began with a loss to Oakland but watched with wonderment as Toronto reeled off three straight wins, including the wild and pivotal Game Four victory, which some consider the most significant game in Blue Jays history.

Suddenly, Toronto needed only one more win to secure their first pennant and a berth in the World Series. I can remember the atmosphere of anticipation at 13 years old, living in Waterdown, Ontario, a small town 40 miles west of Toronto, and, like millions across Canada, eagerly hoping that the Blue Jays would not let this opportunity slip away as they had in the past. I had just started high school that autumn and on the morning of ALCS Game Six, the digital message board in the school cafeteria read, “Three down, Juan to go,” a perfect and simple reference to Toronto pitcher Juan Guzman getting the start that afternoon with the chance to clinch. Guzman and his teammates came through, just as the players’ T-shirts said they would; Toronto won its first pennant and was off to the World Series.

The excitement of the 1992 fall classic is often overlooked, perhaps due to being overshadowed by the unforgettable 1991 World Series. Yet Toronto and Atlanta played six entertaining games in late October 1992: four one-run contests, three of which were decided in the final inning, with crisp pitching from both sides. Young infielder Ed Sprague hit a game-changing home run early in the Series. Gold Glove center fielder Devon White made a catch for the ages. Mike Timlin lobbed the ball to Carter for the final out in Game Six to give Toronto, and Canada, its first World Series championship.

We Are. We Can. We Will. The 1992 World Champion Toronto Blue Jays is the first SABR book about the Blue Jays. Co-editor Bill Nowlin emailed me, ironically, on the night Atlanta played Game Two of the 2021 World Series, wanting to know if I would be interested in helping to produce a SABR book commemorating the 30th anniversary of the 1992 Blue Jays championship season. I ruminated on the idea for a few days and knew this was an opportunity I could not decline.

As described above, I thought back to all the disappointments of seasons prior, and how finally, the 1992 Blue Jays winning the World Series occurred at the perfect time, fulfilling every Toronto baseball fan’s dreams and without hyperbole, truly brought Canadians together. In a year when Canadians should have happily celebrated the nation’s 125th anniversary, the news instead was filled with dread: high unemployment, economic recession, and endless governmental bickering over constitutional reform. The Blue Jays pushed those headlines – for a time – off the front pages and captured the imagination of the country.

This book exhaustively tells the story of the personnel and significant games from that season. We present biographies of all 40 players who appeared in either a regular-season or postseason game for the 1992 Blue Jays. Many of them need no introduction, such as Hall of Famers Dave Winfield, Jack Morris, and Roberto Alomar. Meanwhile, some young players on the 1992 roster like Jeff Kent and Derek Bell started their careers as Blue Jays but went on to be more known in other clubs’ uniforms. Pat Tabler and Rance Mulliniks retired after the season in storybook fashion – as World Series winners. There are biographies for Cito Gaston, the first Black manager to win the World Series, the coaches, Hall of Fame general manager Pat Gillick, and prominent team broadcasters.

Ten memorable 1992 Blue Jays games are recounted in this book, including the final six victories of the postseason. The game stories trace Toronto’s magical season from Opening Day in Detroit – when Winfield drove in Alomar with the first run of the season – to the World Series-clinching night in Atlanta – when Winfield drove in Alomar with the final run of the season. One of the four regular-season game stories captures the spirit of John Fogerty’s “a moment in the sun” (from his baseball ballad “Centerfield”), when the unheralded rookie Doug Linton may have saved Toronto’s season with a masterful spot start in August to turn back a division rival from pulling even atop the standings.

The book concludes with a profile of the Blue Jays’ home stadium, the SkyDome, sold out night after night in 1992 plus an epilogue on the team’s double celebration receptions – at the White House with the president of the United States and in Ottawa with the prime minister of Canada.

It was an honor to work with Bill Nowlin as co-editor, exchanging daily emails to bring the initial idea about the 1992 Blue Jays from concept to book. Thank you to Len Levin and Carl Riechers, associate editors, for their tireless copy-editing and fact-checking work, plus all 53 contributors of biographies and game stories, many from the Hanlan’s Point (Toronto) SABR Chapter. Thank you to everyone who worked so hard at research, writing, and revising their respective articles. We would also like to thank the Toronto Blue Jays for providing photographs used throughout this book. Special thanks to Rod Hiemstra and Simon Wells. 

Finally, special thanks to Dave Winfield for authoring the book’s Foreword, Buck Martinez for his Introduction, and all the players, off-field personnel, and broadcasters who granted time to be interviewed for their biographies.

ADRIAN FUNG lives and works in Toronto. He joined SABR (Hanlan’s Point Chapter – Toronto) in 2014 and has contributed several stories to the SABR Games Project, mostly about memorable games in Blue Jays history. Adrian attended the 2019 SABR Black Sox Scandal Centennial Symposium in Chicago and survived the Friday night deluge that washed away the scheduled doubleheader at Guaranteed Rate Field. In January 2020, at a Hanlan’s Point Chapter meeting, he presented cases for how the 1919 Reds could have won a “clean” World Series and how Buck Weaver was unfairly treated.