Klaszus: Doubleday Tripping in the year of our Blue Jays
From SABR member Jeremy Klaszus at The Walrus on October 16, 2015:
On the morning of August 8, 2015, just before 9 a.m., a grey-haired man in a suit walked out of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. He carried a small tray of laminated plastic numbers, one through nine, along with the fraction one half. The small crowd waiting outside the doors—we who had travelled from Calgary and Hamilton and Boston and San Diego to visit the Hall—regarded him expectantly. We wanted in. “Soon,” the man said, and disappeared around the corner.
“He’s going to update the standings,” said my brother-in-law, Owen.
The standings. They were neatly displayed in a case out front of the Hall, facing the town’s quiet Main Street. For Owen and me, the American League Eastern Division column was undergoing a long-awaited transformation. Our beloved Toronto Blue Jays were on a tear, six games into an eleven-game win streak. We had arrived at the fabled birthplace of baseball smack-dab in the middle of this ascension, stumbling around in happy delirium as the Jays closed in on the faltering New York Yankees. The Jays were just four and a half games out. By the streak’s end, they’d take first place.
The timing of our visit was plain luck. Or handiwork of the baseball gods, if you believe in that sort of thing.
Read the full article here: http://thewalrus.ca/doubleday-tripping-during-the-year-of-our-jays/
Originally published: October 19, 2015. Last Updated: October 19, 2015.