McDaniel: Doug Ault and the triumph of joy
From Rachael McDaniel at Baseball Prospectus on January 11, 2018:
One of my favorite parts of being a baseball fan is the sheer breadth of the history that can be learned, the staggering number of huge immortal moments and small, glittering fun facts that come with being a fan of any team. Even a relatively young team like the Jays has magic waiting to be discovered in its four-decade history, and it is a source of seemingly inexhaustible joy to burrow into this magic, reliving it through the pieces of it that remain—the fondly-recalled stories, the grainy video clips, the breathless newspaper headlines.
I realized recently that the very beginnings of the Blue Jays as a franchise were a significant gap in my knowledge.When I’ve looked into the team’s past it was usually into more successful years: the dominant teams of the 80s, the World Series champions of the 90s. The predictable but still-depressing struggles of an expansion team—carving out a space and an identity for itself, establishing a presence in a league, a sport, a city—were less interesting to me. I am not particularly disposed, I guess, to read about my team being terrible, especially when they aren’t any good right now.
Read the full article here: http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2018/01/11/doug-ault-and-the-triumph-of-joy/
Originally published: January 11, 2018. Last Updated: January 11, 2018.