“Touch ‘em all, Joe, you’ll never hit a bigger home run in your life!” — Tom Cheek, the play-by-play radio announcer for the Toronto Blue Jays, during Game 6 of the 1993 World Series.
There’s nothing like going euphoric over a sports team, especially if you are emotionally invested in their winning ways. So in the 2025 season, baseball fans in Canada noticed the rise of the Blue Jays in their division when they started piling up wins after wins. From thereon, the Rogers Centre SkyDome was experiencing full capacity in its home games. By the time the playoffs started in October, the whole country was totally watching and very supportive of the Blue Jays in their run to the World Series.
Sports, in general, is a masterful force in unifying a country from its seemingly irreconcilable differences. This baseball season, the Blue Jays galvanized the country to put away its grievances and allowed people of different backgrounds and political affiliations to participate in one loud voice of love. This was not a one-time experience. For in 2019, the Toronto Raptors captured Canada’s first NBA championship. Again, in the Raptors’ run to the playoffs, Canadians expressed overwhelming love and support that ended up with two million people squeezing along the lines of the victory parade to celebrate Canada’s lone NBA team. It would have been superseded by the Blue Jays if they had won the 2025 World Series.
It’s hard to win a championship. But the Blue Jays did it twice as back-to-back champions in 1992 and 1993. Let’s take a brief journey in the past.
The Blue Jays was an expansion franchise that was founded in Toronto in 1977. In the beginning the team was mired with difficulties to win games and frequently landed at the bottom of their division.
In the early 1980’s, however, it started to turn its standing by winning more games that culminated in its first winning season in 1983. Two years later, the franchise won its first division title and finished first in the American League East with a record of 99 wins and 62 losses. The team was led by a trio of talented outfielders in George Bell, Lloyd Moseby and Jesse Barfield. It also had an exceptional shortstop in Tony Fernandez and an outstanding young pitcher in Dave Stieb who led the American League in earned run average (ERA) in 1985.
By 1992 only Dave Stieb remained a Blue Jay. The franchise brought in old reliable players in Jack Morris and Dave Winfield, aged 36 and 40 respectively. The make-up of the team was expertly described by Rosie DiManno, who was Toronto Star’s sports reporter at that time, in her book Glory Jays: Canada’s World Series Champions.
Jack Morris’s nickname was Cactus Jack because of his “corrugated face and prickly personality” as DiManno put it. “It is doubtful whether Morris, “she wrote, “has ever taken much direction from another human being. Here is a man who plots his own progress and draws his own road maps in life. It is this self-reliance, this faith in his own instincts, that had brought the 36-year old pitcher to the Toronto Blue Jays as a latter-day messiah of baseball. He was the one who would lead the team out of the wilderness of post-season deficiency and into the inner sanctum of the World Series. He knew his way and, in their previous trips towards the October classic, the Jays had always managed to lose theirs.”
Even with such a tremendous talent as Dave Winfield had(12-time All-Star, 7-time Gold Glove Award winner and 6-time Silver Slugger Award winner), he never won a World Series ring with San Diego Padres (1973-1980), New York Yankees (1981-1988, 1990), and California Angels (1990-1991). So what was Pat Gillick, the general manager of the Blue Jays, thinking about? It turned out Gillick’s instinct about Winfield was on the money. “It was a spontaneous display of affection from a city to a player,” DiManno wrote, “because they had both believed in each other, loved each other, were beholden to each other. Winfield had come to Toronto looking for the World Series ring that had eluded him in a major league career that spanned almost two decades. The city had spread wide its arms in welcome because here was a man who could take them to the World Series that had eluded them all the days of their baseball life. It was, to use Winfield’s own expression, a symbiotic relationship. And perhaps it was also a last chance, the last dance, for both partners. But they had made beautiful music together.”
Let’s not fail to mention the young Roberto Alomar, who came to Toronto in 1991 after playing for the San Diego Padres who signed him at age 17 in 1985. Alomar’s enthusiasm for baseball had no bounds. “Some athletes,” DiManno wrote, “play ball for the money. Other, regardless of how much they earn, just play ball. They are the ones who do it with glee, as if there were no other place they’d rather be than on a field of green. They skip on the grass, get dirt all over their uniforms, and slide head-long into first base even though they’ve been told that there is no particular advantage in this mode of arrival. It just feels good…Robbie Alomar is this kind of ball player. He not only lives for baseball, he actually lives in the park. To be more precise, when he goes to sleep at night, he does it in a hotel suite that is attached to the SkyDome. And when he goes off to work, all he has to do is step into a service elevator that will deliver him to the clubhouse in the bowels of the complex.”
And, of course, there’s the much-maligned Jays manager Cito Gaston. He started as the hitting instructor of the Blue Jays in 1982 but reluctantly took the managerial helm on May 15, 1989 when the then-manager Jimmy Williams was fired. “He is one baseball manager,” DiManno wrote, “who identifies with athletes. He has spent most of his adult life as a player and that is where his loyalties still lie. Gaston treats his hired hands with the kind of respect he was rarely accorded in his own career.” Even with two World Series rings, however, Gaston’s managerial style was always being questioned. DiManno continued, “His approach has not been universally appreciated in Toronto. Gastonic attacks have evolved into a sort of recreational activity in town.”
Having obtained a World Series ring, some key players of the Blue Jays had no illusion of winning again the following year and so they left the team either as free agents or retired. Gone were Tom Henke (closer), Dave Winfield (designated hitter), Jimmy Key (starting pitcher), David Cone (starting pitcher), Candy Maldonado (outfielder), Kelly Gruber (third baseman), Manny Lee (infielder), Dave Stieb (starting pitcher), Pat Tabler (utility player), and Rance Mulliniks (third baseman).
In 1993 the hard-throwing pitcher Dave Stewart and the reliable clutch hitter Paul Molitor joined the defending champion Blue Jays.
Dave Stewart had already two World Series rings with Los Angeles Dodgers in 1981 and with the Oakland Athletics in 1989. In a way, Stewart didn’t sign with the Blue Jays for another glory. Rather, he felt disrespected by the general manager of the A’s, Sandy Alderson, who offered Stewart with a contract less than what the Jays were willing to pay.
Paul Molitor, on the other hand, had no World Series ring, just like Winfield, after fourteen years with the Milwaukee Brewers. Like Stewart, Molitor signed with the Blue Jays because of a more lucrative contract (3-year $13 million vs 1-year $2.5 million). He, too, didn’t expect a World Series ring would be a reality so soon.
Still the Blue Jays had strong, remaining players who would make them very competitive: Joe Carter, Robbie Alomar, Juan Guzman, Devon White, Pat Borders, and Duane Ward. Added into the mix were up-and-comers Pat Hentgen and Ed Sprague and latecomers Tony Fernandez and Ricky Henderson.
He wasn’t called Joltin’ Joe for nothing. He was always jumping and leaping for joy as he circled around the bases after hitting a home run. When Mike Timlin tossed the ball to him in first base for the final out in Game 6 of the World Series versus the Atlanta Braves, there was Carter hopping up and down, up and down to the delight of the whole country. And when he hit a 3-run homerun in the 9th inning of game 6 versus the Philadelphia Phillies, he performed his customary jolting act that made the Blue Jays a repeat World Series Champion.
After thirty two years we could have won again…but we did not.
There’s palpable sadness all over Canada and the only way to get over it is to move on. For one shining moment we were unified, proud to be Canadians and love Canada for all its flaws. We console ourselves with the hopeful phrase, “Perhaps next time”. That will be for a while.
In the meantime, we will face again the harsh reality of our differences, of our political division.
There’s Pierre Poilievre mouthing once again how bad the country is and he alone can fix it. The NDP and the Green Party are in disarray while Alberta is musing with separation. And our very dear Prime Minister Mark Carney no longer has his elbows up and is kowtowing to the whims and caprices of the arrogant, most vile and clownish bully in the White House.
5 November 2025