Meaningful Games: That One Hurt

That one hurt. What has yet to be determined, though, is whether that long afternoon, and the handful of turning points offered therein (like that elastic strike zone), will prove long after the fact to be a fanbase’s shared injustice, a “remember when” rallying cry, or the adversarial element in a stirring narrative of improbable victory.

But whether or not Odor’s foot came off the bag (it did) and regardless of Tulowitzki’s tag (he got him), and notwithstanding how that would have altered the outcome of the game (they’d have gotten out of the inning and then scored in the bottom half and we’d all be hungover with joy today, not abject misery), it’s probably necessary to pan back a bit and remember that this, in all its heartrending glory, is baseball.

It’s also in moments like this that the truly astonishing length of the baseball season really becomes apparent. Because should the Toronto Blue Jays somehow fail to pull off something amazing, think of all the games they’ll have to play in order to get back here again next year.

But take heart. I’m going to repeat myself here, because I think it bears repeating: baseball is perfectly designed to break your heart. It also happens to be uniquely engineered to permit the impossible to come to pass.

A pennant-race dispatch from Invisible author Andrew Forbes (What You Need). In April 2016 we’ll be releasing The Utility of Boredom, a collection of Forbes’s baseball essays.