Tag Archives: Andrew Forbes

Meaningful Games: Distortions, Aberrations, and the Potential for Heartbreak

The playoffs are a strange prism that can distort and warp and obfuscate, in which Daniel Murphy can look like Babe goddamn Ruth, or at least someone other than Daniel Murphy, and in which the historically torrid Toronto offense can suddenly flag, and wilt, and disappear altogether. If we were to speak disparagingly of bandwagon […]

Meaningful Games: The Results are In

It’s exhausting, isn’t it? Even if you’re not in the game, even if you’re only watching. Necessarily, you’re invested after so much back and forth, the numbers encouraging, then not, then going your way again. I’m talking about both baseball and the federal election, in case I’m being too opaque here. The campaign, which kicked […]

Meaningful Games: Everything is Beautiful and Nothing Makes Sense

Sam Dyson, the Texas reliever who surrendered what going forward will likely be viewed as the second-most important home run in Blue Jays’ team lore, reacted to José Bautista’s defiant, celebratory bat flip, and to the Blue Jays’ exuberance in general, by saying “If they want to act like that, it’s whatever.” We’ll have to […]

Meaningful Games: Thanksgiving

Baseball gives, and we are thankful. That the Blue Jays’ two backs-to-the-wall, series-swinging victories occurred over the long Thanksgiving weekend, when we might watch with family and, bellies full, cheer ourselves hoarse, was a lovely bit of fortune. Memories, I feel safe stating, were made. I watched Game 3—unofficially presented as a plebiscite on this […]

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 […]

Meaningful Games: Drama

Regarding the Blue Jays, there is a lot to see and hear and read today, probably a lot more than there was the last time the team prepared to throw open the gates of the SkyDome for a playoff game, so I don’t want to get in the way of your taking all that in. […]

Meaningful Games: Twenty-Two Years

It’s childlike, this feeling, this joy, the joy of watching your team capture something like this. Childlike because it is unrestrained and boisterous, and childlike too because it’s been so long since you saw it. How old were you in 1993? You were sixteen, you were ten, you were just a babe. And it felt […]

Meaningful Games: Eclipse

Whatever we want to call the hot magic that has propelled the Toronto Blue Jays these last two months, it may have have hit its apogee Sunday. That night’s impending #superbloodmooneclipse might have exerted its influence, but then there’s been something moony about this team since the end of July, when a scuffling collection of […]

Meaningful Games: “Listen to This Crowd!”

A pennant-race dispatch from Invisible author Andrew Forbes (What You Need). He’ll be blogging in this space, come hell or high water, until the final out of the year, and in April 2016 we’ll be releasing The Utility of Boredom, a collection of Forbes’s baseball essays.  The Blue Jays and Yankees are locked in a […]

Meaningful Games: Atlanta

This is the first pennant-race dispatch from Invisible author Andrew Forbes (What You Need). He’ll be blogging in this space, come hell or high water, until the final out of the year. In Spring 2016 we’ll be releasing The Utility of Boredom, a collection of Forbes’s baseball essays; you can get a small taste of […]