Eric Andrew-Gee, in June, 1996 at the age of six, waited a long time to see the Jays make the playoffs.
Every Toronto baseball fan of a certain age remembers the moment: Mitch Williams pitching from the stretch; Joe Carter at the plate; a hanging slider; a flick of a swing; the SkyDome roaring – and then the credits.That's how my generation experienced the greatest play in Blue Jays history: as the end of a highlight reel.
I was born in 1990. By the time my brain started forming lasting memories, the team was bad. They would remain bad for the next 20 years. They were worse than bad, actually – they were mediocre.
All I had to salve my wounds and stoke my imagination during those long decades was a pair of tapes: the commemorative videos of the 1992 and 1993 World Series, miniature epics put together by Major League Baseball Productions.
I watched them hundreds of times. As a kid, it was those tapes and Beauty and the Beast.
They weren't such an incongruous pair, really. The World Series videos had all the ethical complexity and narrative sophistication of a Disney movie. They were stories of good triumphing over evil. That's why I loved them.
The good guys were so good. Tom Henke, with his fatherly physique and dollar-store glasses. Devon White, a gazelle in centre field. Paul Molitor's humility and grace.
The Phillies, especially, were such perfect villains, closer to a biker gang than a baseball team: Lenny Dykstra, swollen with steroids; that snarling ogre, John Kruk; big Pete Incaviglia, who, by all appearances, could have crushed a man's skull with his hands.
Everything about the production is completely over the top, brazenly unafraid of kitsch. The jittery synth and martial drums of the soundtrack. Len Cariou's portentous narration. ("What a spotlight for redemption.") The schmaltzy Irish tenor at the end, singing This Is the Moment.
But if they were corny, that's not to say they didn't work. As pure emotional manipulation, they work insanely well. Those videos capsulize the thrill of watching sports – you could crack them open and snort tingly anticipation through a straw.
A lot of that has to do with Mr. Cariou's narration – if it was portentous, it was also stirring. The script is awful, but as a five-year-old I lapped it up. He uses all these great dramatic words: "lore," "onus," "salvo," "flourish." This was Shakespeare to me.
Deftly produced as they could be, the videos were at their best when they got out of the way and let the inherent drama of a World Series take centre stage. The final plays in 92 and 93 still give me goosebumps, partly because I know what's coming. "Nixon bunts. Timlin on it. Throws to first." "Well hit down the left field line. Wayyy back, and – gone!"
There must be a German word for the feeling I get when I watch the tapes, even now: nostalgia-about-something-you-didn't-experience-in-the-first-place. The movies are awash in period detail: the bulging cheeks of tobacco, Kelly Gruber's mullet, the neon billiard felt of the AstroTurf.
It's one of the films' amazing accomplishments – to not only refresh the memories of people who were there, but to manufacture memories for those people who weren't.
Yet watching the videos wasn't just an adequate substitute for being there – it was better. All the most exciting bits spliced into an hour-long loop that you could endlessly rewatch. The truth is, I wasn't a fan of the Jays, or even the 1992-1993 Jays. I was a fan of the tapes.
They provided solace from the reality of following a team, with all its worry and uncertainty. They spoiled me. Those desultory 80-win seasons that the Jays kept stringing together in the Delgado years, and then in the Halladay years, couldn't compete with an hour of tension culminating in a guaranteed happy ending, available any time through my VCR.
I realize that what I'm describing is basically porn.
Watching the tapes now, on YouTube, reveals subtleties I hadn't noticed and complicates the moral picture of those series: You realize that the Braves and Phillies were fallible and nervous and actually sympathetic some of the time. There's Ted Turner, then owner of the Braves, playing with some worry beads; the twitchiness of Williams during that final at bat; the magnificently tart Minnesota accent of Jim Eisenreich, who battled Tourette's syndrome but managed to launch a three-run homer off Dave Stewart.
And of course you have to wonder how many of them were juicing – the steroid era is thought to have started in 1993.
Still, the overwhelming experience of watching the videos now is a sense of wistful happiness.
Adjusting to a real playoff run has been a different kind of experience. One that feels like a stomach full of battery acid.
The Jays now trail the Texas Rangers 2-0 in a five-game series and face elimination from the first round. I think this may be the exact opposite of winning a World Series.
It's been like this since the All-Star break, when the Jays got good: giddy fun interspersed with windpipe-blocking anxiety.
This is what it feels like to be a fan, to follow a great team in real time. This is what it's like to be there. Frayed nerves. Constant jeopardy. The joy, if it comes at all, saved for the end.
After 22 years taking refuge in the retrospective fantasy of 60-minute championships, I think I'm due.
Eric Andrew-Gee