Since it's important to fill the time between the end of the season and the beginning of the playoffs with distractions, Jays fans have decided to go with outrage and signs of Apocalypse.
The first problem – scheduling.
Thursday's Game 1 will go off around 4 p.m. On Friday, it'll be 12:37 p.m.
This is bad news for anyone who is a) gainfully employed and b) would like to stay that way. Which is good news for future Jays marketing efforts – that appears to be the majority of their fan base.
The club has been gently reminding people that it gets no say in when the games go off. That's a choice made by Major League Baseball to suit its U.S.-based broadcasting partners.
People have been gently reminding the club that they don't care whose fault it is, and that this should be grounds for cross-border skirmishes.
They've been flooding into the Twitter account of club vice-president Stephen Brooks, who's taken upon himself the Sisyphean task of trying to roll a PR boulder up the hill to Toronto's happy place. As if – ha ha! – such a thing existed.
Here are a few more disappointments:
No, you do not get a hard-copy ticket. Welcome to the digital age you were once so excited about.
No, the dome might not be open. Welcome to October.
No, we won't be forced to play God Bless America mid-game (someone tried floating that theory). Welcome to the paranoid style in Canadian baseball politics.
Toronto needs to lie down for a little bit. No, we weren't asking. We've brought along restraints. This is for your own good.
The Toronto sports psyche is unprepared for most sorts of postseason fun. Too brittle and too often disappointed.
The idea that this team may be good enough to win a whole, entire round?! Well, that's pushing people toward a mental cliff. If things go wrong, some of them may jump.
If the Jays really want to do a meaningful promotion during the playoffs, they'll give the first 20,000 fans a handful of Valium and a few breathing exercises.
I can see the problem here – an entire city with an 'L' branded into its forehead trying to wrap its head around rooting for a favourite. Not just a competitor. A bona fide favourite. It's too much dissonance.
Suddenly, the Blue Jays are more cursed than an unlooted tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
Taylor Swift worked her anti-magic over the weekend. According to several reliable sources, all of them self-published, she's already sunk the Astros, Padres and Nationals. Now she's taking her bad juju international. The Jays have lost twice since she performed at the Rogers Centre.
I'm a great believer in Ms. Swift's power and fully expect to be living under her benevolent rule some day soon (I hear there will be cookies), but this really is a very special sort of stupid. It's almost aspirational stupidity.
On Tuesday, someone asked outfielder Ben Revere if he's worried about the Taylor Swift curse. Revere – God love him – appeared to have no idea what he was being asked about. Then he said, "No." Just to be safe.
Sports Illustrated showed up Sunday for a photo shoot, and then did Toronto the favour of putting them on the cover. On a possible curve of past SI cover jinxes, that could mean anything from a playoff sweep to the CN Tower cracking in half and slicing through the Rogers Centre mid-game to an attack by giant, nuclear lizards.
ESPN polled baseball executives anonymously. Eleven of 14 tapped the Jays to win a championship.
"They've now been officially picked by me to win the World Series," said the article's writer, Jayson Stark. "So they're doomed."
Thanks?
Noted pop-culture Dadaist Charlie Sheen has also offered to bring the wrath of the gods down on the local ball club.
"These gangsters are no joke," Sheen said over social media, as he began shoving people out of the way to get to the front of the Jays' bandwagon. That's presumably where the beer cooler is.
Having Charlie Sheen turn up in your corner is a nice, little surprise. Sort of like finding a raccoon living in your Christmas tree.
We appreciate that you care, Charlie, but there's no need. No, seriously. Stay away. We've got enough metaphysical problems without adding karma to the list. And we've got spare restraints.
Everyone who cares about this team is all sorts of rattled. In its way, it's adorable.
The only people who really matter – the players – aren't flustered. Or don't seem so. On Tuesday, they were in the phony war stage of the baseball season – pitching sim games and heading to the cage and just trying to keep things normal while all about them lose their heads.
Manager John Gibbons was sitting the dugout – a spot you will rarely find him during the pregame – talking about the movie he'd gone to see the night before.
(For the record: Sicario. Also for the record: "Really good.")
There are few things more soothing than watching a professional baseball player at his relative leisure. Few people can burn away the hours doing nothing in particular – staring blankly into a locker, for instance – like these men. It's quite calming. They should've invited the whole city down to watch and learn.
They know they're the favourites. How does that feel?
"That's fine," said shortstop and human Sphinx Troy Tulowitzki. "We know we have a good team in this locker room. That doesn't mean, hey, give us the ring right now. There's a lot of good teams out there and we're going to have to play good baseball."
Actually, if that's a possibility, things would probably go easier if they just gave you the ring right now.
We've been underfunding various aspects of civic infrastructure for a while now, and this feels like the sort of event that could shatter them.
Barring that, the city would really appreciate it if they could move past the manic stage of playoff baseball and straight into the ulcer stage.
It can be more painful, but everyone knows it's the waiting that kills you.
Cathal Kelly