Meaningful September Baseball Is a Beautiful Thing

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports Canada.

Since the year 2000, 14 Major League Baseball teams have finished the regular season with 100 wins or more. All but one of them—the 2009 Yankees—failed to win the World Series that year.

Only two of the remaining 13 clubs made it to the World Series, and only three of the remaining 11 went on to the league championship series. Remarkably, only eight of the 14 made it as far as the first round division series. One and done.

Obviously this isn't some kind of scientific observation about the fate of teams that steamroll their way through the regular season. It's just an anomaly—in fact, both of the 99-game winning clubs over that span, the 2002 Angels and 2005 White Sox, did win the World Series. But it's also something of a cautionary tale.

I'm looking at you, Blue Jays fans. But I'm not doing so to be a dick about it—quite the opposite.

The atmosphere at Rogers Centre since the trade deadline has been absolutely electric—like nothing in my memory, or in the collective memory of so many of the largely young-skewing crowd that's been down at the ballpark of late. Maybe even those who remember 1992 and 1993 better than I do are in awe of it all, too. There will be no need for a "Winfield Wants Noise" moment for these Jays fans.

August was a month-long giant, sweaty party down at the Dome—not to mention at all kinds of bars, backyards and living rooms throughout the city and country. Sportsnet announced Tuesday that Blue Jays telecasts averaged 1.29 million viewers per game during the month, up 112% over the 609,000 it averaged in August 2014—a month that the team began as holders of the American League's second wild-card spot before finishing just four games back of that perch.

September promises even more of the same, as tickets get more and more scarce, and the meaningful games ramp up. The Jays face the Yankees, whom they lead in the AL East by 1.5 games at the moment, seven times this month. They're finally playing meaningful September baseball—the pre-playoff push that jaded fans have for so long bargained for, pretending it was all they needed to satiate their thirst for something resembling the club's glory years. "If only they could even just play meaningful September baseball, I'd be happy with that," went the mantra of the downtrodden.

Of course, now that it's upon us, we see how hollow that mantra seemingly was.

Eking out a few meaningful games in September is as far from the minds of the crowd that exploded in delight after Edwin Encarnacion hit his third home run of the day back on Sunday, borrowing a hockey tradition and showering the field in hats for his hat trick, as the club's dismal beginning to this season, when Miguel Castro and Daniel Norris were going to be the young pitching saviours of this club and Marcus Stroman wasn't going to pitch this year. It's not enough for the crowd that quieted to a whisper Tuesday night after Cleveland's Yan Gomes tied up the game in the top of the ninth with a monstrous home run off the unflappable Roberto Osuna, or those that went absolutely bonkers as Ryan Goins' no-doubter left the yard to win that game in the bottom of the tenth.

This team is built for October, and this fan base has at times seemed single-minded in its attempts to will their boys there through the sheer force of their passion.

It has been a strange and beautiful thing, especially for those of us who have suffered through the doldrums of the Jays' years of virtual irrelevance—the 20-odd summers where they've been little more than an afterthought for most. But one wonders if, in that single-mindedness about October baseball and the playoffs returning and the possibilities before us, it has become too easy to (if you'll forgive the hackneyed phrase) miss the forest for the trees.

This is it. This is what's great. This is what ought to be savoured. Right now. Not as some prelude to some slippery notion of an even greater future, but for exactly what it is. For packed houses, for bars with all eyes on the baseball game on TV, for conversations with cabbies and coworkers we never thought possible, for the slow murmur of noise that erupts in unison as chants of "M-V-P" whenever Josh Donaldson strides to the plate.

As much as we were wrong thinking that meaningful September baseball would ever be enough, we weren't wrong in believing it was the dream. It is the dream, and we're living it.

Blue Jays fans of a certain vintage, of course, won't need any cautionary tales about powerhouse clubs falling short in the playoffs. On Sept. 27, 1987, the Jays began play with a 3.5 game lead over the Tigers in the AL East with just seven contests to go, and they lost every single one the rest of the way, missing the playoffs in heartbreaking fashion. Fans who lived through that know that crazy things happen in this game, and that destiny can be a funny, fleeting thing.

That isn't to say that Blue Jays fans in 2015 shouldn't get upset when it looks like things aren't going to go their way, which inevitably at some point it will. It's to remind us all that we're already on the ride, and that's all that we could ever really ask for.

The ride will take us where it takes us. Savour the journey. Savour this.