Will our agony watching the Blue Jays be rewarded by ecstasy?

by Tim O'Connor October 31, 2025October 31, 2025

It was great to read this morning that Blue Jays Manager John Schneider said that on the red-eye home from Los Angeles, the players acted like they were coming home from any other road game in their 162-game grind.

Obviously, it wasn’t. They need just one more victory to win the World Series.

I get twitchy just thinking about it. I both look forward to and dread watching tonight.

I coach highly aspirational golfers who are seeking to overcome their mental heebie jeebies when they most want to play well, which is what we all want—for ourselves and for the teams we root for.

Like Rory McIlroy’s quest for his elusive Masters win and the Grand Slam, the prospect of winning the world championship of baseball is mind blowing. That, of course, is the challenge for someone competing to win the greatest victory of their life.

How do you deal with the inevitable nerves and thoughts of disaster, and dreams of losing your mind and celebrating with your mates?

As a coach, I’ve got some ideas, but, yeah sure, I’m going to tell—or guess—what Max Scherzer, winner of two World Series and three Cy Young Awards, or George Springer, who won a World Series championship and was the MVP in 2017, should or shouldn’t think about.

Hell, I can barely watch. Innumerable times since the Jays started the post-season, I’ve said, “Enough,” but recanted and left the remote alone. I keep watching, although sometimes I don’t, especially when Ohtani is up to bat. After staying up til 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, I didn’t watch Game 4. I needed a break, a re-set.

Why do we watch high-stakes sports? It’s not because it’s fun. It’s not!

Watching championship games such as the Four Nations Cup, the Leafs in the first round, Rory in any major on a Sunday, or the Jays in the World Series, is not fun. Not if your idea of fun is facial paralysis, squatting on the couch with your arms wrapped tightly around your knees, and grinding your teeth.

What about when Vladdy strokes a homer or Addison singles in a runner? Isn’t that fun?

No. That’s relief. That’s standing on the precipice of disaster and falling backwards rather than forwards.

Well, when the Jays scored nine runs in one inning to just about guarantee the win, OK, that could have been fun.

But it’s just a game, you say. Just millionaires playing for the highest bidder and then some other team in a year or two. Just entertainment and distraction from the real stuff. It’s why the sports section of newspapers was called the toy department by the folks who considered themselves real journalists.

Just a game? Are you kidding? Like my podcast partner Howard Glassman has said about working on his golf game, if I invested as much of my spirit into something worthwhile rather than hoping my team would win, I’d have found a cure for something by now.

Well, maybe that’s the beauty of sports. It provides a welcome distraction, an escape, a place for all those big emotions to play themselves out without damaging an intimate relationship or the drywall. That despite the pain—heaven forbid—of losing, within a few days, it’s just another day.

Actually, it’s the same if they—please, please, please—win. We’ll all go nuts, high-five anyone within reach, and completely lose our shit. We’ll watch replays endlessly. We’ll even cry a little when we watch an athlete lose it thanking his mom and dad. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and read every morsel I can find until my instincts for acting like a responsible adult kick in.

Then, days, weeks, months later. It’s a nice little memory. But that’s it.

When the Boston Red Sox finally won the World Series after a 86-year drought, did it change the lives of their fans? Are they happier today than before 2004 when they were still seeking to break the Curse of the Bambino?

For fans and athletes alike, I believe that Scottie Scheffler hit the nail on the head when he said on the eve of the Open Championship—which, of course, he won—that winning didn’t fulfil him. He certainly liked winning, but what truly fulfilled him was his family, faith, and feelings that were intrinsic and had zero to do with winning a trophy.

He blew people’s minds. His comments were completely counter to our cultural playbook in which winning the greatest sports events is the ultimate for an athlete and their fans.

So, shouldn’t that be enough to allow me to chill out watching the Jays try to nail down the World Series? And to stop worrying that even with two out in the ninth with a five-run lead that Hoffman is somehow going to blow it?

Why can’t I be like Rusty, an 80-something guy at my church and the biggest sports fan I know, who wore his Blue Jays hat to a fund-raising dinner in church hall last weekend? Rusty said to me that even if the Jays lose, it’s been fun to watch and he’s grateful for the experience to watch them come this far.

Rusty is a wise, caring and spiritual man with decades of great experience in life and sports. His words of wisdom should be enough for me to say, “OK, detach, enjoy, savour, observe and admire these phenomenal athletes on both sides, drink in the enormity of the occasion, the magic combination of hope and fear, the brilliance of Dan, Buck and Hazel, and be captivated by how sports reveals our tribal, mythical and communal instincts.”

It should. But it won’t.

Watching the game tonight—or please God, no—tomorrow, will be agony. Ultimately, let’s hope there will be ecstasy.

Please.

********

My most recent book is Getting Unstuck: 7 Transformational Practices for Golf Nerds, which is now available in both soft cover and Kindle formats.

If you’ve ever considered mental game coaching, I’m inviting you to take the opportunity for a FREE 30-minute coaching call.

During this free session, we’ll discuss: