If you know me well, my love of baseball is no secret. I’ve followed plenty of sports over the years, but I always come back to my Toronto Blue Jays. More accurately, I never really leave.
In baseball, as in life, failure isn’t an anomaly. It’s built into the game, and that’s what makes baseball such a compelling reflection of life. In a 162-game season, even the most dominant teams typically win only about 60 percent of their games. That means even the very best walk off the field with a loss roughly 65 times a season.
Last year, the Jays were that team, and it felt like pure magic as they came within two outs of winning the World Series, a feat they had not accomplished since 1993.
It was an unforgettable season for me, and I wasn’t alone as another fan seemed to show up almost every day. As they say, bandwagons have unlimited seating, and there’s always room for one more!
During that run, you could walk into any coffee shop, office or family gathering after a game and hear the same refrain.
“We won again!”
Even after a loss, the language remained resilient and connected. “We almost came back,” or “We’ll get ’em tomorrow.”
We weren’t just watching a team. We had become a part of one.
Then came this season.
The reversal was sharp and, at times, deeply frustrating. Going from first to worst in a single year is a jarring test of loyalty for any fan. But as the losses mounted, I noticed something more revealing than simply numbers on a scoreboard. Our language began to change.
Almost overnight, the post-game conversations shifted.
“We won” gave way to “They lost again” and “They really blew it.”
And the word “we” had all but disappeared.
It reminded me of a quote often attributed to John F. Kennedy: “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.”
When the victories dried up, so did our sense of connection. We were happy to claim ownership of every triumph, but the moment things went wrong, we instinctively distanced ourselves from the team.
And I couldn’t simply blame the fair-weather fans. When I was honest with myself, I caught myself doing exactly the same thing more than once.
What made that realization particularly uncomfortable was how much I had admired the team’s approach the year before. Through the highs and lows of that remarkable season, I distinctly remember manager John Schneider reminding reporters after a particularly tough loss: “We win as a team, we lose as a team.”
It wasn’t just a philosophy or empty platitude. It was a commitment to shared accountability.
The players didn’t cherry-pick their experience, celebrating only highlights and disowning their mistakes. They owned all of it: the brilliant plays, the bad bounces, the stellar pitching and the late-game collapses.
You can’t fully claim the joy of a win if you’re unwilling to stand alongside the team in defeat. Unity means staying connected when it would be easier to walk away.
Today, many of us will gather around the Thanksgiving table with our own teams, our families and loved ones. We’ll enjoy good food, reflect on the year behind us and give thanks for the people, places and things that matter most.
Yet we can sometimes bring a subtle form of self-protection to that table, as well.
When someone asks how we’re doing, it’s tempting to share the highlights: the promotion, the achievement, the good news. We leave out the setbacks, the disappointments and the things we’re still trying to figure out.
We can worry about being judged, or we may not want to appear vulnerable or feel like we’re somehow letting the team down. Whatever the reason, we edit our own stories, presenting the wins while keeping the losses to ourselves.
In doing so, we may also miss opportunities for genuine connection.
I’ve had my share of quiet difficulties this year, and I suspect many of you have, too. Life rarely delivers a season of uninterrupted wins. We all experience bad breaks, make mistakes and encounter setbacks we never saw coming.
Gratitude doesn’t require us to pretend those difficult chapters never happened. Nor does it mean celebrating only the highlights. True gratitude means appreciating the whole story, including the challenges that tested us and the people who helped us through them.
We win as a team, and we lose as a team.
This Thanksgiving, I want to practise the kind of ownership I admired in the Jays last year. I want to resist the temptation to distance myself from the difficult parts of my own story and find reasons to be grateful for the whole journey.
Not just my own story, but my teammates' stories, too.
And for what it’s worth, the word “we” may have faded a little this season, but the final game at Rogers Centre still sold out. Fans filled the stands, cheered the Blue Jays until the final out, and gave a standing ovation to a team that endured a losing season in a game that meant nothing in the standings.
They showed up anyway.
That gives me hope.
Wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving. And Go Jays Go!
