Hawaii-oh no the Seattle Mariners beat the Toronto Blue Jays

Last weekend, I witnessed the biggest post-season comeback ever by a Major League Baseball team playing away from home.

To put that into context, the league began in 1876, the same year Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for an invention he was calling ‘the telephone’.

The only bigger recovery in play-off history came in game four of the 1929 World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Philadelphia Athletics, when players had names like Woody English, Sheriff Blake, Bing Miller and Lefty Grove.

The Seattle Mariners, in their first post-season berth since 2001, came from 8-1 down after five innings, to win 10-9 after nine.

As a broadcaster and journalist, these are the moments one should crave and cherish. The problem was, it was against my team.

I’ve been travelling to watch theToronto Blue Jays ever since taking up temporary residence there in my late teens. I hadn’t been since Covid, so this was an emotional pilgrimage back to my ‘happy place’.

We had already lost the Friday game in this best-of-three shoot-out, but home advantage and the most exciting team we’ve had in a long time gave us genuine faith, and that was borne out by a terrific start.

Back-to-back home runs from Teoscar Hernandez, hits flying everywhere like confetti. Then, it all went so horribly wrong.

If the first half of the game was orgasmic, the second half was like watching your parents have sex. Still, it’s not like I’d made a 7,000-mile round trip to witness it.

The carnival atmosphere inside the Rogers Centre turned funereal, a season ended in a flash, while a pocket of travelling Mariners faithful gathered behind the away dugout in an otherworldly state 
of euphoria.

I was happy for them. Baseball isn’t like football. There is no segregation.