COMMUNING WITH THE BASEBALL GODS

In the late spring of 2014, as part of an annual event for Blue Jays season ticket holders, I finally got to take my shoes off and stand barefoot on the centre-field AstroTurf at the SkyDome. (When one is being romantic about that ballpark, it’s hard to call it by its present name, the Rogers Centre.)

It was a childish, romantic thing that I’ve wanted to do for as long as I can remember. Yet, standing by the warning track, I felt both reluctance and overwhelming curiosity when finally given the opportunity to do so. I sneakily looked around and then slowly slipped off my sandals, stepping onto the springy plastic greenery and the sprinkling of fake brown dirt that carpets the expanse just beyond the bases. Part of me felt like I was going to get in trouble, that maybe I was doing something crass, disrespectful, and against the rules. Other fans wandered around me, shoes on and oblivious, none of them apparently harbouring a secret desire to feel the turf between their toes. Despite my hesitance and fear, I may have instinctively closed my eyes the moment the soles of my feet sunk in, as though I were communing with the baseball gods, connecting with a direct line to legend. (Yes, I realize they switch the turf out periodically; no need to nitpick here.)

I started watching baseball the way most of us do—my dad took me to the stadium before I was old enough to decide I wanted to go myself. In the late 1970s, my father was a relative newcomer to Canada. A long-time soccer fan, he developed an interest in baseball when the Blue Jays were introduced to the city of Toronto in 1977. I was born two years less a day after the team played their very first game at Exhibition Stadium, beating the White Sox, 9–5, in the April snow. (In true Canadian fashion, the Jays had to borrow a Zamboni from the NHL’s Maple Leafs to clear the field of powder before the first pitch.) As both my father’s and the city’s interest in the team developed, it seemed only natural for him to take me along to enjoy nine innings in the sun.

My personal devotion to the sport certainly ebbed and flowed over the years I was growing up, before finally reaching the near-absurd intensity it sits at today. As a child I was probably more interested in stadium ice cream and French fries than I was in Dave Stieb or Lloyd Moseby, but a day at the park was always something easily loved. Even when I grew into an angsty, indifferent teen, more compelled by boy bands and school dances than deciphering the infield fly rule, I implicitly understood there was something hallowed about the entire experience, even if it was just the sacred fixed time spent with my shift-working father.

The true religion that is baseball showed its face to me on October 20, 1992, when I was thirteen years old. That age is formative enough for any girl, but it also happened to coincide with the first flush of a team I cared about winning something big. I remember sitting with my dad at the SkyDome, just beyond the wall in centre field. Like every life-defining moment, I also remember exactly what I was wearing that day: a fall-appropriate red plaid button-down shirt, blue jeans, and a pair of yellow lace-up boots.

At the time, I probably didn’t fully comprehend what a rarity it was not only to see your team go to the World Series but to physically be there and watch them win. (Thank you, Dad.) Two decades’ worth of subsequent seasons spent sipping overpriced beers in a nearly empty ballpark, repeating the sad old mantra “maybe next year,” have made clear just how spoiled I was in my youth by the success of my team.

But on that day in 1992 I got to witness, in person, what has come to be known in Blue Jays circles as “The Catch.”

With all due respect to Kevin Pillar’s recent heroics, the capital letters signify the most famous glovework in franchise history, and I wield my being there as an insufferable badge of honour when debating pivotal sports moments with my peers. It’s a status symbol, a boast that inspires awe and envy, and prompts retellings of the now-mythic events that transpired that evening.

With two men on and nobody out in the fourth inning, storied slugger David Justice—incidentally, once voted one of People Magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People—launched a Juan Guzmán fastball deep in our direction. Jays centre fielder Devon White was at medium depth at the time, so he had to rapidly chase the ball all the way to the wall. Mid-sprint, he not only managed to launch himself into the air to snag it (while hurtling face-first into said wall), but possessed both the coordination and wherewithal to throw directly to the cut-off man after the catch was made.

What happened next is the source of the worst kind of beer-drinking dismay among nostalgic old-timers. Braves runners Deion Sanders and Terry Pendleton crossed up, and Pendleton was called out for passing Sanders on the base path. Meanwhile, the ball sailed into first baseman John Olerud’s glove, and he seamlessly threw to third baseman Kelly Gruber for the final out. Gruber speedily chased down Sanders and tagged him on the heel as Sanders dove for second base. The umpire, Bob Davidson, called Sanders safe, denying the team what everyone knew was a triple play. (And what would have been just the second triple play in World Series history.)

After all was said and done, that single catch captured my burgeoning baseball imagination like no other thing I had ever seen. It would have been enough that White sacrificially launched himself headlong into the abyss, but then he went on, impossibly, to get the ball into what was, Davidson be damned, indeed a triple play. Many have since compared the moment to Willie Mays’s famed catch from Game One of the 1954 World Series, some even saying the 1990s version was more impressive than the original. Count no less an authority than Vin Scully among that group: “I saw Mays’s catch. And this one, to me, was better.”

Devon White, or “Devo,” will always be remembered for that moment, but of course there was so much more to his sixteen-year career than just Game Three. Born Devon Whyte in Kingston, Jamaica, he immigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was nine; subsequent paperwork misspelled his name as “White.” At the request of his children (his daughter is professional basketball player Davellyn LaRae Whyte), he legally changed his last name back to its original spelling in 2003, yet still signs autographs “Devon White.”

Devo came to the Blue Jays from the Los Angeles Angels in 1990, and retired with the Milwaukee Brewers in 2001. He has three World Series rings and seven Gold Gloves, and was a three-time All-Star. In 2015, I watched as he threw out the first pitch at one of the Blue Jays’ postseason games, and 50,000 people stood to honour him. He has said that people stop him all the time to talk about The Catch, and though he is gracious about how it figures into our formative baseball memories, it certainly doesn’t define the player he was, or the person he is.

We come to love the players we do by the sheer force of randomness and circumstance. Sure, Devo was a great ballplayer—that point is indisputable—but the reason I fell in love with him that day, the reason I call him my favourite Blue Jay of all time, came to be via a confluence of moments and feelings that would be impossible to unravel. He astounded me at the exact moment I was old enough to be astounded, the exact moment I needed to be astounded, the exact moment I truly understood the physical feats necessary for the perfect execution of that play.

I was a thirteen-year-old girl looking for something to love, and he hurled himself at a wall beneath my feet, bringing an entire game and all of its history with him.

The thing about that barefoot moment in the outfield that I’d waited for since I watched The Catch in 1992? The hero himself was there in the moment I slipped my shoes off. About twenty feet away, Devo sat at a folding table signing autographs for eager children and nostalgic adults, his signature smile as wide and bright as I remembered it.

Standing there shoeless, I realized I didn’t need to close my eyes to commune with the baseball gods—one of them was right there on the field with me.

“The reality is I never forget where I come from. Every day you bump into people complaining about life. When you see things like this, you have to thank God every day for being able to wake up and be healthy.”

DAVID ORTIZ

on meeting his biggest fan, six-year-old Maverick, who was born with a heart defect

“Happiness is an attitude. We either make ourselves miserable, or joyous and peaceful; the amount of work is the same.”

JASON GRILLI

on Twitter

“Our destiny’s within our control.”

JOSÉ BAUTISTA

“I’m ready to go out there and beat some folks, win some ball games, chest-bump with these guys, and eat some gummy bears. You know what I’m saying?”

COLBY RASMUS