Tao of Stieb: Bracing for the stress of September Blue Jays baseball

The opening line of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land claims that “April is the cruelest month.”

Eliot probably wasn’t a baseball fan. If he were, he might have recognized the cruelty that the month of September imposes on the devotees of the game.

“Meaningful baseball in September” is what fans pine for when their team is languishing. But once a team begins to play those consequential games, September is the month when the long season gets very short. The painful sprint at the end of a marathon. After five months of building context, September is when a team’s season is truly given meaning.

Sometimes, that means subverting the narrative that has led up to the final month of the schedule. In 1987, the Toronto Blue Jays might have been the best team in baseball for much of the season, and the high point in the franchise’s history to that point. But a calamitous final two weeks marked by key injuries and a losing skid left that year’s team out of the playoffs, effectively negating many of the good things that happened that season. It remains one of the bitterest pills that the Jays fans have ever swallowed.

At other times, September can reinforce all that has preceded it into the chronology. This year’s Blue Jays can scarcely be discussed without the words “frustrating” and “disappointing” being featured prominently. After more than five maddening months, a team that seemed poised at the outset of the season to ascend to a new level of prominence now sits perilously on the precipice of the lowest playoff seed.

The Blue Jays have left themselves little or no margin for error in these final weeks. As they cling desperately to the last rung on the post-season ladder, the chatter at the outset of nearly every series has been that the team needs to sweep each one to keep their playoff dream alive. Every game is a “must win”. If there is a hint of Eliot’s irony in such stated expectations, it certainly gets lost by the time the first pitch is thrown.

Baseball is inherently a game of failure. This is because almost every aspect of the game is unfathomably difficult. It’s what makes baseball great. At the best of times, hitters still fail more often than they succeed, and 2023 has been far from the best of times for Blue Jays batters.

Baseball is also a game of luck, but by September, fewer fans are inclined to hear the music of chance.

To enter September with so little room for failure means that each disappointment takes on added meaning, far more than any particular moment should be asked to bear. But every ground ball with runners in scoring position echoes that much louder given every missed RISP opportunity throughout the summer. Every at-bat is more than just a sequence of pitches leading to an outcome. It has the possibility to be a referendum on the season as a whole.

And if you really think about, it might even be bigger than that. It might be about the future of the franchise.

With that level of portent attached to every pitch, it’s no wonder that September baseball can feel painful in the moment, and unbearably draining through the course of a game. We’re beyond the point of reason or nuance, and into an almost purely emotional state.

You may be able to intellectualize the game in June, but in this sort of September, with this sort of team, the experience is physical. It’s tension headaches and nausea, and the feeling of cold dread at slightest setback.

Of course, there is the upside.

There is a decent chance that the Blue Jays hang in, at least well enough to put their fans through the wringer right through the final week of the season. Meaning weeks of trepidation and high anxiety. But all of this punctuated by moments of pure elation should they be able to hang in, or even have the stretch of sustained good play that has been awaited for most of the season.

Those moments become indelible memories, deeply ingrained in the psyche of the fanbase, and historical touchstones that remind us of why we come back and subject ourselves to this oppressive torment.

If it all goes well, then there will be the playoffs, which are their own special sort of suffering. It’s all that a fan could hope for.