Tomorrow night, as the Blue Jays take the field for their first World Series game in 32 years, I find myself thinking about time, how it moves, how we mark it, and how certain moments seem to hold more than others.
As I write, The Mighty Rio Grande by the band This Will Destroy You plays in the background. It’s the same haunting track often used in baseball highlight reels, the one from Moneyball that rises and swells beneath the most emotional sports moments. Somehow, it feels right.
There’s something about baseball that just hits differently. It’s never just about the game in front of us, but about all the games that came before.
Maybe it’s the numbers, the endless statistics that let us measure generations and compare legends. Maybe it’s the pace, the slow burn of a game that unfolds in quiet moments between action. Or maybe it’s something deeper. Baseball holds a kind of memory that feels almost sacred. It is the nostalgia made tangible, a way of reliving who we were through the game we watched and the people we shared it with.
My first sports memory that really stuck was the 1981 Expos. I can still name their starting nine. I remember racing home at lunch to catch the end of the deciding game, and then the heartbreak as Rick Monday’s home run ended it all. Blue Monday. One of the most memorable days in Canadian baseball history, a unifying disappointment that every fan seemed to feel together.
I remember where I was for that one, just like I remember watching Joe Carter’s home run with my dad twelve years later. You don’t just remember the play; you remember the room, the people, the sound of your own voice shouting in disbelief. Baseball does that. It freezes a moment in time and lets us return to it, even decades later.
We love sports in our house, but none of our kids ever got into baseball. They found it too slow, painfully slow. Instead, they gravitated toward cheer, basketball, and track — sports with constant motion, immediate results, clear finish lines. I loved baseball growing up, but I get it. The game does feel too slow for our short-attention society. We are used to speed, to instant results, constant updates and highlights trimmed down to fifteen seconds. Baseball asks something different. It asks you to wait. To breathe. To notice.
And yet, as an educator, I see them learning the same lessons with my kids, just at a different tempo. The patience of perfecting a cheer routine through countless repetitions. The persistence of basketball practice. The slow accumulation of milliseconds shaved off a track time. The rhythm might be different, but the long game remains.
Monday night, when George Springer launched that three-run homer to send the Blue Jays past Seattle and into the World Series, Rogers Centre (I still just call it Skydome) erupted in a way we hadn’t heard in more than three decades. The excitement is infectious, sweeping through the community and the country. For those of us who grew up on the West Coast, Seattle and Toronto were our two favourite baseball teams. We would catch maybe one Jays game a week, but almost every Mariners game on local TV. Seeing those two cities battle for the pennant, knowing one had to lose, felt bittersweet and beautiful, like revisiting an old part of ourselves. The heartbreak for Seattle fans, the joy for Toronto. Both emotions familiar, both part of the game’s poetry.
Schools are a little like baseball that way. They are built on patience and presence. They reward those who keep showing up, even when the results take time. The best teachers, like the best players, understand that the season is long and the game cannot be rushed. There is a rhythm to learning that can’t be condensed into a clip or captured in a score.
Both baseball and teaching embody a culture of saying yes: yes to the slow moments between breakthroughs, yes to showing up when progress isn’t visible, yes to believing in potential that takes time to manifest. It’s saying yes to the process, not just the outcome.
We talk a lot these days about acceleration, about faster tools, quicker responses, and shorter attention spans. But maybe education, at its heart, is still about the long game. About showing up every day, doing the small things that no one notices, trusting that they will add up to something beautiful over time. About saying yes to patience when everything else demands speed.
When you are twenty and Canada’s team has just won back-to-back championships, you believe it will happen again soon. You can’t imagine that suddenly you’ll be fifty-two, that three decades will have slipped by, that you will have lived an entire life in the space between World Series appearances. The wait itself becomes a teacher. And now, caught up in the excitement that’s gripping the country, you realize how much these moments matter precisely because they are so rare.
As the Blue Jays prepare to face the defending champion Dodgers, I find myself thinking not just about the scoreboard but about that sound, the crack of the bat, the swell of the crowd, the quiet connection between father and son, teacher and student, one generation and the next.
Maybe that’s what baseball and teaching really share. They both remind us that the moments that matter most rarely happen fast. They both ask us to say yes to the waiting, to the watching, to the faithful belief that something magical might happen if we just stay present.
And maybe that’s the real lesson, that in a world obsessed with the next big thing, there’s still magic in the slow game, in the steady, human work of showing up, staying hopeful, and believing that meaning often reveals itself only when we give it time.
Over the next week, a new generation of fans will create their own frozen moments. Somewhere, a parent and child will watch together, and thirty years from now, that child will remember not just the game, but the feeling of being there, present, connected, saying yes to the slow unfolding of something larger than themselves.
Play ball.
The image at the top of this post was generated through AI. Various AI tools were used as feedback helpers (for our students this post would be a Yellow assignment – see link to explanation chart) as I edited and refined my thinking.
