How about them Blue Jays? If they were playing any other team but the Braves, with their Arkansas connections, I`d be rooting for the Maple Leaf. Or is it an elm? Anyway, I`d try to wave it right side up, which was more than a Marine ”honor” guard managed to do before Game 2 at Atlanta, which was won with a homer for Toronto by Ed Sprague of Stockton, Calif. (The border between our two countries has always tended to be porous.) North of the border, up Toronto way, they seem to have fielded the best team of Americans and Latins above the 49th Parallel and, if the Blue Jays take the Series, above the 36th. No country ever had more accommodating or less noticeable neighbors. Even when they`re sneaking Americans out of Iran, buying our goods, or being robbed by the umpires-of a run in Game 2 and of a freakish triple play in Game 3-the Canadians remain remarkably composed. Maybe it`s all that British Reserve, which not even Quebec`s French elan can overcome. As self-effacing as their Rockies are dramatic, the Canadians tend to leave the athletic theatrics to us emotional types south of the border.
Strangely enough, Atlanta`s good ol` Journal-Constitution greeted these polite visitors with words worthy of some Yankee rag. ”This is OUR game,”
the paper proclaimed in the most unhospitable, un-Southern fashion. Perhaps it was under the impression that Sherman was marching on the city again. Ralph McGill would surely have been embarrassed. The shade of the old editor doubtless would point out that those of us on the continent not yet wholly Americanized (unreconstructed Southerners and Canadian outcasts) need to stick together.
Canadians seem to have taken to the national pastime-ours and soon theirs-with some enthusiasm, showing a talent for teamwork not noticeably evident in their tangled constitutional affairs. Clearly the solution to Canada`s bilingual troubles lies in rooting for a single baseball team. The country may be coming apart but the Blue Jays seem to be bringing it together. Why can`t politics be more like baseball? Alas, reading about baseball`s hovering troubles-with finances, organization, and transient commissioners-makes it unsettlingly clear that the game is becoming more like politics. But let`s worry about all that after the Blue Jays and Braves have done their uneven but always inspiring stuff.
Unfortunately, by that time football fever will be upon the land;
baseball`s owners will be conspiring against the game again under the delusion that it`s an industry; Congress may be intervening with hearings on baseball`s anti-trust exemption, once as sacred as the seventh-inning stretch; others will be suggesting that salvation lies in still more gimmicks, technology, and playoffs rather than fewer; the punditry will be pushing ways to speed up the game and thus deprive 20th Century America of its single refuge from time-management; and the designated-hitter will still be maculating the American League, producing a two-platoon version of what was once as thoughtful a pastime as chess. All in all, these improvements that disimprove the game sound as sensible and soothing as an anarchists` convention.
What`s needed is (a) a unilingual Canada (how about Esperanto as a Lingua Franca?) and (b) another Kenesaw Mountain Landis to straighten out a sport that has over-expanded and under-talented itself. That taken care of, let`s Play Ball.