That cold day in Milwaukee: a look back at the Jays’ last division clincher,
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The way it was explained here, after a Brewer named Kevin Reimer bounced into a game-ending double play at old, cold County Stadium in Milwaukee merely these (ahem) 22 years ago, the Blue Jays congregated in somewhat orderly fashion, out behind the mound.
They looked like a mob of shoppers heading for the bargain table at Eaton’s; just enough mayhem to suggest disorderliness, but not much of it.
The Jays won 15-2 Wednesday in Baltimore to clinch the franchise’s first American League East Division title since Sept. 27, 1993. But what happened in a celebratory way with John Gibbons’ crew afterward was different from that Popsicle of an evening in Milwaukee, when they could have been the first team to celebrate by emptying hot-water bottles on each other.
An outfielder named Willie Canate, a minor stop on the Jays’ historical roll call, did himself no future favours at game’s end by emptying a bucket of ice water on manager Cito Gaston, who was not amused. Teammates responded by dousing Canate in milk, ice and chocolate syrup, turning him into a human sundae. Others were soaked the more traditional way.
Even teams that win titles of various importance on a regular basis like to dance and sing and bathe each other in liquids better off sipped. For those 1993 Jays, this was the third consecutive division championship and fifth in nine seasons. The year before they had won the World Series, so everyone recognized this as a starter-level party. Still, there was no talk and no sense detected that this latest cork-popping should be any kind of old hat.
“It never gets old,’’ the no-nonsense pitching fortress known as Dave Stewart told inquisitors that night. “It always feels good to win.”
“This is what it’s all about. I’m a lucky man playing a little boy’s game,’’ said Paul Molitor, the long- time Brewer (but first-year Blue Jay) whose home run that night would be all Pat Hentgen and the bullpen required in an eventual 2-0 win that, like this year, confirmed the Yankees in second place. Molitor, the next day’s Star suggested, “needed those red-rimmed eyes that a champagne soaking provides. He needed them to hide a few genuine tears.”
John Olerud, a batting champion that season and a thoughtful, wellspoken individual, made fewer animal noises than most teammates and said something over the clubhouse din that applied equally then and now: “We got hot at the right time and we’ve got as good a chance as anybody from here on.”
Today’s collection, many of them first-time champagne hounds and all of them first-time imbibers in a Jays uniform, have the opportunity for four celebrations of increasingly intense degree. The first was the mathematical assertion of the postseason. The division title is the first time something stitched and hoistable has been earned, though, after which the horizon lifts to the next two ever greater possibilities.
For newcomers to the class, please note there was no wild card in 1993 and therefore only three party possibilities: the team won its division that night in Milwaukee — in Game No. 156, which was three games faster than any previous dance party — then beat Chicago in the AL Championship Series. The World Series against Philadelphia, which boiled down to Joe Carter’s exclamation point, was the third, longest and loudest jubilee.
Back then, although not in numbers as great as now, there was a strong contingent of travelling fans. “Only a handful” of Jays backers found their way into County Stadium that night, but not many fans, period, showed up that night with temperatures were in the single digits (C). The house was announced as 14,391, but that was fiction. Brewers fans on hand applauded politely at the finish, about like a golf crowd after a possible birdie putt turns into a par tap-in. Why? Because the Jays were rich and powerful and spent the most on players and won all the time (it seemed). As we explained: Some fans, going years without a title of their own, would rank the Blue Jays’ dancing around on their turf on a par with, say, watching shareholders celebrate corporate stock splits.
That has all changed, of course. Now they’re up from two decades of mostly middling performance, darlings of the pink-hat fan crowd. But here’s one thing that was the same as ’93: They went on to Baltimore as part of their final road trip. Then as now there was bad blood between the teams, back then mostly stemming from the Gaston-Mike Mussina all-star fiasco.
The Orioles responded by — honest — flying the Jays’ pennant upside down beyond the outfield walls, a subtle nose-thumb that recalled the great goof-up of the 1992 World Series in Atlanta.
Alas, there was no Twitter universe to explode with that stunt.
“This is what it’s all about. I’m a lucky man playing a little boy’s game.” PAUL MOLITOR WHEN JAYS CLINCHED IN 1993