Pitcher’s wedding registry the final spitball
Cleveland’s Ryan Merritt and fiancée’s list includes items that drive home the fact that we lost
The pain was starting to lift.
Then I clicked on the wedding registry belonging to Sarah Brushaber and Ryan Merritt and the agony returned, along with a blinding urge to douse my rally towels with kerosene and burn down the Rogers Centre.
It’s always a jolt to the heart when your team is purged from the playoffs. But the way the Blue Jays crumpled to Cleveland — dropping four of five games, including Wednesday’s decisive 3-0 wipeout — will haunt local dreams long after Marco Estrada is a senile old man berating park pigeons about their lack of run support.
Even 48 hours later, none of this makes sense.
The Jays, who beat Cleveland 17-1 in a regular season game on July 2, couldn’t score half that many runs in the entire ALCS? All they had to do to stay alive in Game 5 — all they
had to do! — was pound a Doogie Howser doppelganger who shockingly didn’t climb atop a phone book as he took the mound with about the same amount of pro pitching experience as my mother?
That would be Merritt, the 24year-old future husband to Ms. Brushaber and a big reason the Jays aren’t going to the World Series. That would be a millennial Rain Man who prefers video games to human interaction and is so clearly at the start of life itself that he’s now registered for a Scroll Paper Towel Holder ($8.09 U.S.) and Swiffer 180 Dusters Starter Kit Unscented ($4.49).
To peruse this wedding registry, as a Toronto fan, is to feel blinding shame.
Our team fell to a kid who is now probably shuffling around in wrinkled chinos because he doesn’t yet have that Retractable 4-Leg Ironing Board ($25.99). Our team walked off Baltimore in the Wild Card and swept Texas. Then our team was trash-binned by a guy who, after getting married in January, will be dabbing his lips with a Classic Belgian Flax Linen Hemstitch Dinner Napkin ($36 for a set of four).
I thought the baseball gods were twisted after that ghastly drone injury. But this is really too much. It’s one thing to be destroyed by Cleveland relief pitcher Andrew Miller, a six-foot-seven freak of nature with an arm like a bazooka and the jib of a man who lives in a remote mountain cabin and catches salmon with his mouth. It’s one thing to be outmanoeuvred by Cleveland manager Terry Francona, a master tactician who probably rebuilds his engine each morning just to make sure the combustion chamber is optimized for the day’s forecast.
But watching Merritt hypnotize the Jays for half that final game, watching him induce narcolepsy in their bats and do so with ice water in his veins — even before he owns the Prodyne Fruit Infusion Pitcher ($19.99)! — is a slap to the face.
In a game in which performance is measured by astronomical salaries, a game in which Dodgers’ ace Clayton Kershaw is under a $215-million contract, the Jays were bamboozled by a guy who, based on his wedding registry, appears to be a sales associate at Banana Republic.
Baseball can be a real time suck. At an average length of three hours, if you watched every Jays game this year — 162 in the regular season, one Wild Card, eight post-season — you just donated 21.4 days of your life to sudden heartbreak.
So, Cleveland fans, stop bragging on social media about how you’re buying items on the registry to thank Merritt. If you really cared about your team, Cleveland wouldn’t have the third-worst attendance in 2016.
Any fool can drop $5.19 on an Ultra Bake Pro 12 Cavity Muffin Pan. Where were you in April? And please don’t call me a sore loser. Merritt is registered for a Tava Charger Round Espresso Stain ($13.99). I don’t even know what that is. But now I’m sore. In fact, multiple items on the registry sound like anti-Jay taunts: the Bonavita Gooseneck Kettle; the Hamilton Beach 4 Square Belgian Waffle Maker; the Presto Digital ProFry Deep Fryer. We get it. We were cooked. But there is always next year. And we don’t have a single player who is eagerly awaiting an OXO Soft Works Apple Wedger ($8.99). vmenon@thestar.ca