There’s only one truly American way to root this World Series.

Ah, the halcyon days of 1993. What a year it was! Bill Nye the Science Guy started airing in syndication, Jerry Seinfeld was 39 and going out with a teenage girl, and Craisins were finally, finally brought to market. But for Toronto baseball fans, 1993 is of particular import: It was the last time the Blue Jays made it to the World Series, and perhaps the last time any of us experienced true, arrant joy.

To be a Toronto sports fan is to be a beleaguered and oft-harmed member of a steadily crumbling society. When the Raptors won an NBA championship in 2019, they ended a quarter century of losses by all Canadian major sports teams. The Maple Leafs are not so much a hockey team as a brutal but inevitable punch line, having not won a championship since before the October Crisis. We don’t have any teams in the NFL, but we do have our own proprietary football league, which I’m sure is currently being watched by someone’s half-asleep Caucasian uncle.

But this fall, everything is different. For the first time since their back-to-back wins in ’92 and ’93, the Toronto Blue Jays are playing in the Fall Classic against the Los Angeles Dodgers. And if you consider yourself a real American, you’ll spend the next four to seven games rooting for the Canadians to win the World Series.

It’s been a tough year for the U.S. This is the part where I’d list out a few of the recent collective horrors, but there are so many that I’m forgetting more than I can remember. Amid the devastation are so many examples of dissent, from regular folks standing between ICE agents and the people they’re trying to kidnap, to millions of people showing up for No Kings protests across the nation. The country is being run by the smug and the privileged, sore winners who have spent the past nine months gloating. Doesn’t it feel right, then, for a Canadian team to be not only the American League champions for 2025 but also the ones to make the Dodgers cry? The win could serve as a quaint reminder that while the current administration is operating as if the country is beyond impunity, a Canadian team can still clinch a uniquely American game.

It’s a perfect footnote for the history books that they’ll start burning in 18 months: President Donald Trump being forced to acknowledge a successful Canadian sports team filled with Dominican players and named after a mostly vegetarian bird.

I don’t want to be too cruel to Dodgers fans. It’s bad enough to either be from or have to live in L.A., a city made of freeways and indoor vaping. Surely it has its charms: good tacos, palm trees, a legal dispensary on every corner with a $16 preroll that’ll change your neurochemistry. But, hey, do you love being 45 minutes away from everything, no matter what? Do you wake up each morning hoping an influencer is filming a skit in your local coffee shop that will involve you, whether you like it or not? Are you dying to be hit by a Cybertruck driven by a guy who’s letting A.I. write his will? Boy, do I have the place for you!

Despite being from a city that super-duper sucks, the Dodgers are undoubtedly the stronger team, the second-biggest one in the MLB. They’re certainly more likely to clinch the World Series, especially considering that they won in 2020 and 2024. In the following few games, they’ll act as a reliable and terrifying Goliath, and there’s nothing more boring than cheering for the big guy. Publicly rooting for the Dodgers is like walking around town in a Palantir T-shirt. You’re representing the most overrepresented team in the league. Grow up. Take a risk. Try something hard for once in your life. The Death Star didn’t need any more encouragement either.

Meanwhile, the Blue Jays aren’t just Toronto’s team; they carry with them the hopes of an entire country that remain discounted by major league sports. Since the Expos left Montreal in 2004, the Jays have been the only Canadian team in the MLB. Toronto’s forthcoming WNBA team, the Tempo, won’t begin its season until next year, and it too is the first and only non-American team in the league. And before you bring up hockey, Canada’s kinda-official sport (don’t tell lacrosse), you shut your goddamn mouth. The Maple Leafs are so historically bad that when Blue Jays first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. wore a Leafs jersey to their seventh game against the Mariners, it was like watching your favo(u)rite athlete rip a black cat in half while walking under a ladder, shards of broken mirrors raining down from the sky. Besides, the last time any Canadian hockey team won the Stanley Cup, it was incidentally the same year a Canadian baseball team won the World Series.

This fall, the Jays have transformed us into a grateful baseball country. Whatever we learned from our hockey fandom transfers over. Do Americans really think they invented getting drunk and eating sunflower seeds and yelling at some guy on the pitch who makes more money than me? You guys didn’t even invent baseball!

But hey, if my plea for you to not root for the Joe Camel of baseball teams doesn’t move you, then maybe it’s because your politics are aligned with the current state of America. I can understand wanting to endorse a team already liable to win—Trump, after all, is definitely a winner, and he loves winners too! But do you really want to tolerate an even more self-congratulatory Gavin Newsom? Even I don’t want to watch that man smile with all 700 of his teeth anymore.

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If you’re new to the Jays this season—or even this series—there are plenty of players to fall in love with before the end of the month. If you’re interested in rooting for someone who makes you feel unsafe, there’s Max “Mad Max” Scherzer, our starting pitcher with heterochromia, who skulks around the bullpen like a malcontent daddy longlegs. There’s George Springer, who got hit in the knee by a Mariners fastball during Game 6 but still managed to hit a three-run homer in Game 7. But there is no 2025 Blue Jays without our MVP, Dominican-Canadian Vladimir Guerrero Jr. Vladdy’s dad played for the Montreal Expos until the early aughts, so his son was first introduced to Canadian sports fans as a little kid warming up with his pop. Moneyball said it best: “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” For Guerrero, the World Series could be a promise fulfilled, not just for his dad, but for an entire country rooting for this Canadian kid to bring it home. No, I’m not crying. There’s just a lot of dust in here.

2025 is the year of the underdog, and part of being in a community is supporting the scrappy little guy. Rooting for the Jays is, essentially, a vote against the inevitable cruelty of an autocratic establishment. Didn’t all of you just say No Kings last weekend? Such anti-tyrant rhetoric should apply even to our leisure viewing. It behooves all of us, from Mendocino to Key West to St. John’s to Tofino, to tell the Dodgers to eat shit.

Look, we all know that the Jays will be fighting an uphill battle. To be Canadian is to be unbearably connected with placing second to our U.S. counterparts. But we’ve ruined an American’s day before, and we’re happy to do it again. Trump, after all, isn’t the first to destroy the White House. But at least these two teams have one undeniable thing in common: Neither of them are the New York Yankees. And really, isn’t hating the Yankees what baseball is all about?

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