Joe Carter of the Toronto Blue Jays celebrates after hitting the World Series-clinching home run against the Philadelphia Phillies on Oct. 23, 1993.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
A crowd of 52,195 people arrayed around a ballpark is not something you can see when you’re a part of it. It’s too many people to capture in your central and peripheral fields of vision, which are good for about 180 degrees laterally in a 12-year-old kid with near-perfect sight. To capture the scene in its 360-degree, quintuple-decked entirety, you must cast your eyes around to survey the place, stitching things together in a kind of panorama that is not reducible to a single-frame snapshot you can burn into your memory and carry with you forever.
At least not for me, I realize 32 years later, as I rifle through my mind for a singular image that might contain the wild corpus of humanity I was a small piece of on Oct. 23, 1993. All that’s really there is the sound: a thick, scratchy roar, thundering voices in aggregate. It’s a sound that can never be wholly benign because it contains all the raw potential a crowd that size is capable of, whether good or bad, and it was the first time I felt it. This much I’m sure of.
We’d been to many Jays games before. Casual, loose, sometimes raucous. But this was different. It was Game 6 of the World Series, when the Toronto Blue Jays beat the Philadelphia Phillies at home to win the big one, back to back.
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While I don’t think or talk about this experience very often, I’ve trotted it out enough times over the years to know now’s the time where you say with more skepticism than I deserve, You? In ’93? Game 6. Joe Carter. You were there? Sometimes there’s an expletive at the end, telling me where to go, depending on the company.
The reality is, I don’t remember that much.
Of the surviving mental footage, some tempts me with a crisp realism, some is watercoloured by time: here, a smooth, freight-train swing; there, a limestone-coloured ball, driving, lifting, pushing, holding, arcing over the blue wall that separates mortals from the gods; to my right, that’s Mike, my friend and my ticket to the game, grinning in joyous, head-back, white-teeth shock; around us, in the foreground, bodies leaping, hollering, high-fiving, hugging, screaming; zoom out a little, it’s a quivering, bellowing ecstasy of people layered upon more people; look down, there’s Joe Carter making deer jealous with his mad, beautiful pronk around the bases; a little later, a flash of Yonge Street in a noisy riot, blue mayhem streaked with improvised toilet-paper streamers, open mouths, arms and hands dangling out of car windows.
In the bottom of the ninth inning, Carter launched this three-run shot off Philadelphia Phillies reliever Mitch (Wild Thing) Williams.Rick Stewart/Getty Images
These are the messy fragments that remain. I’m revisiting them in and out of sequence in an effort to put together the story of that Saturday night when we rolled east along the Gardiner Expressway from the suburbs with Nick and Mary, Mike’s mom and dad, hoping to witness history.
If I’m being honest, it’s not working. These shards are not portals to my youth. They activate something that looks and feels like ’93, but it’s shaky and unreliable, a landscape composed from memory that could be borrowed or imagined.
As for the game itself, I recall the clutch of tension developing in our bellies when the Phillies turned the tide against the Blue Jays. Except, embarrassingly, I couldn’t remember whom the Jays played until recently when I asked my mother to send me a photograph of the program that is stashed at their house (it’s mint, since I know you’re wondering).
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I know the pit-of-the-gut feeling is real because I watched the game on YouTube over the past few weeks, a few innings at a time. I hoped it would take me back to what happened on the field, a little digital madeleine that was going to turn me into my younger self and make this throwback assignment a breeze. But inning after inning, it was a bust.
There I was, still 44 years old, completely numb to a night I can’t quite remember but will never forget. Even I was beginning to doubt I was there. Every recollection was being stripped of its credential. I had thin allegations, diluted claims. I had come to the internet for reassurance and revelation and it left me questioning the institution of childhood, pitch after pitch.
But then, all of a sudden I arrived at the bobbled seventh inning, the disastrous inning that showed the crowd how thin the margin was between human error and divine intervention. That’s when I felt it, a twinge of sense-memory, even if I couldn’t quite retrieve it. It was real.
I swear now that I can recall Mitch Williams taking the mound in the ninth – who could forget a tangled mullet that had an ERA of its own? It practically swept the dirt when Wild Thing collapsed on his side after each baffling pitch. But I can’t shake the fear that it was planted during my online trip down 4:3 memory lane.
Finally, we arrive at the crucial moment. Carter at bat, the bottom of the ninth, the most famous homer in Toronto history (with all due respect to Jose Bautista, his celebration outdid the home run itself). At this point in my journey, this is the one thing I think I truly remember besides the sound. I want to check it against the version that’s been compacted and compressed in my mind. He steps up to the plate. Looks good. Now I’m really aging backward. I’m getting there like the ball is going to get there, reaching, hoping, going, gone. There I am, I’m in Section 128 at the Dome and the lights are on.
It quickly turns dark, though.
Jays players mob teammate Carter after his World Series-winning home run in Toronto, ensuring the Blue Jays earned back-to-back championships.The Associated Press
In my own reel, the one I’ve carried around for so long, he had fouled off two or three times. I would tell you that these were not foul balls, they were home runs born on the wrong side of the line. I’d tell you the whole stadium could feel it: Joe was calling his shot.
It’s a nice bit of cinematic fabulism, it turns out. The home run is just as majestic as it ever was, but everything before it was pure fiction. My memory of the at-bat was completely false.
God is no help to a non-believer, so I turned to the group chat. Mike is there, along with another dear friend from the era. Three of four buddies who were inseparable in Mississauga but have been scattered around like the blazing carpet of fallen leaves on the front of the program.
I barge in and ask what they remember. They will think I’m just asking a question, I fear; they won’t realize what I need is durable evidence and earthly reassurance that we haven’t made it all up, corroborating details to ensure the torn tissue of my existence doesn’t blow away completely.
Days go by. Nothing. Zip. I’m really disintegrating now. I’m gone.
Then, a few days later, Mike drops a photograph with the three of them looking windswept, happy, hungover. There is an ocean in the background. I realize I’ve been cut out of a reunion. It stings just briefly, but exclusion is just a recurring scherzo in our little group. We’re never all together. Someone’s always left out. So now it was my turn, which is okay because Mike and I were the ones who got to go the game while our pals watched at home on TV (together, allegedly happy for us to be there in person). I’d actually believed that three of us were at the game until I was reminded it was just the two of us.
The chat woke up, the memories started pouring in. I made peace with the false memory. As it happens, Mike doesn’t remember too many details about the game either, but we shook out a few more errata: Mike produced his ticket, which proved he was in 213 (Row 11, Seat 101). There, another imposter – sitting in the 100s – was struck from the faulty roster, or so we thought.
One thing Mike remembered was the anxiety of finding his parents after the game, because we weren’t all sitting together. Nick and Mary were elsewhere and the crowd was vast, insane, electric.
This week, I phoned Nick and we spoke for the first time in more than a decade. It was good to hear his voice, the same as I remember hearing on the end of a seven-digit landline I still have memorized. We jawed about the really old days, then caught up on the newer old days, until we cut to the chase.
He asked me if I remembered where we sat. I referred to the photograph of the tickets, which had been brandished as gospel. This was settled. This was fact.
Toronto Blue Jays Paul Molitor, left, and Joe Carter, right, celebrate with the World Series trophy in the Jays clubhouse after defeating the Philadelphia Phillies 8-6 in October 1993 to clinch back-to-back championships.FRANK GUNN/The Canadian Press
He paused for a bit. He’s an insurance executive, mostly retired. You trust that kind of guy. He wouldn’t misremember a Jays game, even if he couldn’t remember all of it.
Then he hit me with another twist. There were two pairs of tickets: one in the 213s, another down in 118. Neither he nor Mary could remember where they sat, exactly. He wondered if he gave Mike his own ticket for posterity, which would mean my fugitive memory would be correct. But no one was sure.
I confessed I remembered very little of the baseball part. For him it was the same, overlapping and vaguely corroborative, but I knew we’d never really settle it.
I told him I hope I had thanked him enough back then for bringing me along to the spectacle. And if I hadn’t, I’d like to now. He shrugged me off and offered me another gift before we said goodbye: We don’t remember much, but we remember we were there. And that’s enough.
Dennis Choquette is the deputy editor of Report on Business at The Globe and Mail.