Taking a Swing at Fandom

This is a Mark Sampson guest post. You may remember Mark Sampson from such Rose-coloured hits as writing a horror novel, waking up at 4:30, and breaking our bathtub plug, among many many others. Today, he takes on America’s most time-consuming sport!

I learned a ten-dollar word a few months back that really encapsulates one of the key experiences of 2025 for me. That word is syzygy, defined as “the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies (such as the sun, moon, and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse) in a gravitational system.” Beyond the fact that syzygy would be a fantastic though impossible Scrabble play (alas, there are only two Y tiles in the bag), it can also serve as a one-word metaphor to replace the increasingly clichéd phrase “… when the planets align.”

My 2025 syzygy—as you can likely guess from the title of this guest column—involved the sport of Major League Baseball. Three things came together this year to put the game on my radar, things that I did not and could not plan but nonetheless had me turning on the cable TV during weekday evenings this fall when I’d normally be reading a book and listening to jazz.

Before I tell you what those three things were, I should probably share something about my relationship with team sports—which is to say, I don’t have one. My parents briefly forced me to play hockey when I was a very small kid, but I was so inept at the game that I often passed the puck to the other team if I felt they hadn’t had a long enough turn with it. I do know that the last Canadian team to win the Stanley Cup was the Montreal Canadiens, and that this occurred in 1993. I also know that hockey first introduced the helmet in 1974 and the protective cup in 1874, which tells you something about what men prioritize.

But that’s it. Hockey, football (gridiron or otherwise), basketball—they just weren’t my jam. The one sport I did follow, briefly, in the 1990s/early aughts, was professional boxing. My father, Ronnie Sampson, was a professional fighter in the 1960s, an undefeated lightweight who held the Canadian title from 1966 until his retirement in 1968. I loved (maybe even still love) boxing, but with its proliferation of multiple “alphabet” sanctioning bodies recognizing multiple champions across 17 weight divisions, the sport makes it very difficult for me, or anyone, to be a die-hard fan. 

But then, this year, a syzygy occurred that made me sit up and pay attention to baseball. The first of these three aligning elements happened in May, when I read, just by happenstance, the nonfiction work Faithful, cowritten by Stewart O’Nan and Stephen King. The book chronicles the Boston Red Sox’s historic 2004 season, in which the team won the World Series for the first time in 86 years, putting an end to the notorious Curse of the Bambino. I challenge any non-baseball fan to read Faithful and not be at least a little intrigued by the ups and downs of MLB. King, a die-hard Sox fan since he was a kid, is a master of transference, of making you care about what he cares about. (That talent probably explains why I, a King fan, read so much H.P. Lovecraft and Richard Matheson as a teen.) King’s love of the Sox, and of the quiet beauty of baseball, is infectious in every paragraph he contributes to Faithful. O’Nan, meanwhile, is a big-hearted, generous fan with an encyclopedic knowledge of the game. He’s also hilarious. I’m still chuckling at his nickname for the Oakland A’s, “Chokeland,” on account of their inability to win games that season when it counted.

The second element of my syzygy was also a book, this time a novel, called The Northern, by Jacob McArthur Mooney. I read this book in September, a few months after it was published. The novel is set in the 1950s and is about, among other things, a fictitious minor baseball league based out of southern Ontario. Yes, The Northern is a story that touches upon childhood and loss and what constitutes a real family. (It reminded me, in a way, of certain King stories along similar themes, including “The Body” and “Low Men in Yellow Coats.”) But The Northern is also a delicious, delirious cri de cœur for baseball itself. Like O’Nan and King, Jake knows how to present the game in a preternaturally compelling way, making you want to be a fan, to immerse yourself in both the statistics and the emotions of the sport. The Northern was a five-star read for me, a clear frontrunner for the best book I’ve read in 2025.

And, of course, that third element was the incredible run that the Toronto Blue Jays had this year, culminating with a heartbreaking loss to the LA Dodgers in Game 7 of the World Series in extra innings. My buddy Chis, a huge Jays fan, was already intimating by the end of August (when the team’s record stood a full 21 games over 500) that the Jays could go all the way this year. And by the time the postseason started, I shocked myself by tuning in. Who was I now? Was I becoming a baseball fan? I can easily say that what won me over was the Jays’ remarkable sportsmanship, their examples of positive masculinity and the fun the team seemed to be having, even when it looked like their World Series dreams were being dashed. I became just as obsessed with the absolute joy in Ernie Clement’s smile as I was with the “Springer Dinger.”

Yes, all of that is true.

But the other aspect I learned by watching is that baseball is called a pastime more than a game for a reason. Because here’s the thing: you can watch baseball while doing something else. This is not true, for example, of boxing: fights can end at any time, including in the first 10 seconds of the first round. Boxing requires you to pay constant attention, often from the edge of your seat. But with baseball, I didn’t have to sacrifice precious reading hours in the evenings to watch a game: I could do both, simply by muting the TV and looking up every now and then from my book to see how the boys were doing. Hell, I could even put on a jazz record while the game did its thing in the background, if I wanted.

So, yes, maybe I’m becoming a baseball fan. I figure I have about five months to bone up on MLB and learn what I can about its rules, its history, its culture. Why, for example, does the regular season have so many games? How do the “leagues” and the “divisions” work? How does the wildcard round in the postseason work? What is the relationship between the major and minor leagues? And how the hell is Jays pitcher Trey Yesavage so good, considering I own extension cords older than that guy?

Barring a players’ strike or zombie apocalypse, I’m committed to following the 2026 season as best I can. I want to see, at this stage of life, if I can add another interest to what already feels—with two careers, a marriage, a wide crew of friends, a home cocktailing hobby, a rich reading life—like a pretty packed existence as it is. Am I destined to take on yet another passion?

Because here’s the other thing about a syzygy. When it comes to the huge, cosmic questions of why planets suddenly align, you have to wonder: is it fate, or it is simply an sequence of arbitrary occurrences? Indeed, this question feels like something straight out of a Stephen King book—specifically his 1994 novel Insomnia, in which he talks about the two forces that hold his fictional multiverse together. They are called The Purpose and The Random. These forces compete with one another, but they also hold the universe in balance. Yet, that story wisely points out that, beyond a certain point, there is no Random. All things are Purpose. All things serve the beam, and the beam I’m on seems to be leading to baseball.

Do you want to help me in this journey? If you’ve got suggestions for good MLB primers I could read over the winter to prep for next spring, please leave a comment below!