Some Thoughts on Tim Hortons

Just a few scattered thoughts about Tim Hortons today:

• Let's start by addressing the elephant in the room: Tim Horton was a hockey player; Tim Hortons the donut shop, therefore, requires an apostrophe. The original Tim Horton Charcoal Broiled Hamburgers in North Bay used the player's name without an 's' and I'm cool with that (mind you, if it was called "Angus Beef Charcoal Broiled Hamburgers", angus beef would clearly be an ingredient, and so I'm not really cool with it at all I guess). At some point, someone decided to introduce an 's' (and add donuts, and remove burgers) and that's when things went horribly wrong. Thats my opinion. Whats yours?
• I think there's lots you can learn about ownership and management by comparing the differences between Tim Hortons franchises (now I don't know if I should be saying "Tim Horton's franchises", "Tim Hortons franchises", or "Tim Hortons' franchises" but I digress). They all have basically the same food, the same equipment, the same procedures for beverage and food preparation, and presumably more or less the same compensation model for staff. And yet, as I'm sure you've experienced - there are wild variances in the customer experience from one place to the next. It's too easy to conclude that how you're treated and how fast your order is prepared comes down to the individual staff member you're dealing with. Not true. It's the ownership/management that recruits, hires and trains those people. I blame (and praise) them. Here are three recent examples of the wildly varying experiences:

Tims #1 (or is it Tim's?) - I pull up in the drive-thru (yes, I know) and the voice on the speaker becomes a person in the window. He hands me my steeped tea. Except it's not steeped tea at all. It's coffee. I tell him. He tells me that I'm wrong and it's steeped tea - pointing at the white "ST" on the lid. I patiently remove the lid and have him (wake up and) smell the coffee. He does, then patiently informs me that it's steeped tea. I eventually have to park and go into the store to rectify the situation. No apologies - just a new cup of tea.

Tims #2 - My colleague and I enter in the early morning and the place is empty. The drive-thru lane is also empty. We order a coffee, a steeped tea, a breakfast sandwich and a toasted bagel. The server's pupils dilate. I can almost hear Homer Simpson in a meltdown at his nuclear plant:  "What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?" THEY ORDERED FOOD AND NOW I HAVE TO MAKE IT BECAUSE I'M ALL ALONE AND I CAN'T DO ALL THIS ON MY OWN!!! Thankfully, some other guy, not in uniform, walks behind the counter, pushes the server aside heroically, and makes our drinks AND our food all while shooting the original server some seriously angry glances. I think I'm seeing the manager in action.

Tims #3 - The voice on the drive-thru speaker is friendly and warm every morning: "Thank you for choosing our Tim Hortons. What can I get for you?" My order is captured without error and without requiring repetition or slowing down. At the window, I'm greeted with a smile and a "Hi!" and my food is delivered promptly and accurately. The whole team seems to have helped. They also seem to like each other (which I have found is often not the case in other Tim Hortons locations - having witnessed staff nearly coming to blows in a Tims #4 I won't talk about further). They are a well-oiled machine. I ask for half-butter on the bagel and they deliver half-butter (Tims #2 confused half-butter with three-times-the-butter). The bagel person is in a hurry to get me my food and hands it to the window person with urgency. The window person is a joy to deal with. And what's most notable is that it's the same experience but not always the same people.

As you might expect, I avoid Tims #1 and Tims #2 and go to Tims #3 ninety-nine percent of the time. I also commend Tims #3's staff all the time. But really, I should also be commending its ownership and management because what else is there in the fabric of each franchise that makes it what it is?

•  I'm too lazy to cut and paste the nutrition information here. It's also a bit of an effort to get to the nutrition information from the Tim Hortons website, and I'm feeling a bit sluggish from all the Tim Hortons bagels I've consumed over the years, even at half butter. So go look for yourself. Yuck. I will save you some time by letting you know that on their "Nutrition and Wellness" page, you'll see fresh, un-cracked eggs at the top, you'll eventually find a "Balanced Menu Options" link, and there, the 12 Grain Bagel proudly displayed first. Then the words: "Plain or toasted, buttered or slathered with cream cheese spread; everyone loves a tasty bagel." This shining example of a "balanced menu option" has 330 calories, 9 grams of fat (only 1.5 saturated), 55 carbs, and 450 mg of sodium. It isn't even clear to me whether those numbers are for a buttered bagel, plain bagel or one that is "slathered with cream cheese".
• Isn't 'slathered' a cool word? It sounds delicious and fattening while in fact containing no calories or fat. I just thought that deserved a paragraph of its own.
• So it sounds like I'm an idiot for going to Tim Hortons regularly (which, if true, would mean that most of my fellow Canadians are too). I defend the fact that I do go there as follows:

A) It feels like a patriotic duty (to buy from Burger King) 

B) It's so damn convenient (except when it's not) 

C) Sometimes, they have roll-up-the-rim and that's fun.

I will also tell you that I NEVER get donuts (haven't had one - not even a timbit) since reading all about donut nutrition when Krispy Kreme tried to enter the market and suddenly donuts weren't healthy, I go to Tims #3 almost exclusively, and I always order - when I need some food in the wee hours of the morning - a cinnamon raisin bagel with half-butter (which, if you check, you'll see isn't nearly as bad as the 12 grain). So I'm an idiot, but an idiot who slathers his food with half the butter AND an idiot who at least tries to get the apostrophe's right.

David Does Deep

My new car comes with a temporary free subscription to SiriusXM (satellite radio). Amongst other listening delights, the 6 year old and I have been using it to surf up and down between the 50's on 5, 60's on 6, 70's on 7, 80's on 8, 90's on 9, and Pop2K on 10 (the latter name because we never did bother to come up with a good label for that decade).

She's been getting pretty good at guessing which decade we're listening to based on one or two songs, which tells you that either each decade really does have a sound, or that the programmers for the various stations certainly have a preferred sound for their respective decades.

She's even taken a stab at characterizing the sound for me - but only got as far as "The 50's sounds like the music is being played in a barn", "The 70's is all happy and active", and "The 90's sounds like it's in a music class and they're still practicing." (I really pushed her to describe the other decades as well because I thought that would make for a really cool post, but she got bored and started to talk about penises and vaginas instead - as she is wont to do).

Of course, as we were listening she was also curious about whether she was alive then, I was alive then, her big sisters were alive then, Grampa was alive then, etc. (She also asked me last week, by the way, if Grampa and Gramma were alive for Ancient Egypt. I told her yes. And then she told me that she doesn't like Egypt because they're all slaves and she doesn't like slaves. At which point I turned the conversation back to penises and vaginas.)

Anyhoo...at one point on 70's on 7 Kasey Casem's American Top 40 from some time in 1970 was playing (the 6 year old no longer in the car with me), and between songs Kasey explained how the top 40 list is based on record sales from 100 stores from across the country. 

Whoa. Talk about a stark reminder of how things used to be.

Of course there was a sound back then - because there were stores and radio stations and people like Casey Kasem who made sure there was a sound based on what they stocked in store, what they played, and what they told people to listen to. And there weren't other ways to access music, except going to concerts or making it yourself.

The same, of course, was going on in television and the movies. A very finite set of delivery channels that everybody accessed together, which meant watching the same things at the same time - together - and being able to talk about it the very next day because a) you had seen it, or b) you would basically never be able to see it. Which meant NOT MISSING IT in the first place.

Entertainment was a collective thing. We watched together and listened together and experienced together - all at the same time, in unison. Coke could "teach the world to sing", literally, by placing a great ad in precisely the right places at precisely the right times.

Now look at us. It's no accident that starting with 90's on 9 and Pop2K on 10, there isn't really a defining sound. Nor are there generational TV shows anymore. Or if there are, we won't all have finished watching them until ten years after the decade is over. (I forget who I was talking to a few days ago, but this person was raving about how great Breaking Bad is/was, as if it just went off the air this past weekend). 

Sure, there is content that goes viral still, grabbing an audience despite the diffuse noise all around it, and usually doing so for clusters of demographically homogeneous sub-audiences or "communities" with which it strikes a chord. And there are still movie events that come along, sending large numbers of people out to see the same thing in theatre all at pretty much the same time. But even those community-crossing film events hit mainly the moviegoers (a cross-cutting community) and not the rest of us who are stuck at home with kids or unable or unwilling to go out for some other reason. And more and more, even those events are looking like they'll go straight to an online content provider like Netflix sometimes, or they're getting stolen and watched online before leaving theatres...

But how often is there real convergence for everybody on something they all care about all at the same time? Something that transcends diverse communities? I MISS THAT. I think we all do.

Did you see how Toronto, its surrounding neighbourhoods, and the rest of Canada (or so we're told) came together for the Blue Jays? Wasn't that amazing? Didn't it feel like something we really, really needed? 

Did you see how the recent Federal election got people all talking about the same things all at the same time? No matter how you feel about the outcome, wasn't that amazing? 

I strongly believe we need unifying moments more than ever. And unifying themes. And unifying purposes. Whether they emerge from entertainment, or sport, or politics or events in the news - they help define us and our time. We'll always have our separate communities of interest, but our bigger, foundational communities need reinforcing from time to time as well: our neighbourhoods; our cities; our countries. And not in ways that prop up those communities by excluding others - because that works too. The events and themes and purposes I'm talking about connect communities to other communities, as well, in a shared experience that brings everybody together.

We are becoming ever more connected like cells in a network. We have access to an ever increasing amount of content. We have a tremendous amount of personal control over what we consume. The choices about how and where we direct our attention seem endless. Our natural course seems to be to gratify our individual wants because we can. Yet we can't forget about the containers that need to be in place to hold everything together; the networks we need to hold the networks together; or the gravity we need to keep us in orbit around the same things.

Sure, the container might have been too confining before; the gravity may have weighed us down too much. And now we have networks in place and communities of interest that allow us to explore things with others who are like us: Lots of freedom; loads of access; tons of control. But let's not lose sight of the value and importance and reality of our bigger communities. Our collective identities that should - from time to time - take precedent over our individual and sub-community interests.

If you listen for a while to 60's on 6, you'll hear not just a common sound, but a consistent and common purpose. Love. Harmony. Fixing the world. Hokey, right? Quaint, right? Naive, right? It's so unfamiliar now to hear such a coherent and shared focus from a generation. And so easy to laugh it off.

But I wonder...Will my 6 year old's generation rally together to save the world? Or will they have individual and diffuse existences without a shared purpose that defines them? What could they do if they collectively decided to fix something? How much could they accomplish, that no previous generation was able to, precisely because they have the freedom and access and control and authority and smarts that no previous generation had? Could you imagine what they could do if they can find the will and set their minds - collectively - to accomplish something really big for their city, their country, or the world? And can you imagine the damage they could do if they rally around the wrong things?

I don't have any suggestions beyond sharing these rambling thoughts and doing my best with my 6 year old. Maybe her daughter one day will hear about something really magical that happened to fix everything and ask her if she was alive for that. And maybe her answer will be that not only was she alive for it, she (and everyone else) made it happen together. Because they decided to and because they could.

Wouldn't that be amazing?

What are you doing on the toilet? (A personality test)

Okay. Sometimes you need to take a break from what's going on in your external environment (sports, politics, a steady stream of depressing news) to reflect on your internal environment. Sometimes you need to ask the hard questions about yourself, even if those questions are tasteless and awkward to ask. With that said, I now invite you to spend some time with me, exploring how you're using your most private time of all, and what that has to say about who you are.

(For sophisticated readers, stop reading now. For even more sophisticated readers, rest assured that all of the puns you come across below are intended, even if they're not).

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What are you doing on the toilet?

Context for the test: We have more choices than ever about how to use those times when we are stuck on the toilet (not stuck in a literal sense, of course, but stuck in that we have no choice but to be there - I refuse to get more specific than that). What do your choices say about your personality? Sit back, relax, and take this test to find out.

For the most accurate results, choose the option that best fits your usual experience. All answers and results will remain anonymous.

Question 1: How long are you there?

A) Absolutely the minimal amount of time I need to be.
B) The minimal amount of time, unless whatever else I'm doing holds me there for a bit longer.
C) As long as I can get safely away with.
D) Much longer than I should be.

Question 2: How do you prepare?

A) Each and every time, I am in by necessity and out asap - so I go in strictly "as is".
B) I will sometimes grab my device or something else to do if I expect a long visit.
C) I usually make sure I've got something to do, and my bathroom at home always offers options.
D) I will not sit down until I know how else I will keep busy (even if that means cutting it close).

Question 3: Will you connect with others whilst seated?

A) Absolutely not. That's disgusting.
B) Only if I've got my device and only inbound text or e-mail.
C) Yes, when someone reaches out to me on an important matter once I'm committed.
D) For sure. But I go on mute during moments that might be noticed. Or not.

Question 4: What's your distraction of choice?

A) Quiet reflection.

B) A good book (but not The Good Book), magazine, newspaper, or crossword puzzle.

C) Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, a good game, a good playlist or some other go-anywhere social media or entertainment source.

D) All of the above plus anything else I would do anywhere else (with my pants around my ankles).

Question 5: Which statement best describes your perspective on toilet time?

A) It's a necessary evil.

B) I'm cool with it, but it's a private experience for each of us and should be treated as such.

C) I must admit that I look forward to it a bit and sometimes go there when I don't have to.

D) It's often the best part of my day.

Question 6: What about public toilets?

A) Public toilets are strictly a last resort.
B) If the bathrooms are clean, I don't mind being there as long as no one else is in there to hear me.
C) I treat them pretty much like the home one, but I like to have headphones in so I don't hear what's going on around me.
D) Any time. Any place. No difference to me.

Question 7: Your phone rings while in a public bathroom stall. What do you do?

A) That could never happen.
B) I quickly decline the call and text that I'll call back.
C) I answer, speak in a low voice (but not too low), and get off the phone as quickly as possible.
D) I answer the call and have a perfectly normal conversation.

Question 8: Which phrase best describes your personality (with or without respect to what goes on when you're on the toilet)?

A) I'm introverted, repressed, too proper to even take this quiz, I feel a little bit superior to anyone who would choose anything but A) on this question and far superior to anyone who would write a quiz like this. I am old, and feel older inside.

B) Toilet talk embarrasses me, but I try to be open to new things. I am sociable and polite. I am empathetic, intelligent and giving. Life-long learning is important to me.

C) I am a fully actualized person with few hang ups. My social status matters a lot to me. I am a good leader when I have to be, and a good team-mate always. Look out world, here I come!

D) I am boorish, slovenly, loud, and socially backward in many other ways. I am also fun-loving and live life with gusto. Some people like me. Some people don't like me and to hell with them.

Assessment

Give yourself 1 point for every A) answer, 2 for every B) answer, 3 for every C) answer and 100 for every D) answer. If your score is...

<10      You took this quiz despite how you feel about it. Interesting. 

10-16   You are evolved and have a strong sense of self. Or you lied.

17-24   Your attitude towards the bathroom is what most people would consider normal.

25-200 You walk a fine line between socially acceptable and not. Careful about your one D) answer.

>200    Somebody should have told you long ago to reel it in. If you're wondering why people give you funny looks all the time, wonder no more.

Total your score for questions 1-7 and divide by 7. If your resulting score is...

1.00-1.99    Your answer to question 8 should have been A) or B). If it wasn't, you wanna be cooler than you are. Wake up!
2.00-3.00    Your answer to question 8 should have been B) or C) and it probably was.
3.00-100     Your answer to question 8 should have been D). If it wasn't, think again.

A Great Moment

There's nothing sudden about great moments.

According to Webster, a moment is: 

"A very short period of time. A particular time. A precise point in time."

Great moments, though, don't just happen in isolation, out of the blue, without a context that might be minutes or hours or days or weeks or months or years or decades (e.g. 22 years) long. There's nothing short, or particular, or precise about great moments.

One of the great moments in my life took place on a beached surf board with my two older daughters - sodden, exhausted, starving - after a morning in surfing lessons in the cold ocean on a cloudy day on the west coast of BC. The moment involved some cobbled-together turkey-and-tomato sandwiches and a flash of sunlight triumphantly penetrating the clouds, at last. But take away the grey morning, the damp clothes, the aching muscles, my beautiful daughters, Mom's absence because Nonno had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer...and take away the drive across Vancouver Island listening repeatedly to "Hey There Delilah" and the cabin in the woods the night before and our complete failure collectively to actually stand up on a surfboard...and you basically have a so-so sandwich, shitty weather, and a lot of chafing.

Jose Bautista hit a home run last night. Great moment.

Here's why:

• Before hitting the home run, Bautista had basically been a complete playoff bust despite being one of the top players in baseball since "suddenly" emerging as a superstar a few years ago, and despite his usually clutch performances, and despite a career which to that point had never included the playoffs. Bautista is the guy you don't want to make mad - usually - having made a notable habit of punishing opposing pitchers and teams when they pitch him inside or anger him in any other way. But here he was, late in a series, having failed to deliver in those kinds of moments several times. Would he now and forever be known for his feeble pop-ups instead of  his grandiose home runs? A playoff under-performer? A choker? No. In this defining moment, he rose to the occasion...
• And before Bautista had the chance to swing the bat, there was the Texas infield, not once, not twice, not three times but FOUR TIMES blowing relatively routine plays. That doesn't happen. Ever. But it happened last night, opening the door for Bautista's at-bat...
• And maybe that happened because in the top of the inning the crowd got ugly, emotions ran high, players waited around and milled about, and did everything but what they usually do - especially on great teams - which is to play baseball and make routine plays. And some of the young players were suddenly a little more nervous and cautious and caught up in the moment...
• And all that certainly happened because of one of the weirdest plays I've ever personally seen - again, a usually routine moment where a catcher lobs a ball back to the pitcher, turned into yet another sports disaster for a city that has known nothing but sports disasters for over two decades. (Or so it seemed at the time...)
• Which drove some usually well-behaved fans to drink and misbehave, embarrassingly and dangerously delaying the game further by throwing beer and other watery beverages onto the field; behaving so because of those same 22 years of frustration and their fury with the "Gods of Sport" once again throwing their fickle support behind the other team...
• And the game being a game only because Marcus Stroman - who wasn't even supposed to play baseball again until next year - rose to the occasion of getting a start in the biggest baseball game in the city in forever. Stroman, pitching in a deciding Game 5 only because his Manager and the rest of the braintrust for the Jays, believed in him and made moves in Game 4 (to preserve a Game 5) that were both controversial and fateful - but in a good way this time...
• And the Jays being in the playoffs only because their GM - a Canadian for heaven's sake - did everything right in assembling a team that grabbed the brass ring in the second half of a season that seemed otherwise doomed to mediocrity and underachievement, just like each of the years that preceded it, in every sport that matters in our insanely loyal city...
• And all of that taking place in Toronto, where we always feel under-loved and under-appreciated and conspired-against, and also fiercely proud.

Take away Bautista's back-story, and the teams', and the craziness in the top of the seventh, and the fans and the madness that has swept the city, and the four games that preceded it, and the second half of the season, and the first half of the season, and the 22 seasons before, and the Leafs, and the Leafs' loss to Boston a few years ago, and Wayne Gretzky hauling down Doug Gilmour in 1993, and all of that...and all you have is a home run. A nice home run.

But instead, we have a GREAT MOMENT that won't be forgotten for years and years and years no matter what happens from here on out.

Go Jays Go.

10 Reasons to Put Life on Hold for the Jays

The Go Train doors slide open at the Exhibition stop. Nobody gets on and nobody gets off. A few leaves blow by on the platform, enjoying their temporary freedom. If the two weeks of the CNE marks the end of summer, then surely the windy, vacated Exhibition Go station - crowded and hot just 6 weeks ago - signals the inevitably of fall, and then winter.

For the last two decades, at this time of year, the fall has been the time for Toronto sports fans to turn their attention to hockey and basketball - as painful as that's been for the last two decades. And it's been the time when the non-sports-fans and the non-baseball-fans and the non-Jays-fans have continued to ignore what they've always ignored.

But this year, baseball - the sport of summer - will continue to command attention in this city, for at least another weekend.

Toronto is electric. Jays fans are coming out of the woodwork. And new 'interested-parties' (I won't call them fans, yet) are somewhat reluctantly, or in some cases whole-heartedly, turning their attention to the team.

For those who - like me - live and die with every success and every failure of this team, you already love them as much as I do. But read on if you want to check if we're in sync on the why. For those who find themselves in the uncomfortable position of needing to appear like you're a real fan, read-on to gain some talking points that you can co-opt for your own purposes. And - for those of you who are still stubbornly insisting on not caring - hear me out. Maybe it's time for you to join the rest of the city - and the country - in a love-in that has the potential to give you something you'll remember for a long time.

So, without any further preamble, here are my own personal reasons to put life on hold for the Jays:

1. Baseball is a very relatable sport. (When I say 'sport', I don't mean darts or golf. Sorry.) There are short players and tall players and skinny players and fat players and speedy players and slow players and smart players and not-so-smart players. They aren't hidden behind masks and layers of equipment. They wear stockings, a dumb little hat (which they replace with a dumb hard hat when they bat), and a little glove to prevent blisters when they bat. You could have been a professional baseball player. I could have been a professional baseball player.
2. Baseball is a thinking person's sport. To the casual observer, it may (and does) seem slow. But at every moment in the game there is a showdown between two people...both of whom really, really, really want to succeed. They are trying to out think and outguess each other. They are trying to overpower each other. At any moment either can be a hero or a goat. No lead is ever too big. There isn't a clock that runs out. Just match-up after match-up after match-up - chess played with bats over and over throughout the game. (And, if you're good with a remote, you can watch an entire program on the PVR while watching a baseball game at the same time and not miss a thing on either side).
3. This year's Jays are a team. They went from being a bunch of individuals over the last few years to suddenly and remarkably emerging as a team. If you study team dynamics at work, you can learn a lot from the transition the Jays have gone through. Egos have been checked. Players care about each other. Players support each other. They behave like children. They smile. They laugh. They pick each other up when bad stuff happens. A few individuals joined the Jays this year and seem to have led the transition to a new frame of mind. Not by accident mind you, but through a careful selection process by senior management - chasing great players who are also great people. It seems to have worked, and isn't that good to know?
4. This year's team is a Cinderella story. How can a team be World Series favourites and a Cinderella story, you may ask. Halfway through the season, the team's record was as mediocre as mediocre can be (is it possible to be extremely mediocre?) Then some good stuff happened, some great new pieces were added, and from out of nowhere a comeback worthy of Cinderella was fully underway. The Jays - the downtrodden perennially mediocre team - were suddenly chasing down The Damn Yankees, then overtaking them, then leaving them in their dust.
5. The Jays have it all. They have the best offense in baseball. They have top-5 defenders at almost every single position. They have some of the top pitchers in the league. They've got old grizzled veterans trying to end their careers with a bang. They've got players younger than one or two of my daughters who are trying to start their careers with a bang. 
6. The Jays have Marcus Stroman. He's young. He's a starting pitcher. He's a phenom. He's an underdog - too short to be a professional pitcher. Injured for the season before the season started. He's an optimist. He took the injury in stride and overcame it. And used his rehab time to finish a degree. And if that's not enough, he seems to be the happiest person you'll ever see in your life, with a smile that is infectious. I met Pinball Clemons once in a business meeting. I came away shaking my head about being in the presence of a person who seemed to really understand life and exude pure joy. Marcus Stroman seems to be made of the same stuff. And even if that's not true, why not believe that of him for now?
7. The Jays have Josh Donaldson and Russell Martin and Troy Tulowitzki and Bautista and Encarnacion and, and, and... Top to bottom their players are formidable offensively, great defensively, and yet able to subjugate their own individual games for the overall good of the team. Taking walks when that's the right thing to do. Passing the torch from player to player in the batting order. Tipping each other off on what they learned from their failures in a given at-bat. Sacrificing their own safety to try for an out that will bail out a pitcher. A team of stars and still a team. A team that wears down other teams with a staggering number of clutch performers who could each individually win any given game with a swing of the bat or a defensive gem. There is no weak link in this chain.
8. The Jays Manager is John Gibbons. Talk about the underdog, the downtrodden, the scapegoat, the disrespected... John Gibbons is all of that. Many, MANY people thought/think he's unfit to manage a Major League Team, there because of his friendship with the GM, doing nothing to contribute to wins, and being the reason - every time - for losses. And yet, here he is. Seeming to have a bunch of star players playing as a team, earning their respect, treating them with respect, and getting the most out of everyone. If for no other reason than John Gibbons, you should be cheering for this team's success. Gibbons is an 'every man' who speaks like a character from 'King of the Hill', and is suddenly in the middle of an amazing story.  
9. The Jays defense is absolutely beautiful to watch. If nothing else gets you watching, pay attention to this team's defense. Ballet, gymnastics, athleticism, determination, and sheer grace. In any game you might see a defensive feat that appears superhuman. If you don't believe me, watch the highlight reels from throughout the season. Great offense is exciting. Great defense is beautiful.
10. The Jays have already won. For those of us who have been watching from the start, and over the last few years, all we wanted this year was 'meaningful baseball in September'. We got that and more. The rest is absolute gravy. Even if it's only 3 more games against an equally great team and story (the Texas Rangers) - there's no chance that we can look back at this season and deem it a failure.  AND, the Jays have already beaten out the Yankees and Red Sox and Orioles and Rays. And really, isn't that what matters most?

Looking forward to the upcoming weekend.