The Home Run Jacket, Or Learning How to Celebrate

The Home Run Jacket, or Learning How to Celebrate

By Paddy Johnston

Growing up in England in the 1990s, I went to church on Sundays, but the true religion of my people was football, or what baseball fans will most likely call soccer. Our hymns were football chants, boorish songs sung on hard concrete terraces; our gods were men in short shorts and bright shirts, with mustaches and mullets; we prayed for the gift of golden feet. Football was everywhere, and it was everything.

Football was my first experience of being in a team, and my first experience of being treated with absolute disdain by teammates. Aged about seven or eight, I’d just learned the meaning of the word ‘crap,’ which seems innocuous enough looking back as a man in my early thirties, but at the time felt as devastating as an f-bomb or c-bomb, with all swearing being punishable by the removal of access to the Sega Mega Drive. The first time I heard the word ‘crap’ in the wild was from a teammate when playing football, and not even to my face. Instead, it was whispered behind my back, just loud enough for me to hear, before being followed by cutting laughter. To be crap at football was to be crap at life, to be crap at being, to be just, well, crap. Completely crap.

Team sports were tarnished for me from that moment on, and it wasn’t until decades later that I was able to admit to myself that playing in a team didn’t have to be an exercise in the aggressive denigration of peers, in motivating people to succeed in a shared goal through endless stick and no carrot (carrots being, presumably, for soft wankers who can’t kick). It was baseball that showed me things could be different.

I have Peanuts comics to thank for this, in large part. We had a lot of them lying around the house when I was a kid, and this was where the foundation of my baseball knowledge came from. Charlie Brown’s struggles on the mound were something I could relate to directly, and his verbal assaults from Lucy were reminiscent of the ones I’d endured in the playground when attempting to kick the football or stop it from ending up in the goal. I fixated on them, of course, empathizing with Charlie Brown as everyone does, but I also, somewhere deep in my mind, took note of the rest of Charlie Brown’s teammates. Most importantly, the pep talks he received from Schroeder as his catcher and Linus as his second baseman and statistician were more towards gentle encouragement and support, if not as overtly positive in their content as the coaching of today’s Ted Lasso. Somewhere in my mind, the seed of baseball as a fun sport that might be for me was planted by Charles M. Schulz. It took quite a while for it to grow into a tree, however.

The other things that drew me into baseball as an English fan were the aesthetics, the history, the endless stories, and the distance it had from my own experience and that of my peers. But I also appreciated the struggle of the individual within the team, and one of the things I loved the most about watching baseball as a new fan of the game, when I started watching it out of curiosity around a decade ago, was watching teams celebrate. You don’t need to know what the infield fly rule is to enjoy a team running out of the dugout to pour Gatorade over the head of the rookie who just hit his first walk-off home run, or know how many career saves a closer has when you see him hug the catcher after getting the final strikeout of the game. These are some of my favorite baseball moments, and some of the things that watered that seed, fighting off the demon of childhood sports trauma and letting the tree grow.

I started following the Blue Jays when I got into baseball because I’d had a pennant of theirs on my wall as a child. My dad worked in sports PR for a while, and he’d come by the pennant through work somehow and stuck it there in my room. I never connected it with football; it was something else entirely, and it was lost in a house move a few years later, but it also planted a seed of fandom. As a Blue Jays fan, some years later when Jose Bautista did his Bat Flip for the Ages, I watched with absolute unbridled joy as the stadium erupted. But my eyes were on his teammates and not on the fans. The channeling of such overwhelming emotion into this positivity and joy was something I knew I’d never found in football and had always wanted, but that I finally found in baseball.

Every sport has celebration, of course, but as a baseball fan it’s something I’ve connected with on many levels, and it’s helped me on the journey of self-acceptance and of acceptance of others. I pitch on a baseball team here in England now, and I love all my teammates with the joyful, celebratory love that comes with sharing team goals.

What prompted me to write this essay, however, is the 2021 Blue Jays’ home run jacket.

Whenever a Blue Jay hits a home run, this blazer decorated with their logo along with all the nations their teammates come from is placed on their shoulders when they return to the dugout. Seeing the team celebrate all their home countries is a welcome sight to a baseball fan from outside the US, and a nicely performative gesture of inclusion that’s served to increase my feeling of being included in sports in general as I’ve watched the Blue Jays this season. Baseball may be an American sport, but watching Canada’s only MLB team celebrate its players’ heritage in this way has shown me that baseball is for everyone, wherever you are in the world.

The joy on the Blue Jays’ faces when wearing the jacket, or bestowing it on a teammate, is boyish and pure, and it’s been my favorite thing this season. You’re always on a journey as a baseball fan, but the home run jacket has shown me how far I’ve come, as all I see now in sport is joy, celebration, and the uplifting of teammates, and I have baseball to thank for that.

Paddy Johnston is a writer, musician, comics publisher and podcaster based in Surrey, UK. He is passionate about baseball and promoting baseball in the UK.

Sam Williams is a cartoonist, comics publisher and baseball enthusiast based in Bournemouth, UK.

Paddy and Sam co-founded the UK indie press Good Comics in 2015 and continue to run Good Comics along with Rozi Hathaway, as well as writing and illustrating the personal essay newsletter Stealing Home, which focuses on telling personal stories about baseball.

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