TORONTO — The Blue Jays have been chasing this moment for 32 years. Since Joe Carter skipped up the first-base line and touched ‘em all, they’ve been trying to climb this mountain again.
For so long, it was too steep. The Blue Jays spent 22 years without even a taste of the postseason, then spent the past decade refamiliarizing themselves with all the ways October can break your heart.
To this day — to this very minute — Carter represents what is possible in this city. Every corner of this country has hosted Carter at a celebrity golf tournament, a fundraiser dinner, an alumni event, you name it. He lights up each time he talks about that home run in 1993. It’s the 10,000th time he’s told the story, but that’s part of the deal. When you win the World Series, you have a story worth telling forever.
He still recites the call from Tom Cheek, radio voice of the Blue Jays from their inaugural game on a snowy day at Exhibition Stadium in 1977 through 2004. Carter always looks up when he tells this story. He’s watching it over in his mind, listening to Cheek.
“Here’s the pitch on the way. A swing and a belt. Left field! Way back! Blue Jays win it! The Blue Jays are World Series champions as Joe Carter hits a three-run home run in the ninth inning and the Blue Jays have repeated as World Series champions. Touch ‘em all, Joe, you’ll never hit a bigger home run in your life!”
Every detail of that inning at SkyDome on the night of Oct. 23, 1993, has become its own trivia question over the years. Who walked to lead off the inning? Rickey Henderson. Who else was on base? Paul Molitor, with a line-drive single to center. What a lineup, rebuilt from the 1992 World Series team as a part of a bold run at back-to-back championships.
What Cito Gaston always remembers, though, as he watched the Phillies’ Mitch Williams deliver that pitch, is all the versions of Joe Carter he’d known before. Carter was already 33 by then, an 11-year veteran in the big leagues with a reputation for doing one specific thing.
“You know what’s amazing about that?” Gaston said at an alumni event years later. “When Joe Carter played for Cleveland, we’d hide in the dugout because Joe would pull the ball so far foul. To this day, I’m very surprised he kept that ball fair. He talks about it, too. He says that the only reason he kept it fair is because he was looking for it … Most of the time, he would pull that ball foul.”
Stepping in, though, Carter wasn’t trying to play hero. He looked at Henderson, looked at Molitor and thought about finding a gap, maybe tying the game with one swing. He could hear Gaston’s voice in his head. Have a plan. Have a plan. Have a plan.
“The last thing on my mind was a home run,” Carter remembered. “Once I got to two strikes, I thought, ‘Sit back, wait, put the ball in play.’ I looked for a breaking ball because of the pitch before, but he came with a fastball down and in. That’s my happy zone. That’s the ‘beware’ zone. I was able to keep it fair, and as they say, the rest is history. Great history.”
Carter has called keeping that ball fair “the biggest accomplishment I have.” That swing from Carter has been frozen in time, one of the greatest moments in baseball history.
Still thinking of Cheek’s famous radio call, Carter always pulls back his memories of those fan tours and caravans they’d do across Canada.
“I asked Tom, ‘What were you thinking when you made that call?’” Carter said at an alumni event. “Tom said to me, ‘You were jumping up and down on the bases and I was telling you to make sure you touched all the bases.’ That’s ironic, because if he remembers, when I got to first base and started jumping, the first thing on my mind was to touch all of the bases. We had that moment there when we were on the same page. Touch all of the bases. I’ve got the proof on all of the film. I touched all of the bases.”
Now, the 2025 Blue Jays are one win away from their own clip we’ll all watch one thousand times. They’re one win away from Dan Shulman delivering those famous words at the final out, from the beloved Buck Martinez talking Canada through those final moments.
These past few weeks, the Blue Jays have rolled out these alumni, the names growing bigger by the series. In Games 1 and 2 of the World Series at Rogers Centre, it was Gaston and Carter, the greatest manager in franchise history and the author of this team’s greatest moment. The 2025 Blue Jays, from Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to Kevin Gausman, Bo Bichette to Max Scherzer, George Springer to Trey Yesavage, all stand in the moment they’ve dreamed of. It’s the same one Carter once could only imagine.
“When I was 6 or 7 years old, I started playing baseball, and that’s what you do in the backyard,” Carter said. “Bases loaded, bottom of the ninth, Game 7 of the World Series. If you’re a basketball player, it’s 3-2-1 for the last shot to win a world championship. You live those dreams. Dreams come true, because I’d thought about that since I was 7 years old. It happened.”
It can happen again. It’s so close to happening again.
