#104. Spontaneous Reunion (Saturday, August 27, 2022)

What was your best day…of reuniting with old friends?

Shohei Ohtani is a generational baseball player. The first player in over a century (i.e. since Babe Ruth) to be both a top-class hitter and a top-class pitcher. I don’t know when the next one like him will come around, but I do know what he’s doing now is being grossly under-related – simply because of how mind-blowingly incomparable it all is.

So yeah, this was the first time I saw Ohtani play in person, as his Angels were playing their one annual series with the Blue Jays in Toronto. But that wasn’t the only good thing.

When I told my plan to come down that weekend to my old university friends Masato Takamura (best friend, #113) and Dennis Bei – both living in the area and whom I hadn’t met in person in nine years¹ (though we did have periodic video calls) – they were both free and hyped as well. Especially Masato, with Ohtani being their national hero and all.

So on Friday, immediately after signing off work at one (we got half-day Fridays in the summer), I head over to take the VIA Rail train for the four-hour ride to Toronto. Once there, I meet Masato at the train station, we grab a quick bite, and we make the short walk to the stadium for the seven p.m. start.

An hour into the game, his wife Mai, whom he just married a year earlier, joins us in our seats behind first base. I’m meeting her for the first time; she is very chill, and I can see right away how they ended up together. (Masato had already told me the story of how they met, which was kind of a funny coincidence that indirectly/unknowingly involved me².)

Throughout the game – which the Jays lose 12-0³ – and the post-game drinks after, Masato and I just converse like old friends who already implicitly know everything about each other, despite only communicating sporadically in the last nine years.

The Saturday game is the big one. Ohtani is pitching (and hitting, of course), while there’s also this big pre-game celebration honoring the 30th anniversary of the 1992 World Series team,⁴ so it’s a full house. And we’ve got an even bigger group there: me, Masato and Mai, Dennis and his roommate, and one of Masato’s other friends. It’s my first time attending a sporting event with such a large group of friends, which feels surreally cool. To add to that feeling, it’s also the same day as the annual Fan Expo in downtown Toronto, so the juxtaposition of cosplayers and baseball fans literally filling up the streets is quite a memorable sight⁵.

Ohtani does his thing as the Jays lose 2-0⁶, but then we’ve got a big get-together planned at Masato’s place. So we make our way through the insanely packed subway, pick up the three extra-large Shawarma pizzas, and get to his basement room where Alejandro (another close friend of ours from Waterloo, who I hadn’t even interacted with in a decade) is already waiting for us.

Initially, we were planning to play Catan or Napoleon like in old times. But instead we just start chatting on about our lives and all matters of random stuff, and once the beer takes hold that alone leads us late into the night and early morning.

During all this, I do take a moment to pause and take in my surroundings. And what strikes me is simply how different this environment – the people, the location, everything – is from what I’d experienced in the past nine years, let alone the past two. Yet at the same time how natural it feels, as if I’d instantly been transported back to ten years earlier as if it was yesterday.

Except here, with a lot more alcohol.⁷

Needless to say, none of us were very good at keeping touch.
The last time I reached out to Masato to meet up, back in 2019 when I was in Toronto for another sporting event, he couldn’t make it because he was volunteering at Anime North that same weekend. In that same conversation he expressed his longing to find a girlfriend. And, well, it was at that very convention where he met Mai.
But I’ve already experienced so much recent Jays hype (#107 and others) at this point, and am so excited about seeing Ohtani, that I don’t really care.
For which a pathetically-small contingent of that team actually show up. Like, literally less than half of the players. Plus, the special Blue Jays bomber jacket they gave out to the first 10,000 through the gate felt like it was made from dollar-store plastic.
Especially after more than two full years of seeing nothing like it anywhere.
Satisfied with my Ohtani fill and not wanting to see the Jays lose again (which they do), on Sunday I go to Wonderland instead to scream my head off on their massive roller coasters – which I also hadn’t done in fifteen years.
What made this reunion even more interesting is that in college, neither Masato or I really drank – him because he his girlfriend at the time wouldn’t let him, and me because I was…sheltered (#106). It was like in our time we away we both belatedly discovered the concept and were now making up for lost time. He went even harder than I did.