The Sunday Magazine12:16Former Blue Jays World Series hero Joe Carter goes to bat for today’s Jays as they try to win it all
Nearly 32 years after Joe Carter hit his historic home run to win the 1993 World Series for the Toronto Blue Jays, the baseball legend believes the current team has what it takes to win it all.
“They have the guys who can do it. And I’m betting my money on them right now,” Carter told The Sunday Magazine host Piya Chattopadhyay.
The Blue Jays lead the New York Yankees two games to none in the best of five American League Division Series (ALDS), with both wins coming in convincing fashion in Toronto. The Jays have a chance to advance to the American League Championship Series (ALCS) with a win in Game 3 in New York on Tuesday.
But before the season started, few — if any — had the Jays down for a run at the World Series. The team had a disappointing 2024, finishing with the worst record in the division, missing out on playoffs.
Carter played for the Blue Jays from 1991 to 1997. He helped the team win back-to-back World Series championship titles, which included an iconic walk-off home run in ’93 to seal the deal.
Despite currently living in the U.S., Carter is rooting for Toronto as the playoffs unfold. But if the Jays are to conquer baseball playoffs this season, he does have a small stipulation on how he wants them to win.
Here’s part of his conversation with Chattopadhyay.
What explains how well the Jays have played this year, despite all the predictions?
The thing that has turned the team around is that they have the cohesiveness and the camaraderie. What I saw last year, a lot of people … didn’t have the pitching, they weren’t getting the timely hitting, they weren’t doing anything. And they finished in dead last. And so it just snowballed.
But now this year, [I was] talking to the guys like George Springer, and he says, you know what, it’s fun to come to the ballpark. They look forward to going to the ballpark.
And it’s not just one guy carrying that team. It’s not [just Vladimir Guerrero Jr.] you know, Bo Bichette gets hurt, and so other guys step up. You have Ernie Clement stepping up. I mean, you just go on and on.
Everybody is picking everybody up and that’s what you have to do. One or two guys cannot carry a ball club. You have to have everybody cheering for one another, pulling for one another and believing in one another.
And that is what they’re doing. They’re having a lot of fun coming to the ballpark, and it’s a different guy every single game.
No matter how far the Jays go in this postseason, they’ll be facing an American team. This is a battle of Canada versus the U.S.
You know that there are heightened political tensions between our two countries right now. How are you thinking about that part of the dynamic?
That’s a different story. Our politics here in the U.S., for a lot of us, it’s really embarrassing. But I can go to that Canadian side and have a lot of fun. And that’s what I’m going to do and do it faithfully: pulling for the Blue Jays, because I think this is their time.
I gave them just one criteria for them winning the World Series. They can win the World Series, they just can’t hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth to win the whole thing. That was it.
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I don’t know if you call that selfish, but I’ve had it for 32 years. I’d like to keep that thing because, it’s like you say, you hit a home run like that — and not just in Toronto, but in all of Canada, from the East Coast to the West Coast, it was for our whole country.
And man, that is so exciting. And I’m very proud that happened. And I’m very proud to be one of the ambassadors of Canada, just because I hit a little ball out of the ball park at a big moment.
Did you understand at that time what that moment meant, not just for Blue Jays fans here in Toronto, but across Canada and beyond?
At the moment, I knew that it was big, but 32 years later, I did not realize it was that big at that moment.
Playing in the World Series and the whole season, it’s a long year. And so if you go from ’91 when we got to the ALCS and then ’92, winning the World Series and then ’93, we had played a lot of games and we were exhausted.
And so hitting that home run, it was like, OK, now I can go home and relax and just kind of take some time off and give your body a chance to heal.
But I didn’t realize at that time how big it was. But like I say now, when I come back for my golf tournament, if I go to a Raptors game and they introduce me, it’s like a standing ovation. The fans go wild.
So, you know, I see the significance of it. And you know those are the things you live for in baseball. Because when you’re retired, most people have that one moment. And my one moment was a pretty big moment. And so I think the Canadians will love me for the rest of my life.
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