TORONTO -- Walking back onto this field, one after the other, the old World Series champions were all 25 years old again.
Saturday wasn’t the first celebration of the 1992-93 teams, who went back-to-back over three decades ago. It won’t be the last, either. Most of them would do this every weekend, if they could. All in town to celebrate the unveiling of the Back-to-Back World Series Statue, they could step back into the best days of their lives.
Joe Carter, leading the group out onto the field after the statue unveiling, couldn’t stop smiling. Has he stopped in the last 32 years?
The moment they stepped back onto the turf, they were ball players again. They looked around in awe, some of them even winding up their arms or joking with one another that it’s time to start stretching, the group of old friends all exchanging a look that said, "I bet I could still do this," even if they know they can’t.
“We sit around and tell a lot of lies,” Carter said, lighting up again. “But you know what? We never talk about baseball now. As we get older, it’s like, ‘How many surgeries have you had? How’s your back? How’s your knee?’ It’s great to see guys like Pat Gillick and Paul Beeston, the nucleus of the team. This is a lot of fun. As we reach that golden age, getting up there to be senior citizens, we relish these moments.”
They’ve all lived other lives since then. Some are grandparents now. Some, like the great Tony Fernandez, have left us too soon. Some have gone into business, others into retirement. But then, they step back on that field.
“It’s like I played with them yesterday,” said Pat Borders, MVP of the 1992 World Series.
Yesterday on one of their buses, Dave Stewart stood up and spoke with the group, reminding them just how important their lives are to one another’s. Those World Series wins last forever, and so do these relationships.
“There’s a brotherhood,” Borders said. “Even if we don’t see each other for a couple of years, or maybe even more than a couple of years, we come back and it’s like you just saw them yesterday. These are true brothers and you have a great love for them.”
From 1992 to ‘93, the Blue Jays completely overhauled their roster, led by general manager Pat Gillick. Longtime big-league star Paul Molitor was brought in for the second run in ‘93, and players with rings already on their fingers rallied around getting him one of his own.
A baseball lifer in every sense, the old player still comes out in Molitor when he remembers that famous Game 6 in 1993. He was standing on first base in the bottom of the ninth, the best view in the house, and he still remembers every detail.
“I got a hit off Mitch Williams and Rickey [Henderson] had walked,” Molitor remembers. “My thought was that, if something happens here, I’m going to be the winning run in the World Series. A double in the gap, maybe a roller down the line. When Joe hit it, it wasn’t a high, majestic homer. It was a line drive. I was thinking that if that ball hits the wall, I’ve got to score…”
None of them will get tired of these stories, and how could they? Carter has told these same stories 100,000 times, and he hopes he’ll be able to tell them 100,000 more. That statue standing outside now, capturing the most famous moment in Blue Jays history, will live there forever.
These fierce competitors soften with time, too. Even the great Dave Stieb, so famous for his piercing glare and a level of competitiveness that often became a monster of its own, found a moment to appreciate this scene between the jokes and jabs.
“This is great. It’s always great to see everybody,” Stieb said. “We share some stories, you see how their personal lives are going now.”
For so long, these teams have represented what’s possible in this city. They’ve had to carry that torch for too long now, and were nearly joined by the 2025 team, but they’re happy to keep carrying it. For them, the World Series years aren’t just videos, famous radio calls and blurry memories. They’re a real thing, and on days like this, they can all step back into the past together.
“We are back in those days,” Borders said.