The Blue Jays lost miserably. Why is the franchise taking it so lightly?

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What struck you most after the Toronto Blue Jays had just experienced the most miserable loss in the 46-year history of the franchise was the ease.

No one speaking on behalf of the team seemed that upset. They certainly weren’t worried. Seven months ago, they were talking about trailers and movies and just you wait. Now that things had come down in a four-inning landslide and wiped out the 2022 season, everyone was just fine.

“Aw, you know,” manager John Schneider said. “The post-season is great and the post-season sucks.”

Schneider is an interim manager. When he took over the Jays, they were in a wild-card spot. They finished the year in a wild-card spot. It wasn’t exactly a turnaround for the ages.

Schneider, a de facto temp, has only one highlight on his quarterly self-assessment – that he was in charge when the team coughed up the biggest road comeback in major-league post-season history.

Some managers in that situation might be worried. Some managers might be at pains to show contrition or explain what happened or take the burden of fault on themselves in order to shield their players.

Not Schneider. Smiling ruefully, he told reporters that he will get over this by “taking a vacation or two.”

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While you’re sitting there listening to this, you’re trying to imagine how a world-class sports organization would react. Say, the Los Angeles Dodgers or the Pittsburgh Steelers or Real Madrid.

I can’t say for sure what the coach of those teams would say after that bad a loss in that big a game. But he probably wouldn’t be talking about going to Cabo for a week to unwind. He’d probably be re-interviewing for his job in real time.

He’d know that turning an 8-1 lead into a 10-9 loss in the last game of the year is the mathematical formula equalling unemployment.

But Schneider knew he didn’t have to do that. Because he works in Toronto. And in Toronto, losing doesn’t matter.

Somehow, while no one was paying attention, this city’s sports revival has become a sports rest home. Always inclusive, Toronto has created a safe space where everyone can be themselves. Even if who they are is someone who is not successful at their job.

This attitude started with the Leafs, extended to the post-championship Raptors and has now taken visible root in the Blue Jays.

With small wrinkles, it’s the same in every case: talk big in the pre-season; make sure to praise the city and its fans to the sky; refuse to make concrete predictions; achieve measured regular-season success; over-celebrate the small, meaningless wins; pump the brakes hard going into the post-season; talk a lot about sustainable growth; lose in the first round; pat each other on the back for learning so much; change nothing; do the exact same thing in the exact same way again.

Every Toronto team does win one thing every season – the Forbes list.

Ten years ago, Forbes valued the Raptors at US$380-million. Today, the same outlet pegs them at just short of US$2.5-billion.

The 2019 championship helped, but it isn’t the reason why the team doubles in value every other year. On-court/field/ice performance has become untethered from the sports business. Get eyeballs on your team and you are winning in the only way that counts. Toronto does that better than just about any market in the world. We love a happy loser.

The buildings are full. The merch is getting hoovered off shelves. The bulk of sports media is owned by the teams, so the conversation about them is omnipresent. Even when the teams are bad, they’re creating a virtuous circle of content.

The owners of the three major local teams are a co-mingled corporate entity. Like any corporation, they make measured decisions. So measured that they avoid making decisions at all. It’s easier to let a failed coach or GM stay in the job than it is to call the board meeting necessary to replace him.

Corporations can be roused to rash action by competition within their own markets, but there is none of that in Toronto. If the Raptors win, Rogers wins. Is it really going to be upset if the Jays don’t win, too? If nobody wins then everyone’s equal. How can any publicly traded parent choose between their many beautiful, profitable children?

In fact, from a purely business perspective, having all your teams win at once is a bad thing. Why oversaturate the market? Better to let each team have its moment to shine.

These past couple of years were supposed to be the Leafs’ moment, but they can’t manage it. Oh well. Let the Jays get good instead. They’re not good? Oh well. Maybe the Raptors can do something interesting. They can’t? Oh well. Let’s give the Leafs another shot.

None of the people at the very top of the pyramid want to lose, but it’s not as if they’re lying awake at night worrying about it.

As a result, everyone who works for them has gotten the message – winning is good, but losing is okay, too. Even if you screwed up. Even if you screw up over and over again. Just don’t embarrass anyone. Don’t say anything stupid. Keep things steady and everything will be fine.

It’s fine because you’re also working on a stadium refurbishment and that’s the thing your corporate bosses really care about. They’re not going to screw that up because some guy way down the organization chart who was working the long weekend didn’t have the sense to let your hundred-million-dollar free-agent starter throw to one more guy.

The fans? The fans will get over it. They always have. This isn’t New York, thank god. New York, where failed expectations have consequences – what a headache that must be.

What we have created in Toronto is the ideal environment for people who own sports teams: minimal pressure, maximum profit, endless mulligans.

The key is never reacting to bad news. All bad news is actually good news: “We learned so much [by screwing things up again].” Keep repeating that mantra and trust that once every few decades, the roulette wheel will land on a winner. If it doesn’t, so what? What are they going to do? Stop showing up? Find a new hobby? As if.

In Toronto, everybody wins, even when they’re losing. It’s a brave, new sporting world. The only people who can be disappointed are the ones who tell themselves that it will be different the next time around.