Vlad Guerrero honored a gay sports icon with his choice of pregame attire

Welcome back to the last Talkin’ Gaysball of 2025 where we’re desperately googling to try and manifest a recording of “OK Blue Jays” covered by Leonard Cohen…

Seeing the footage my colleague Cyd Zeigler posted of the Gym Bar gays celebrating the Dodgers miraculous World Series victory did my heart a world of good.

Thanks to all of my sense memories of the 2016 Cubs, I strongly empathized with every emotional swing of near-catatonia inducing agony and dopamine explosion-fueled ecstasy that Game 7 brought. Even nine years later, I still can’t believe that “ecstasy” gets to be part of that sentence.

It was genuinely wonderful to see so many gays get to experience what makes baseball so sublime and savor the ultimate reward of being a fan of the sport, even if just for one unforgettable night.

As for Your Friendly Neighborhood Baseball Gay? As you might have gleaned from how I phrased my Series prediction, my heart was with Team Canada. And perhaps the best way to sum up why I was rooting for the Blue Jays was with a Game 7 image of their superstar Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

Get off the sidelines and into the game

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It was a marvelous Fall Classic for All Stars. On the one hand, I was thrilled that a full-power Shohei Ohtani got to put his signature on this World Series. Then Yoshinobu Yamamoto established himself as an October pitching name to dread alongside Orlando “El Duque” Hernández and Madison Bumgarner and that was also incredible.

But the most emotionally satisfying thing about this postseason was seeing Guerrero announce over and over again that he was stepping into his transcendent era and there was nothing anybody could do to stop it.

With the pedigree and pressure of a Hall of Fame father who shares his name, Guerrero spent his first seven years with the Blue Jays oscillating between brilliance and underperformance. Even at his best, there was always an underlying sense that he had not fully arrived.

Then the calendar flipped to October 2025 and it was as if every game was another opportunity for Guerrero to proclaim “This is who I am and it is GLORIOUS.” His stats were otherworldly: a .397 batting average, eight home runs, and a 1.289 OPS.

Vladito was such a wrecking ball, Miley Cyrus should’ve been swinging from his Baseball Reference headshot.

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But it wasn’t just the numbers. Guerrero went about dominating each game with the kind of pure joy and unbridled emotion that no one could ignore.

The pause and shushing gesture in his home run trot between second and third base as if to say “You need a moment to properly admire that one so I’m going to stop time for a couple seconds.” The headfirst dive into home plate like he was hoping to score an extra run if the judges gave him 10s across the board.

And especially the “Hope your widescreen is wide enough for this” smile he gave the TV cameras in Game 5 like he decided to create a new baseball GIF in real time.

This was Guerrero’s October and I genuinely wanted to see him get rewarded for it. Then when it all came down to Game 7 and everything was all on the line for the Blue Jays on Saturday night, whose jersey did Guerrero wear when he arrived at Rogers Centre?

Marie-Philip Poulin.

As he was mentally preparing to play the biggest game of his life, Guerrero chose to celebrate one of Canada’s biggest legends from Team LGBTQ.

With three Olympic gold medals and four world championships, Poulin’s name is associated with winning like few others in her sport’s history. Known as “Captain Clutch” after scoring the game-winning goal in three Olympic finals, the Team Canada captain married teammate Laura Stacey last year.

While playing a postseason for the ages and representing an entire country, Guerrero knew that all eyes would be on him when he arrived for Game 7. And when that happened, he wanted to have Poulin’s name on his back.

If this particular baseball gay was writing the script, Guerrero would’ve channeled Poulin and Captain Clutched the Jays to their first World Series title in 32 years.

Alas, it ended with Vladito in tears.

As a fan of decades of Cubs teams prior to 2016, I have a PhD in this feeling. So in the wake of that absolute nightmare of a loss, I can say this…

The legendary sportswriter Roger Kahn once wrote “You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat.” There is no better way than that to sum up what happened between Guerrero and baseball fans this October.

Wearing a Poulin sweater only served to cement that love. While Guerrero didn’t get to hoist the trophy, I will remember both that this was the time that he arrived as a name-above-the-title baseball star and who he chose to elevate in that same moment.

I trust I’m not alone in this. Especially in Canada.

And the next time Guerrero and the Blue Jays make the postseason, he’ll have a legion of fans rooting for him to finish the job — so that he can be the kind of winner who inspires future generations to wear his jersey before the biggest game of their lives too.

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