Whit Merrifield shares the story behind the 2023 Blue Jays player’s anthem

Being the weirdo I am, I wanted to go even further down the rabbit hole. I spoke with Merrifield about why they chose the team’s de facto lefty reliever as the subject for this chant, how it started and how it brought that 2023 team closer together.

A favourite game of the 2023 Blue Jays to play off the field was “Mafia”. It’s a common game played in the minor leagues, but the Blue Jays needed something to pass the time on the bus as they travelled to and from the airport, so Mafia became the go-to.

The game starts with a narrator. Everyone else on the bus puts their heads down, and the narrator picks six members of the mafia. It’s then up to everyone else, the “townspeople,” to discern who is part of the mafia. If all the mafia are eliminated by the end of the game, the townspeople win. But if the mafia is the majority, they win.

Without fail, every time the Blue Jays played Mafia, they voted Tim Mayza off. Why Mayza, you ask? Well, he was an easy target according to his teammates.

“Tim’s just kind of the team punching bag,” Merrifield told Blue Jays Nation in a recent interview. “Everybody makes fun of Tim. The first round, once everybody in the mafia is assigned, the first time everybody picks their head up and starts deliberating, everybody just instantly agrees that Tim’s in the mafia and he’s got to die.

“That would always frustrate Tim, and the more upset he got about that, the more likely we were going to do it again the next time.”

No matter what Mayza did, he was killed off by his teammates time and time again. He tried to use that as leverage by convincing his cohorts he wasn’t part of the mafia, but nobody ever believed him. They trudged on, taking Mayza out of the game, week after week after week.

Despite his knack for being the sacrificial lamb for these games, Mayza was beloved in the Blue Jays clubhouse. He took a long and winding road to get to the majors in 2017, but he spent the next six seasons with the Blue Jays before being released late last June. He was one of the last holdovers of the Blue Jays’ old regime and forged a lot of bonds not only with players but with the coaches in the organization. That’s why guys like Merrifield wax poetic about Mayza.

“Tim’s one of my favourite teammates ever,” Merrifield said. “He’s one of the most genuine people you’ll ever meet. He’s one of the nicer guys. One of the hardest-working guys, he cares more than anybody. And he’s the ultimate teammate. I can’t say enough good things about him.

“But at the same time, Tim was the consummate rule-follower. He is the guy that if you were at school and snuck in two minutes late to class, he’d raise his hand and tell the teacher you were late to class.”

Although he was one of the elder statesmen of the club, Mayza had the personality of the younger brother of the family, which made for a fun dynamic with the team.

Now we know about why Mayza was the target, but how did it morph into a song which fans witnessed once the Blue Jays clinched their 2023 Wild Card berth? It all happened during a tumultuous landing in Boston ahead of a series with the Red Sox.

“From what we were told, it was really foggy that night,” Merrifield said. “As we were going to land, the fog got super dense, so they had to bank up really quickly because they couldn’t see the runway. It was almost a 90-degree bank up, and it was really scary, which I had never encountered.”

20 minutes later, the pilot tried to land the plane again, but once again, had to pull up due to the dense fog on the runway. But the second time, the players were familiar with what was going on, so they had some fun with it.

“This time, half of us were feeling better about the situation while the other half still hated flying, and Tim was one of them,” Merrifield said. “We had the song playing and we all together just started chanting, ‘Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim is gonna die,’ standing up on the seat, smacking the overhead bins and just being stupid.”

While players like Mayza were curled up in the fetal position, praying for a safe landing, Romano, another player who hated flying, was sitting silently as several Blue Jays acted like hooligans in the face of danger.

“It was a great moment,” Merrifield said. “It’s hard to put into words how much fun that was and how funny at the time it was yelling that Tim was gonna die as we’re doing this emergency manoeuvre. That’s a little insight into what it’s like on a big-league plane. The rules kind of go out the window, and you just do what you want.”

On the third attempt, the pilot successfully landed the plane and the Blue Jays safely rolled into Boston, but not before their harrowing in-flight experience for some, but a true bonding moment for others.

Merrifield mentioned that Blue Jays third baseman Matt Chapman believed it was a signature moment for the team and that what happened on that fateful flight would propel them to a world championship.

Many outsiders point to the “team nap” in between the doubleheader in Washington from June 2, 2015, that brought that 2015 Blue Jays team together. They were 23-30 after losing the first game of that doubleheader, then won the second game and went 69-39 the rest of the season. In actuality, teams like the Blue Jays don’t pinpoint manufactured stories like that as their “we’re winning the World Series” moment. These often happen behind closed doors, or in this case, on a team charter with a plane banking up on a steep incline and INXS blaring from a speaker, while others pray for their safety.

“From a media standpoint, I get it; you guys are bored over 162, there’s not a lot of stuff to talk about,” Merrifield said. “It’s not a big deal; those things are kind of corny, stupid things that people in the media like to make a huge deal out of. It’s cute and it’s a good story, but that’s just part of being on a team for seven months out of the year.”

That’s the byproduct of spending eight months of the year with your co-workers, day in and day out. You’re seeing these people more often than your family, so you’d better get along with them; otherwise, it makes for an incredibly long baseball season.

Merrifield said he loved the energy of the 2023 Blue Jays, but unfortunately, they didn’t finish the job of winning that World Series title.

“When stuff like that happens, it usually brings the team closer together,” Merrifield said. “Usually, you do stuff like that when you have a close-knit team. We did have a close-knit team. We thought we could get it all to click, but it just didn’t happen that way.”