Sportsnet analyst Caleb Joseph: ‘It’s gonna sound like sour grapes … I think the better team did not win this series’

From a purely neutral perspective, neither team deserved to lose Saturday night’s Game 7 of the World Series. Both the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays made several would-be championship-defining plays throughout the course of the 11-inning thriller, not to mention throughout the course of the entire series.

But one team had to lose, and unfortunately for Toronto fans (and Canadian baseball fans generally), Saturday was not their day. Any fan would’ve been devastated losing a Game 7 in such fashion, especially after waiting decades since their last opportunity. So when it was time for Caleb Joseph, a former Blue Jay and analyst for Sportsnet’s coverage of the World Series in Canada, to come on the air and set the scene for a Canadian audience after such a tough loss, he decided not to hold back.

“It’s going to sound like sour grapes, and I don’t really give a shit, but I think the better team did not win this series,” Joseph said. “And I think the Blue Jays are the better team. And I feel like they played baseball in a certain way that was infectious, that grabbed the attention of the fans. And it’s disheartening to see that the better team did not win. And that’s not to take anything away from the Dodgers, but the Blue Jays, they did so many things correct. They did so many things right.”

Now, it’s more than fair to say that this is, by definition, sour grapes from Joseph here. But let’s remember who he’s speaking to. The vast majority of folks watching the Sportsnet broadcast would have been rooting for the Blue Jays. While it was technically a national broadcast, the Blue Jays are Canada’s team, and Sportsnet serves as the club’s de facto local network. There were probably a lot of fans who felt the same way as Joseph did in that moment, and he was able to capture that feeling and translate it to words.

Does that mean the Blue Jays were actually the better team? That’s not really up for debate. The Dodgers took home the World Series. But that doesn’t mean Joseph wasn’t justified in saying what he said. In a series like that, with so much back-and-forth, so many memorable moments, and such a fine margin between winning and losing, it’s more than fair to show a little favoritism when you’re an analyst on what is essentially the home broadcast. If this were Ken Rosenthal saying this on Fox, it’d be a much different story.

But this is what sports are all about. So credit to Joseph for not censoring himself after the most important game the franchise had played since the ’90s. I’m sure the Sportsnet audience had no issues with what he said.