Intro for November 3, 2025

Dear Gossips,    

Anyone in Canada who’s been following the Toronto Blue Jays this season will tell you that it wasn’t just their play on the diamond that made them so popular. It was also the way they played in the dugout, in the locker room, during interviews… 

Of course fans would have supported any team, but this team was extra-special. As I wrote last week, it was the charm factor – a group of ragtag silly misfits whose brand identity is decidedly UN-sophisticated playing, cracking us up almost every day with their goofy, sometimes corny, and always chaotic antics. And, most importantly, they love each other SO much. That, really, is the X-factor: team chemistry that can’t be manufactured, so intoxicating that together, truly, they became more than the sum of their parts. 

Which is also how ARMY would describe BTS. Those of us who’ve been here could see the crossover. For those of you who aren’t familiar, the Jays have given me a new way to explain BTS. Like the Jays, who were more than strikes and bases and homeruns, BTS is more than music and choreo. Any ARMY will tell you that the hook for BTS is their personalities – and specifically how they interact with each other, it’s the culture of love that they built together, that started privately, between them, in the rehearsal room, their joint apartment, in the recording studio, and then extended to include their fans. 

As they became more successful through their careers, just like the Jays this season started winning more and more and more, they only got closer but didn’t change their behaviour. They’d come offstage at an award show and livestream themselves putting on pimple patches, piled up on a couch on top of each other, giggling, sometimes tipsy, ordering room service like a group of unsupervised kids taking advantage of their parents leaving them at home without a babysitter. 

Even now, as global superstars, they’re still having water fights on stage during a major concert. 

That happened this past weekend as Jin played two solo shows in Korea to close out his tour, bringing in j-hope and Jungkook on Friday and Jimin and V on Saturday. Jimin and V also livestreamed together the other day and casually dropped a major piece of news:

So the new album is done. They’re now working on the video and other visuals. They’re on schedule to release either the lead single or the full album by the end of March. And industry reports are that a massive world tour will happen between May and December.

Interestingly there’s a connection here to between the Blue Jays and BTS. A friend sent me this quote yesterday as we were going back and forth with pride and sadness about the game on Saturday. This is what A Bartlett Giamatti, former MLB commissioner (and father of Paul, the actor), wrote about the game in his book of essays, A Great and Glorious Game: 

“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

“Spring Day” is arguably BTS’s signature song, a song about missing your friends, enduring a winter of loss, longing, and separation before the spring of reunion. ARMY has been waiting for a new spring day with the band for three years. The end of March is also when baseball comes back, the Jays’ home opener is on March 26. So both BTS and Blue Jays will return at the same time. 

Yours in gossip, 

Lainey