Execute Order 66

How Cody Ponce's jersey number will get him through the darkness

Hi everybody and a very pleasant morning to you, wherever you may be.

Homecoming

On Monday evening, I attended my first Blue Jays game of the season, the first time I had walked through those doors since last October when I stayed until the wee hours of the morning for the 18-inning Game 3 watch party with the very same friends. Opening week always brings a fresh excitement with it, and walking through the skywalk to the ballpark surrounded by thousands of Blue Jays fans felt like I was coming home again. The Blue Jays did a phenomenal job with the concourse upgrades with memorabilia from the team’s history at nearly every section of the 100 level. As my friends and I took a stroll through the concourse, we were filled with excitement for the beating that the Blue Jays were going to put on the Colorado Rockies, the same team that lost 119 games last season.

Unfortunately, the Blue Jays forgot how to play baseball that night. By the time we left our seats to catch the early train home, they were losing the game 14-1 and backup catcher Tyler Heinemann had already been trotted out as the sacrificial lamb that would close out the brutal 8th inning.

As we wandered around the concourse before the game began, watching the Rockies take batting practice, we each made predictions on how we thought Cody Ponce would perform. Funnily enough, all four of us said “six strikeouts” at the same time and laughed at how similar our minds worked. There is a reason we’re all friends, I suppose. While we all agreed on the strikeout total, all of us decided to choose different innings predictions to keep it interesting. I went with 5 innings pitched, one friend went with 6, another went with 7 and the last buddy went with 5.2 just to be a clever pain in the butt.

Routine Ground Balls

Well, despite all our optimism, Cody Ponce didn’t make it that far. After coming out strong in the first 2.1 innings — striking out three batters on 47 pitches — Ponce ran to field a grounder towards first hit by Jake McCarthy, bobbled the ball, buckled on his right knee and collapsed on the infield dirt. At first, we all thought he would be fine as he just slipped off the mound a few pitches earlier for a balk and laughed it off, but once we saw the emergency cart coming out from the outfield, we knew there was a disturbance in the force.

The man who chose number 66 as a partial tribute to Order 66 — the darkest moment in Star Wars — didn’t know yet how fitting that choice would end up being.

The initial diagnosis is an ACL sprain, but given that most reporters are indicating he'll miss the season, the reality is almost certainly a tear, which is devastating news for Ponce and for the Blue Jays.

His story has been told many times but for those unaware, Cody Ponce initially came up to the majors with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2020. He was serviceable in his first season but dreadful in 2021, going 0-6 with a 7.04 ERA over 38.1 innings pitched. He left for Japan in 2022, signing with the Nippon-Ham Fighters, and began quietly reinventing himself.

Then, in 2025 with the Hanwha Eagles of the Korean Baseball Organization, the reinvention became something closer to legend. He went 17-1 with a 1.89 ERA, 252 strikeouts over 182 innings, the pitching Triple Crown, and the league MVP award. The Blue Jays signed him this offseason and he looked every bit as sharp as advertised in spring training. He was supposed to be an answer. He was supposed to be one of the good stories that we would follow throughout 2026.

I can’t imagine spending four years away from the country you grew up in, reinventing yourself from the ground up, and finally earning a miraculous return to the league you once dreamed of playing in only to have it ripped away within three innings of stepping back onto a major-league mound. It just goes to show that sometimes, you can do everything right. You can make every sacrifice, endure every setback, do the work no one sees — and still fall down.

There’s a particular kind of grief that comes with watching someone fall at the exact moment they were supposed to fly. Not the slow, predictable decline of a career winding down on its own terms, but the sharp, senseless interruption — the grounder that takes a bad hop, the knee that gives at exactly the wrong time. We all watched Ponce go down on Monday night, and for a few seconds the Rogers Centre went quiet in that particular way stadiums do when everyone in the building understands that something has just gone horribly wrong.

What stayed with me, though, wasn’t the fall. It was what came after.

He Tipped His Cap

Ponce was loaded onto the cart and as he was driven off with a look of disappointment on his face, he still managed to tip his hat to the crowd to signal that everything would be okay. And then he disappeared through the left field gate, into whatever comes next.

I’ve been thinking about that gesture all week. It wasn’t resignation. It wasn’t performance. It was a man telling 42,000 people, without a single word, that he had already been through worse than this, and he knew it. A man who had crossed an ocean at rock bottom, who had reinvented himself pitch by pitch in front of crowds who didn’t speak his language, who had come back when no one was asking him to — that man knows something about falling down and standing back up that the rest of us are still learning.

Baseball has a way of compressing the whole human experience into a single inning. Joy and devastation, sometimes within the same at-bat. What Ponce’s story reminds us — what the best baseball stories always remind us — is that the journey back is rarely linear, and the destination is rarely what we imagined when we started walking. He didn’t set out to become a KBO legend. He just refused to stop. And that refusal, over four years and two countries, turned a 7.04 ERA into something approaching myth.

The Galaxy Goes Dark Before The Return

The road back from a torn ACL in your thirties is long and brutal and unglamorous. I have some friends who have torn their ACLs recently and they are never quite the same and we’re just regular human beings, not pro athletes. There will be dark days in the training room, days when the knee doesn’t cooperate, days when the mound feels very far away. But Cody Ponce has already proven he knows how to survive dark days. He’s already proven he knows how to find a way back when every door in front of him is closed.

We’ve all had our 7.04 ERA seasons. We’ve all had moments where the thing we worked hardest for slipped through our hands at exactly the wrong time, where the grounder took a bad bounce, where the knee gave out. We have all had moments where we felt like there was absolutely no chance we would get back to the place where we wanted to be. But the question was never whether we’d fall. The question is always whether we have enough left in us to wave at the crowd, ride the cart off the field, and start figuring out how to come back.

Cody Ponce already answered that question four years ago, in Japan, when nobody was watching. And here’s what gives me genuine optimism: he might answer it again sooner than anyone expects. Remember when a pitcher whose height didn’t measure heart tore his ACL in spring training and came back for a miraculous postseason run that same year? Marcus Stroman showed us that the timeline doesn’t always have to look the way the doctors say it will.

Which brings me to the number on Ponce’s jersey. He chose #66 as a nod to Order 66, the moment in Revenge of the Sith when the Emperor’s command nearly wiped out the Jedi entirely. It was supposed to be the end. The galaxy went dark. And yet, as any Star Wars fan knows, it wasn’t the end at all. It was just the part of the story before the return.

Yoda said it best: “The greatest teacher, failure is. We are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters.”