Halloween party planners hustle to add World Series Game 6 to the agenda

TORONTO – When Toronto Blue Jays fans pile into The Cat’s Cradle Sports and Spirits to watch Game 6 of the World Series on Friday night, they may get a little more than they bargained for: namely, fake cockroaches, bloody handprints and severed body parts. 

Owner Barbara MacPhee goes all out for Halloween, turning the midtown sports bar into a scene straight out of “Tales from the Crypt” and hosting karaoke. 

But this year, she has to push all of that back to make room for the bar’s bread and butter. 

“I’m built on Halloween, and my husband is built on sports. So this day is like a mega-amalgamation of him versus me, pretty much,” she quipped. 

MacPhee is among the Torontonians trying to squeeze the matchup between the Jays and the Los Angeles Dodgers into a night already packed with Halloween festivities, from parties to trick-or-treating. 

For MacPhee, that means taking her three kids out from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m., handing out candy from 7 until 8, and then driving to the bar, which she said takes roughly 45 minutes with traffic. After the game, they’ll move back into scheduled spooky programming. 

She just hopes it isn’t another six-and-a-half-hour 18-inning nail-biter.

“The whole day is going to be chaos from top to bottom,” she said.

While MacPhee is carving out a Game 6-sized slot in her schedule, some party planners are taking a subtler approach.

YouTubers The Sorry Girls, who this year are opening up their annual Halloween bash to the public to celebrate the 15th anniversary of their DIY decorating channel, opted to rent a TV to show the game in a quieter room of the venue where the event is being held.

“We had a TV on hold since the Jays entered the World Series. And yesterday I called our event organizer and I was like, ‘Yep, this is happening,'” said producer Nina Pikula. “We want to stream it. We want this to be a part of it because it’s so joyous to us that such a huge milestone for the Jays and for our city coincides with our milestone.”

They’ll have the game on in the “DIY Den,” a room upstairs at the Jarvis Mansion, where guests can make a bracelet or decorate a candle away from the dancing and costume contest.

Despite the tight timeline, some planners have built entire events around the convergence of the holiday and the World Series.

That’s the case for Club Crawlers organizer Prit Vyas, who swiftly set up Boo Jays Halloween Night, a Jays-gear-mandatory party at The Pint House in downtown Toronto, not far from the Rogers Centre. 

He first posted about the game on Tuesday night, before the end of Game 3 when it wasn’t yet clear whether the series would advance to a sixth game.

“We sold about like 10 or 15 tickets before they even won the game. And then once they won officially and we knew that it was going to go to Game 6, then the tickets just started coming in,” he said.

The event swiftly sold out, and he’s anticipating the bar, which has a 350-person capacity, will be packed.

He’ll also be commuting in to the event after trick-or-treating with his kids in the suburbs, but he suggests others leave a little earlier. 

“Halloween’s already crazy as it is,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 30, 2025.