National Post (National Edition)
Jays unlikely to play in Toronto this season, but play they should
Border crossing an issue if MLB has a season
This is all but certain: There will be no Blue Jays games in Toronto this Major League Baseball season.
Assuming there is, in fact, a baseball season.
While MLB works feverishly to get the game on the field for an abbreviated 81-game season starting in July, the Blue Jays will play their games, like all teams, in stadiums without fans.
Just not in their home park, not here in Toronto, which remains the preferred home of Blue Jays management and ownership.
There are two rather obvious reasons why you can’t play games at the Rogers Centre in downtown Toronto, even without fans in attendance. One, the border isn’t open to the United States yet and in listening to Dr. Theresa Tam, the chief public health officer of Canada, it’s unlikely to open soon. At the same time, the 14-day quarantine rules remain and will for some time, so how can any American team enter Canada for a three-game weekend series in July, for example?
This isn’t just a problem for baseball and Canada. This is a problem for the NBA and the Raptors, possibly for the Maple Leafs and the NHL.
And all of that means Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro is extraordinarily busy these days — much more so than his baseball brethren in the U.S. who don’t have to plan to pick up and move their operations elsewhere to play this half-season of ball.
“Toronto is preferred,” Shapiro said Tuesday via email, knowing the odds are stacked against him. “If not Toronto, then most likely Dunedin. Unless there is an alternate plan for MLB with central locations.”
That doesn’t seem the way baseball is thinking or selling this apparent comeback.
Last season, in a down year, the Blue Jays still sold more than $100 million worth of tickets. If you go back to 2016, when Jays fans were packing the Rogers Centre, they were generating more than $200 million in ticket revenue alone. With a payroll of slightly over US$105 million, the Jays will have to pay half of that out for half a season of work. So there’s a payroll of $53 million for 41 home games juxtaposed with zero revenue in ticket sales.
“There is no scenario where we do not lose a lot of money this year,” Shapiro said. “All 30 teams are in the same spot (although, expenses for moving the Blue Jays south for the season are greater than anyone else in baseball). We have not booked any revenue and have still incurred a lot of expenses.
“Now, it’s important to play for reasons beyond revenue and the opportunity baseball can provide to help provide a positive outlet on the path back.”
If baseball and its players can stop fighting for just a moment and take an honest look at the rest of the world, the players would realize how fortunate they are to be getting paid to play in empty stadiums. This isn’t about bringing in a salary cap, which players wildly oppose and probably should, this is about this one season, a season unlike any other, and adjusting because of it. A shortterm fix of sorts.
The owners are going to take a beating in operating this summer no matter what. The players should get half the pay coming to them. In these dreadful times, that seems to be a rather fair balance of some kind.
The CNE (Canadian National Exhibition) announced on Tuesday it won’t be running this year. Broadway
has closed through Sept. 6 and who knows beyond that. The CFL doesn’t know if it will play. And this inner-baseball fight seems more selfish and tone deaf than the usual player-owner scraps in professional sport.
Like all sports, baseball will have to adjust to playing in stadiums without fans. The adjustment will be significant for Rogers Sportsnet, which can’t seem to televise a game without centring on the fans after every second or third pitch.
Now it will be all about the game and it can work. UFC proved that on Saturday night. It pulled off a card in Jacksonville without fans. I don’t give a damn about UFC and I watched five hours of it on Saturday night, and hardly noticed there wasn’t fans.
Having baseball back on television on a nightly basis will matter and, just as importantly, having it on radio as a summer staple will matter, too. In its own small way, it will help heal, ever so slightly. Even if the stadiums are empty. Even if the games all seem like road games in Tampa Bay, with nobody in the stands, zero atmosphere.
The Jays won’t suffer, the way a lot of teams will suffer, from lack of broadcast revenue. Their owner is their broadcaster. The broadcast rights money goes from one Rogers pocket to another. But frankly, fans don’t care about that.
They want the game. No matter where it’s played. No matter who’s in the stands. No matter how foreign all of this continues to feel.