Blue Jays give Toronto a taste for victory

As promised, the Toronto Maple Leafs lost their home opener Wednesday night.

No one was surprised. Few actually cared, seemingly least of all the team, which has made it clear over and over that it won’t be a contender for a long time to come. Whether that means four or five years or a decade or more remains to be seen. Ah, what a relief. For as long as anyone can remember, this has been enough. From the Leafs’ perspective, as long as they sell out every game there’s no need to win as well. That would be overdoing it.

Then along come the Blue Jays, an outfit that has never enjoyed the luxury of sellout crowds regardless of poor on-field performance. For 20 years the team has been mediocre, a fact reflected by lousy attendance and general indifference.

But these days the Blue Jays are a team in a hurry. For them, it’s now or never.

Unlike the Leafs, eternally fixated on tomorrow, the Jays live for today.

The contrast between the two organizations couldn’t be starker. You don’t need an MBA to know which of these corporate cultures is stuck in the past and increasingly looking like the anachronism it has become.

Time has passed the Leafs by. The team is Old Toronto, slow off the mark, out of date, dumb, dusty and so 50 years ago. The Leafs are the Gardiner Expressway.

They’re Don Mills, ladies with escorts, Molson’s Canadian and Stephen Harper.

The team hasn’t been in a hurry since 1931 when Conn Smythe was in a mad rush to build Maple Leaf Gardens, a feat he accomplished in five and a half months, a record.

Since then, the team has been able to sit back and rake in the dough from a city ready and willing to settle for the mediocrity the Leafs offer.

For the most part, it has been a successful strategy.

Yes, there has been endless whining about the team but there’s never been a shortage of bums in seats. And in this corporatist world, the private boxes and high-priced platinum tickets have kept staff and players safe from having to face the consequences of their limitless ineptitude.

At a certain point, the narrative of the perennial loser acquires its own momentum and becomes the city’s story.

Though the Leafs are one of the weakest franchises in the NHL, the team ranks as the league’s most valuable. Winning is irrelevant. Like the Leafs, Toronto sees itself as a city that doesn’t have to make an effort to win.

Success can be taken for granted; transit is 30 years behind, leadership weak and the infrastructure crumbling, but Toronto is the most livable place on Earth. Or so we’re told. That’s what makes the shifting fortunes of the city’s sports corporations so interesting. It’s not simply that the Leafs lose and the Jays win; it’s their attitude to losing and winning.

In a sports market as saturated as Toronto, the kind of loyalty the Leafs have historically enjoyed will be harder and harder to find. For the first time in a decade, tickets for the home opener were still available hours before game time Wednesday night.

Even in a city resistant to change, nothing stays the same. Whether the Jays end up World Series champions or not, they have moved the city beyond its traditional loser culture.

They have given Toronto a taste of excellence and left its inhabitants impatient for anything less. In a city raised on second best, this won’t make life any easier. Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca.