Grassroots growth has the bases loaded in B.C.
Thunderbirds plan a crown jewel as big-league fan frenzy hits fever pitch
Terry McKaig believes baseball in B.C. has another chance at a growth spurt. Listen carefully and you might hear echoes of Bruce Springsteen’s Glory Days in the background when he speaks.
McKaig, the director of the UBC Thunderbirds’ baseball program, says his group has raised $5 million through donors of the $9 million needed to build a stadium on campus. The plan is for it to be a nextdoor neighbour to the $4-million 12,500-square-foot indoor training facility the program opened last fall, again via donations.
The stadium would have 1,000 permanent seats, a high-tech scoreboard and a mound on hydraulics so that it could be used for Little League or even slo-pitch. It would replace the bare-bones park that currently sits there, and McKaig hopes it could become a centrepiece for the game in this province, if not Western Canada.
“The timing couldn’t be better for selling baseball,” he said.
There’s logic to that statement. You would have had to be under a mighty large rock the past two summers to have not had an idea what the Toronto Blue Jays were up to. For example, 7.03 million people tuned in just in time to watch Josh Donaldson score the series-clinching winning run in Game 3 of their American League Division Series against the Texas Rangers, according to Sportsnet. The game averaged 4.73 million viewers, which Sportsnet listed as the third-most watched program in the network’s history, behind two Blue Jays playoff games from last season.
Sportsnet doesn’t offer breakdowns by province, but there’s plenty to suggest that ratings in B.C. for the Blue Jays are top shelf. There were estimates of 20,000 people wearing Blue Jays garb in the Safeco Field stands when the team visited the Seattle Mariners in late September.
Meanwhile, the Vancouver Canadians, the Blue Jays’ short-season single-A affiliate based out of Nat Bailey Stadium, are popular enough that they out-drew 12 of the 30 triple-A clubs in average attendance (6,177 per game) and had a deal with Shaw TV to broadcast Saturday night home games this past season. And the Victoria HarbourCats, a summer collegiate all-star team filled with players from assorted NCAA programs, set a West Coast League single-game record when they attracted a crowd of 5,133 for a June 30 home game, and they led the 11-team loop in average attendance (2,239).
Just five years ago, if you said UBC would have a $4-million indoor facility or the C’s would have regular TV exposure, you would have been laughed at.
“We’re entering a golden age for baseball in the province,” Baseball B.C. executive director David Laing said. “There’s a lot of good things going on. It’s an exciting time.”
McKaig won’t get into timelines about the new ballpark at UBC, but says he’s “trying to build on the momentum that baseball in this country has going right now.”
“I’ll be meeting with professors or assistant deans and suddenly we are standing in a circle, talking about the Blue Jays,” he added.
The Blue Jays’ current run hasn’t translated into the kind of minor baseball registration numbers we saw after Toronto won the World Series in 1992 and 1993. By 1995, there were 232,000 youth players in the country, according to reports from Baseball Canada.
But things are still trending upward. Minor baseball registration increased 14 per cent nationwide this year from 2015, leading to 136,614 players from coast to coast, Laing said.
It was up 10 per cent in B.C. with 31,500 players, Laing said.
Baseball critics have long painted the sport as too slow, too methodical. You’d think the Twitter generation, which craves its news in 140-character bursts, might concur. But Jim Swanson, a managing partner with the HarbourCats, says the built-in breaks between innings and other stoppages for things like relief pitchers give people a chance to look at their smartphones.
“It plays into the nature of the activity,” he said.
Concerns about concussions have made baseball an easier sell for some sports fans, he added.
“Hockey, football and lacrosse rely on physical contact,” Swanson said. “In baseball, the most violent thing you have happening most nights is a rounded bat hitting a round baseball. When you have something like Rougned Odor punching Jose Bautista in the mouth, it becomes a big story.”
Whether the Blue Jays can remain in the upper echelon of the American League remains to be seen. Encarnacion and Bautista, two huge bats in the lineup, are entering free agency, and the team has unloaded prospects in trades for older, more established players over the last two years.
There have also been questions about how interested they would be in continuing to zealously sell the game across Canada, particularly with the departures of president Paul Beeston (a Welland, Ont., native) and general manager Alex Anthopoulos (a Montrealer) in the past year.
Canadians owner Jake Kerr and president Andy Dunn have maintained that the new Blue Jays regime, led by president Mark Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins, would be keen, and the Blue Jays and C’s announced in January they’ve extended their affiliation through 2018.
McKaig, too, has talked to the Blue Jays about his various plays, and said they are “very committed to improving baseball in this country any way they can.”
Greg Hamilton, the national team coach, added: “The success of the Blue Jays is impactful from coast to coast and serves as both a motivator and inspiration for the next generation of Canadian baseball players. With increased numbers and profile, we are optimistic about possibilities for enhanced public and private sector investment in infrastructure and programming.” And the best could be yet to come. “I don’t think we’re at the top of the wave yet,” Dunn said. “If they’re going to win another World Series in Toronto, this thing could really take on a life of its own.”