‘IT’S A NICE FEEL’
HIGH HOPES FOR SEASON AT JAYS’ HOME OPENER
It is not particularly surprising that Mark Shapiro, who often speaks like he’s reading slogans off a motivational poster, described his first home opener in Toronto in rather earnest terms.
The still- new Blue Jays president talked about playing hooky from school as a kid growing up in Baltimore, and going to the ballpark with his dad. He mentioned how great it was to see children and parents, and grandparents, in the stands.
“Opening Day,” he said, is “kind of the day that rekindles the bond with baseball.”
Sure it is. It is also, in these parts at least, largely a day for a bunch of people to drink heavily and render the cheap seats something close to a barely constrained prison riot. That was the deal here for many years: You came to the home opener, you partied, and then you turned your attention to the hockey playoffs and by the time you checked back in with baseball the Blue Jays were contemplating another lost season.
Not so in 2016. For the first time in 23 years, the Jays had a home opener in which the general optimism was firmly rooted in the success of the recent past.
The American League East championship banner hangs over the scoreboard and the sellout crowd brings i nstant memories of the packed houses that were the norm through August and September and the bat- flippin’ playoff run.
Before the Friday night game against the Boston Red Sox, there were giant M-V- P placards placed on the field behind second base, for the presentation of the AL Most Valuable Player Award to third baseman Josh Donaldson. The trophy was handed out by George Bell, the outfielder who was the only other Blue Jay to win the honour, in 1987.
Bell’s presence was another reminder of the way this franchise once held the city in its thrall. It has been six months since Toronto’s last game at the Rogers Centre, an ace performance from Marco Estrada in a must-win game that sent the American League Championship Series back to Kansas City, but for one night at least the euphoria of those days still hadn’t worn off.
“There’s a different excitement about this team,” said manager John Gibbons before the eighth home opener of his tenure, with a fouryear interregnum in the middle. “It does have a different feel to it. And it’s a nice feel.”
He smiled broadly thinking about the last game here, the rousing sendoff the team was given before the trip to Kansas that would be their last.
“I remember the reaction we had that night,” he said, and he added that he didn’t doubt that his players were at least a little swept up in the emotion that had surrounded the team since the big trade deadline deals that turned the Jays into a latesummer monster.
“Shoot,” he said, “when this place is rockin’, it does something to you.”
And lo, the rockin’ commenced. Marcus Stroman mowed down the Red Sox in the first, and Kevin Pillar ripped a ball up the rightcentre gap that went for a triple, and the crowd was wild and it was October again. Josh Donaldson added more life with a grand slam in the fourth inning.
Whether this place keeps rockin’, so to speak, might be the biggest question facing the Toronto Blue Jays, more than any of the usual queries at this time of year about health and depth and free agents come and gone. If the excitement of last fall carries over beyond the initial spasm of opening weekend, the organization is much more likely to be able to compete with its big- money division rivals in New York and Boston.
As the Jays kicked off their 40th season in Toronto, the unfortunate reality is that they’ve only had two sustained bursts of real competitiveness, in the midto- late 1980s, behind players like Bell, Dave Stieb and Jesse Barfield, and in the World Series years of Robbie Alomar and Joe Carter in the early ‘90s.
This team has a chance to be the third era of greatness, to be more than a one- off blip. That will, obviously, depend on what happens over the next six months. If they get anything like the starting pitching they had over the opening series in Tampa, they will definitely be playing the ever- elusive meaningful September baseball for only the second time since the first Clinton presidency.
And then it will depend on what happens after that: Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion are in the final years of their extraordinarily affordable contracts, and each has sounded less than certain that they will be back. Another playoff run would not hurt that cause. Simply put, the Blue Jays are a different animal when they are Canada’s Team instead of just the only baseball team in Canada.
“I’ve been thinking about the fact that a whole nation will be watching tonight,” Shapiro said before the game. Indeed, that is different than, say, Cleveland.
We shall see if the country sticks around. But on one night, none of that mattered. There were rally towels to wave, and a title to celebrate and an MVP to salute.
It brought to mind something Gibbons had said a day earlier: “We feel good,” he said, “but that gets you nothing.”
True. But it’s a start.
THERE’S A DIFFERENT EXCITEMENT ABOUT THIS TEAM.