Home on the road:
The Blue Jays switching homes is nothing new. Baseball has a long history of teams moving for fires, structural damages, politicking and even wet paint.
Except for shortened seasons, major league teams play half their games on the road and the other half at home.
But not always.
The Toronto Blue Jays, still blocked from traveling in and out of Canada because of the lingering coronavirus pandemic, will play at least their first two homestands at their spring training park in Dunedin, Florida.
Such movement is nothing new to baseball. Over its history, games have been moved because of dire weather forecasts, air-quality issues, ballpark fires, structural accidents and offseason repairs not getting completed by opening day. There have been marketing moves by the commissioner’s office, conflicts with special events, anticipation of overflow crowds and a desire to play Sunday games when local blue laws wouldn’t allow it.
A look at some noteworthy relocations over the years:
Strange sites
In the early days of the game, finding new homes – often in a hurry – hampered ballclub operations. The 1884 Chicago White Stockings had to start the season on the road because the Illinois Central Railroad purchased Lakefront Park and announced plans to build a depot there. Legal wrangles followed, with the team finally persuading the railroad to allow play in Lakefront on condition that the club would find new quarters for 1885. They did, to West Side Park.
In 1889, the New York Giants opened the season in Jersey City and even played some home games in Staten Island after the city decided to extend 111th Street, swallowing the original Polo Grounds in the process. A “new” Polo Grounds opened at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue on July 8, 1889.
Together in Boston from 1901 to 1952, the Braves and Red Sox traded fields frequently. The 1914 Boston Braves, who won the National League pennant, played all games after Aug. 11 at the larger Fenway Park, opened in 1912, before moving to the bigger Braves Field, which opened the following season.
In 1915 and 1916, when the Red Sox won the American League pennant but the Braves failed to repeat, the Bosox opted for the newer Braves Field, with 4,300 extra seats, as their home park for the World Series.
In 1946, the Braves quickly switched to Fenway because freshly painted seats at Braves Field had not dried quickly enough. The incident, which left the team paying cleaning bills for angry fans, was nicknamed “the wearing of the green” in heavily-Irish Boston.
A group trying to bring baseball back to Milwaukee persuaded the Chicago White Sox to shift 20 home dates to Milwaukee County Stadium between the time the Braves left for Atlanta, in 1966, and the Brewers arrived from Seattle, in 1970. The turnout helped bring a new club to Wisconsin while the move spotlighted the shabbiness of Chicago’s Comiskey Park. A new Comiskey eventually was built across the street.
Champion Stadium at Disney’s Wide World of Sports in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, hosted six Rays games between 2007 and 2008. The attendance-starved Tampa Bay Rays figured 9,000 fans would fill that spring training facility to capacity but look lost in cavernous Tropicana Field.
In 2011, the Marlins were the home team at Seattle’s Safeco Field during a June series with the Mariners because Sun Life Stadium, then their home park, was booked for a U2 concert.
Structural and attendance failures
On Aug. 8, 1903, 12 fans were killed and 232 hurt during a Braves-Phillies game at Philadelphia’s Baker Bowl when a makeshift balcony attached to the third-base stands collapsed.
The Phils moved into Columbia Park, then home park of the Athletics, and played 16 games there.
Baker Bowl had another disaster on May 14, 1927, when fans seeking to escape a sudden rainstorm rushed for shelter under the right-field grandstand overhang. Supported by shoring timbers that were rotting, the whole thing gave way. One fan died of a heart attack in the stampede triggered by the incident and 50 more were injured. The Phillies again moved in with the A’s, then playing at Shibe Park.
Early in the 1998 season, a 500-pound expansion joint fell through the upper deck at Yankee Stadium during a Monday off day. City inspectors closed the Bronx ballpark, forcing the Yankees to scrub the first of two games with the visiting Angels. The Yanks arranged to play the Angels in the third at noon on a Thursday in Shea Stadium.
After dressing at their own lockers in Yankee Stadium, the team boarded a bus to Shea, just five miles away. The Yanks wore their white home pinstripes but occupied the visitors clubhouse – after the visiting Cubs granted their permission – and dugout. The Angels used a locker room once used by the NFL’s Jets and filled the first-base dugout, usually used by the home team, during the game.
“I’d rather be in the thirdbase dugout,” said Yankees manager Joe Torre, who had gone 286-420 as Mets manager from 1977 to 1981, “because I didn’t do that well in the firstbase dugout.”
Longtime Mets star Darryl Strawberry homered for the Yankees, causing the “Big Apple” beyond the outfield wall to rise in tribute. The team won the transplanted game in front of 40,000 fans – 24,000 more than the Mets drew for their night game against Chicago.
The Yankees had played all of their home games at Shea Stadium in 1974 and ’75 while the original Yankee Stadium was undergoing a massive face-lift. As a result, Bill Virdon became the only man since the 1923 opening of Yankee Stadium to manage the Yankees without ever managing a game in Yankee Stadium.
Falling attendance was the reason the Brooklyn Dodgers played 15 “home” games at Jersey City’s Roosevelt Stadium in 1956 and 1957. Team owner Walter O’Malley was trying to show the borough what it would be like to lose baseball.
From 1901 to 1957, New York’s Dodgers, Giants and Yankees never hosted games on the same date – a deliberate effort by schedule-makers worried about fan turnout. With fans banned from ballparks by the coronavirus in 2020, however, New York State had three nondoubleheaders on the same day on Aug. 11 and 12. The Washington Nationals played the Mets at Citi Field; the Atlanta Braves visited Yankee Stadium; and the homeless Toronto Blue Jays played at Buffalo’s Sahlen Field.
Pandemic’s impact
The coronavirus has brought a dizzying array of scheduling and location changes. There were many quirks.
Among them, on Aug. 28, 2020, the Mets won a game at Yankee Stadium in a walk-off. Batting last in the second game of a doubleheader, scheduled to make up for a Citi Field game canceled a week earlier after a Mets player and coach tested positive for COVID-19, the Mets rode an Amed Rosario home run to a 4-3 victory. It came in their last at-bat, which was in the seventh inning because all doubleheaders during the first COVID-19 season were shortened.
The Yankees had their chance at a similar victory earlier in the season against the Phillies in Citizens Bank Park but came up short.
In baseball, as in life, what goes around comes around.