Toronto Blue Jays starting pitcher Jose Berrios throws the first pitch of the game and the Blue Jays' season to Texas Rangers second baseman Brad Miller on April 8.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
A couple of days ago, Kevin Gausman, the Toronto Blue Jays’ big off-season signing, took his wife to lunch.
Gausman is baseball famous rather than famous famous. He’s not especially tall or muscly. He looks like the person in front of you at the Loblaws checkout.
“I took three steps out of the parking garage and some guy is, like, ‘Welcome to Toronto,’” Gausman said Friday. “I told my wife – ‘A little different than what we’re used to.’”
That’s a good way to describe Toronto baseball, circa April, 2022 – a little different than what we’re used to.
Hernandez leads Blue Jays to wild 10-8 win in Toronto’s first home opener since 2019
For the first time since Charlie Montoyo has managed this team, the Jays sold out Friday’s opening night. This is Montoyo’s fourth year in the job. Montoyo mentioned that he remembered what a full house is like at Rogers Centre – from his days as a coach with Tampa.
When I turned to an old baseball hand and asked if that could possibly be true – no sellouts for three years? – he said, “Charlie’s been here since 2019. Did you see that team in 2019?”
That’s the last strong memory of the Jays as a settled fixture on the Toronto landscape – habitual losers watched by habitual masochists. Which made whipsawing over to last night’s Rogers Centre frenzy a trip.
A few thousand fans showed up when the doors opened and stood screaming for balls in the outfield bleachers. Two hours before the game, the stadium was louder than it has typically been two hours into a game.
The pregame festivities lasted longer than the average children’s birthday party. They featured awards, Olympians and Paralympians (medal-winners only, thanks very much), Billye Aaron (Hank’s widow), one of those novelty field-sized flags, playoff ovations for every Jays’ team member, including the laundry guys, and a full-on booing of the Texas Rangers, who looked more confused than hurt. Who gets World Series-level amped on opening day? Canada, that’s who.
A large Canadian flag is unfurled on the field as the Canadian national anthem is sung ahead of the game between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Texas Rangers on Opening Day at Rogers Centre.COLE BURSTON/Getty Images
Even a disastrous first inning for Jays starter Jose Berrios – he was pulled after facing eight batters and recording one out – could not dim the crowd’s enthusiasm.
Even though the Jays were lapped early, that sense of mass belief would be rewarded with a 10-8 Toronto win.
This was what the stadium felt like in the second half of the 2015 season, when an entire generation of this city’s sports fans were learning what it feels like to win.
It’s not just the quality of the team that has super-charged the reaction. It’s a quirk of history. Because of the pandemic the Jays were given something no one gets – a chance for a total reset.
Toronto Blue Jays fans can enjoy video screen, lighting upgrades at Friday’s home opener
A total reset isn’t just starting from scratch. It’s doing so after everyone’s forgotten all the bad things that went before.
The Pittsburgh Pirates can’t tell the city of Pittsburgh they haven’t been feeling like themselves lately, so they’re going to do something they’ve wanted to do since they were little buccaneer kids – get a job in California and live near the beach.
In this scenario, while the Pirates are gone, Pittsburgh realizes it misses the hell out of them. The Pirates start to feel the same way. When they come back, they’re refreshed. They’ve lost weight. They look great.
They get their old job at PNC Park back and start winning a bunch of games. And everybody falls in love all over again.
That’s not possible to do, but the Jays just did it.
In 2019, they lost 95 games. Total losers. The pandemic hit and the Jays left home. They still weren’t all that great, but now that was a Florida/Buffalo problem.
When the Jays did come back to Toronto for the last bit of the 2021 campaign, it felt more like a holiday than a return. They missed out on the playoffs on the last day of the season, packed their bags and disappeared again.
The Jays had become that distant cousin you only see at Thanksgiving, but every time you do you wish you saw him more. That’s why this opening day feels different in Toronto. It isn’t just the start of MLB’s fiscal year. It’s a reunion of far-flung friends.
This week, the New York Times published a delightful provocation headlined “Baseball Is Dying. The Government Should Take It Over.”
The op-ed was obviously meant to be tongue-in-cheek. But many of its points weren’t – that baseball is now a game watched by old people and not that many of them; that its economic supply-demand graph is out of whack; and that some sort of correction is inevitable.
The more impressive thing was that America’s paper of record could publish something saying that America’s pastime had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel and the public reaction was, “Sure, okay, but what’s your point?” The thesis was so obvious it didn’t merit serious rebuttal.
When nobody bothers getting offended – in 2022, that’s when you know you are headed toward irrelevance.
But if baseball’s national HQ is getting squeezed, up here at the only international branch office, big things are projected for this year.
Gausman told a story about how every team he’s ever been on has the same meeting at spring training where the manager tells the players they’re good enough to contend, maybe even win it. all. The implication was that pros learn to ignore that speech.
“But when Charlie said it, we agreed,” Gausman said.
Toronto loves one team most of all – whichever one is winning. Right now, nobody looks like a better bet than the Jays.
That, combined with absence making the heart grow fonder, has the fanbase not only panting but rapidly expanding. We fill a lot of bandwagons in this town, but we don’t often do it before any games have been played.
The Jays’ history is sprinkled with great seasons you saw coming a ways off, but not like this. Not with so much wistfulness over lost time mixed in with giddy feelings of what’s possible.
Other teams should take notes. In fact, a lot of people doing a lot of things might want to think about it. Got an apathy problem at home? Leave for a while. Leave and when you do come back, come back a whole lot better.
For results of Friday night’s Toronto-Texas game, check our website, globesports.com
Cathal Kelly