Toronto Blue Jays catcher Alejandro Kirk tags out New York Yankees designated hitter Giancarlo Stanton at home plate in Toronto, on Sept. 26.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
When the Rogers Centre was renovated during the off-season, the idea was to make it less like a rallying point in case of disaster and more like an enormous tiki bar.
The Toronto Blue Jays eliminated a few thousand bad seats and replaced them with open-air drinking spots. They wedged fans in on top of the bullpens and shortened the fences to give things that right-in-the-mix feel.
Ballparks don’t make money out of baseball obsessives who sit there hanging on every pitch. They want scenesters whose goal is getting lightly hosed on craft beer, with baseball as the backing soundtrack.
Scenesters are preferable to obsessives because they are performance agnostic. Nice summer day with the top popped? Forget about the score. They’re there for the Instagram possibilities.
The obsessives are reliable customers at the beginning and, if things are going well, the end of the season. The scenesters help carry the club through the dog days. If the team is really humming, the two streams meet in one great dynamically priced river at the playoffs.
It’s a good business plan that’s worked elsewhere.
So where is everybody?
On Tuesday night, the Rogers Centre wasn’t empty, but it also wasn’t full. The announced crowd was 40,454 – a few hundred short of a sellout.
This is Toronto versus the New York Yankees with the playoffs in the balance on a pristine early autumn night. The roof was open. Jays’ ace Kevin Gausman was starting.
There could not be a more ideal setting for baseball in this country. But even with ducats going for as little as $20 on the secondary market, the Jays couldn’t fill the room.
It’s been like that a lot this season. The ballpark is a reliable sellout on summer Saturdays. They fill the odd Sunday as well. But the weeknights are a tougher out. The attendance numbers dip down around the mid-30,000s. Occasionally, it falls into the 20,000s.
We’re not talking about June. We’re talking about September. We’re talking about right in the thick of it.
Contrast this with the bat-flip season of 2015. Admittedly, that run had a different feel. A team that had been very depressing for a long time was suddenly a source of light.
But still. During the last three months of that season, the Rogers Centre was bursting. Overcapacity on many nights.
During the less ballyhooed playoff run of 2016, same thing. Sort of. Regular sellouts, with the occasional slower night interspersed.
Now we’re back up to 2023 – it’s not the best team in a long time, but it’s a good team. On a given night over the past couple of weeks, you could be there for the moment the season either takes flight or blows up on the launch pad.
Granted, it’s not a cheap night out. Throw in a few beers, hot dogs and that T-shirt your kid wants and it’ll put you back a small packet.
But in a world in which people talk blithely about shelling out thousands to see Taylor Swift from seats up in low planetary orbit, we have lost our sense of proportion. We talk about blowing a couple, three hundred on a night out like anyone can do it. Most people can’t. Also, they’re too busy working to take the night off.
The next time you look around and wonder to yourself, “Why are people so angry all of a sudden?”, that’s one reason.
But if these Jays, with their competent roster, their high hopes and their semi-state-of-the-art stadium, can’t convince people to fork over a day’s wage on a night out, then what’s going on?
It’s probably a million things, but I’m going to guess that one of them is competence fatigue.
For a chunk of the beginning of this century, all Toronto teams were terrible and all at once. It became one of the civic facts everyone here understands – traffic is terrible, there is not one world-class bar within city limits and none of the big three teams has a scintilla of quality.
That last part changed, sort of all at once. The Raptors went first. The Jays followed. The Leafs shuffled after the other two. Within the space of a couple of years, a city defined by sports badness became one of lite sports goodness.
The golden moment of modern Toronto sports followed immediately. That would be the window between July, 2015 (the Jays trade for Troy Tulowitzki and David Price) and July, 2019 (Kawhi Leonard ghosts Toronto and starts hooking up with Los Angeles).
Since then, everyone’s been fine, but mostly disappointing. This year is everyone’s year, until it isn’t. Then it’s about next year. As civic mottos go, that really would capture the flavour of Toronto circa 2023 – ‘Next Year’.
Crucially, there has been no chance to sour on any of these teams. They don’t fully collapse, or admit they’re taking a couple of seasons off. They’re all tooling up on the fly, or claiming to be right there.
Occasionally, teams must be incompetent. It’s in the nature of competition. What happens when teams are permanently competent, without ever being truly excellent? That’s what we are testing now for the first time.
It is a truism of Toronto sports that people here will pay to watch anything. It is not physically possible to have a discussion with a Leafs fan of a certain age that doesn’t eventually devolve into a complaint about how Canadiens’ fans would abandon the Forum en masse if the team lost three in a row and yadda yadda yadda. It is a rule of hockey conversation so reliable that it ought to have a name – Molson’s Law or something.
It’s a cliché because it’s true. Toronto will pay good money to watch bad teams that drive them wild with rage. But will it do the same thing to watch okay teams that leave them feeling nothing in particular?