Editor’s Note: This column was updated following Toronto’s 10-3 win Wednesday.
My neighbour loves baseball and the Blue Jays. He coaches it, has every possible smartphone app and goes to as many games as he can with his son. We talk or text about the Blue Jays steadily.
I have seen him live through the highs promised by the ill-fated arrival of Josh Johnson et al in the 2012-13 off-season and the lows of slow-motion summer collapses. He’s been elevated by the emergence of Marcus Stroman as a potentially elite starter and dragged back down by Stroman’s spring training ACL injury.
But I’ve never seen him the way he was the morning of July 27 as I bumped into him while stumbling out on a coffee run. The Blue Jays had acquired Troy Tulowitzki in the wee hours. He was already on it, but seemed stunned. “The Jays,” he said. “Tulo.”
He was in a dream-like state, and not just because the sun was barely up. He couldn’t know that his reverie was just beginning. By the end of that week and the arrival of David Price and the rest, he was like a man who had saddled up a unicorn in his backyard and posted a time-stamped selfie. The dream was real.
But could he imagine this? The Blue Jays suddenly in first place this late in August? No. No one could. It hasn’t happened for 7,930 days, or 22 years. It felt like 220.
The man who made it all happen can relate. Alex Anthopoulos was 17-years old and a newly-minted Expos fanatic when the best team that never was began obliterating the National League in the summer of 1994.
“The only time I really experienced a pennant run as a fan, as a pure true fan, was in ’94 with the Expos,” Anthopoulos says. “There is such a sense of pride. Your team is playing well, it’s a good team … It was really so much fun and what I remember is waking up in the morning and I couldn’t wait for the game that night. The games took forever to get there, it was so much fun.
“I always joke about ‘the we,’” he says. “Even with people in our organization we’ll be talking about the team and they’ll be talking, saying ‘they’re this’ or ‘they’re that’, and I say ‘what do you mean ‘they’ – you’re part of the ‘we,’ you work here.’
“And when a fan refers to the team as ‘we’ that speaks volumes to me, because that’s what sports are about. That’s what being a fan is about. The team is an extension of you and it’s an extension of the community and that’s what it felt like being an Expos fan.”
Millions of Blue Jays fans, my neighbour included, can relate. From 1984 through 1993 every August and September was like this. The Blue Jays didn’t always win, but they always played games that mattered. And then suddenly they didn’t for more than two decades.
It was like a nation of baseball junkies was abruptly robbed of a favourite pleasure, and now, just as suddenly, it’s back. In that context this weekend’s series against the Yankees might be among the most anticipated in franchise history, if only because it’s been so long since they’ve played one like it, with the prospect of more to come.
It is the craziest of times. The Blue Jays are winners of 10 straight and undefeated with Tulo starting. Once also-rans, they are suddenly being assessed as legitimate World Series contenders. When Anthopoulos pulled the trigger on the Tulowitzki deal (which also yielded reliever LaTroy Hawkins) and then followed up with trades for David Price and Ben Revere and Mark Lowe, he wasn’t just putting together a better baseball team, he was providing a starving fan base the single greatest gift in sports: a pennant race.
Now, as a technical point, pennant races don’t truly exist in the Wild Card era. The last time you had to win your division to make the post-season was in 1993 and there wasn’t much of a contest – the WAMCO-powered Blue Jays won the East by seven games.
But in the larger picture, a baseball team in the hunt for the post-season provides a thrill like no other. When the Leafs made the playoffs in 2013 it was a quick, two-week high followed by a horrifying crash. The Raptors’ last two playoff appearances have been similarly short-lived and unsatisfying. In both 2014 and 2015 they had their playoff spots locked up with weeks or even months to spare, and then were one round and done, providing a total of 23 days of drama – less if you accept the Raptors were cooked by Washington after Game 2 this past spring.
But baseball is different. The playoff run started in earnest on July 29 when the Blue Jays started their current streak with a 5-3 win over the Kansas City Royals, sparked by Tulowitzki’s pair of doubles and two-run home run. By the time Price takes the mound Friday night against New York seeking his third win as a Blue Jay, his club will have already been the biggest story in Canada for two weeks.
The best part? As of Saturday morning there will be 44 games to play, and all of this before the promise of a run to the World Series, something that seemed nearly unfathomable two weeks ago when the Blue Jays were eight games out of the division lead and losing sight of Minnesota for the second Wild Card spot.
A run to the post-season in baseball means months of fun; there is no equivalent in sports.
Naturally the Blue Jays sleeping giant of a fanbase has been roused. The Yankees series has been sold out for days, and the three-game series the following weekend against the Detroit Tigers will almost certainly sell out as well. The Blue Jays drew 39,381 for Tuesday night’s game against the Oakland A’s, their largest weeknight crowd of the season, a record that lasted until Wednesday when 44,597 showed up, just a whisker shy of a sellout.
“Since (acquiring Tulowitzki) we’ve sold over 300,000 tickets,” says Stephen Brooks, the Blue Jays’ senior vice-president of business operations said on Tuesday. “That’s a huge number. Just to put that into context that’s about four or five times what our normal volume would be and there’s no sign of it slowing up, frankly.”
Want to get a seat on the New Jays full-steam ahead bandwagon? Don’t wait. They have already sold more tickets (including future games) than they did all of last season and the inventory is running out.
“The joke around the office is ‘hey, you got any tickets for Sunday?’” says Brooks. “Everyone is having the same experience, with friends of friends and second cousins once removed calling for tickets. The only thing I can say is buy early; that’s not a sales pitch, that’s the reality.”
Fortunately there is no limit to how many people can watch the Blue Jays on television. It is now routine for more well over a million people to tune in. David Price’s first start drew 1.39 million viewers on a holiday Monday afternoon, the largest television audience in team history outside of Opening Day broadcasts. Tuesday night’s Blue Jays game against Oakland did even better, setting a record with an average of 1.44 million viewers. Since the trade deadline the average Jays TV audience has been 1.23 million.
The obvious conclusion is success sells and so does hope. Blue Jays fans’ most fervent wish can only be that their support will serve as proof that it’s a formula that needs to continue.
Perhaps the only person not enjoying it is the one who helped make it happen.
“As a fan it’s a totally different experience,” says Anthopoulos. “When you work for a team you don’t want to sound fatalistic, but you’re always worried about things and what can go wrong. There are times when I can’t even watch. I don’t want to watch. It’s too hard.”
That’s OK, my neighbour and millions of other Blue Jays fans, starved for a team in the present that can match past legends that live forever, can’t look away.