The expectations for the 2015 Toronto Blue Jays are heavily influenced not just by the team’s own two-decade run of disappointment, but also by the spectacular disaster of the Toronto Maple Leafs’ campaign of catastrophes.
Even at the best of times – and can anyone remember the best of times? – the natural state of the Toronto Sports Fan seems to be something between furious frustration and contemptuous despair. And not without some good reason. Over the last ten years, the three major North American pro sports teams have combined to reach the postseason a grand total of four times. That’s three berths for the Toronto Raptors, one for the Maple Leafs and, obviously, none for the Blue Jays.
To twist the knife a few more painful degrees, all four of those playoff runs were snuffed out by first round losses.
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Even looking at regular season results offers cold comfort. The Raptors have won two division titles almost by default, though they seem on their way to a successful run this year. Meanwhile, the Leafs have finished first in their division only once (1999-00) in the last four decades.
And we’d best not even mention Toronto FC or the Buffalo Bills.
So while this toxic mood of sports fans in Toronto isn’t new, it’s impossible to overlook the calamitous series of pratfalls and the ugly conclusion to the Leafs’ season when considering the baseball club’s fanbase, and their outlook for the coming year.
(Before going further, let’s acknowledge that “Toronto Sports Fans” aren’t a monolith. There are many Blue Jays fans who aren’t Leafs fans, and Leafs fans who don’t even feign a casual interest in the Jays. Some might be New England Patriots fans or Manchester United fans or devotees of the local lacrosse team, and as such have glimpsed some sunshine in recent years. But if we’re drawing the Venn diagram of sports fans in Southern Ontario, it seems entirely likely that there would be a significant overlap of cold weather Leafs fans and warm weather Jays fans.)
It’s one thing to have to overcome your own history — and the Blue Jays’ upcoming season has a significant degree of urgency attached to it. But it’s another thing to get out from the shadow cast from the failings of your neighbours, so it’s hard to imagine a more toxic landscape for opening the baseball season.
If there were any pliability remaining on the fans’ patience, this Leafs season surely has stretched it to its breaking point. A bad first month to the Jays’ season would have elicited panic and anger based on their own recent history, but coming in this year’s broader sporting context, it seems likely that this vocal subset of the team’s supporters would launch brickbats at the team, management and ownership before walking away in a huff.
And it’s this last point that is of particular concern. This isn’t just a statement about the ephemeral sense of spirit and community, but about the prospects for sustainable growth in payroll. Attendance dropped at Rogers Centre by just under 2,000 patrons per game last season, and while that might not have been a terrible result considering the significant spike the previous season, it’s still problematic because of how important those gate revenues are.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Flip this coin over, and you’ll see how the Blue Jays could actually benefit to an even greater degree if they were able to be a positive story after a long, cold, miserable winter. For sports fans who are starved for good news, a legitimate run could become a rallying point for the city, and in turn, the country.
The Blue Jays will never supplant the Maple Leafs as the great obsession in that particularly populous section of the country. But they could expand their own influence and presence amongst the casual baseball fans, who represent the growth needed for the team to thrive.
Mind you, the psyches of Toronto sports freaks have been so irreparably damaged going back to the days of Harold Ballard’s reign over the city’s sports landscape, the bandwagons will likely not fill up until well into August. And even then, an entertaining failure to reach the postseason might be met with the same frustrated cries of “Always next year!”
The stakes were always going to be high for the Jays coming into this season. Now, they’ll face many grumpy fans whose patience for any failure has been exhausted.
No pressure, though.
