Momentum is one of those things in sport and in life that is hard to measure but difficult to deny. Sometimes it just feels like one thing leads to another and they’re all good.
After years in the wilderness it’s beginning to feel like Toronto is on a roll, with respect to its major sports franchises, and it felt that way before Toronto Maple Leafs rookie Auston Matthews made the most audacious star turn by any rookie in the city’s sports history with his record-setting four-goal explosion in his debut against the Ottawa Senators on Wednesday night.
The Leafs are typically viewed as the tent pole on the Toronto sports scene, but in their past decade of dysfunction the scene has shifted and been enlivened. The Leafs on the verge of a revival with a 19-year-old star driving the bus is a great story, but it won’t be the only story, only the latest.
The re-emergence of the Toronto Blue Jays as a city- (and nation-) unifying juggernaut has given the town a 12-month (and counting) taste of what it’s like to have championship aspirations, while the Toronto Raptors establishing themselves as an upper tier NBA franchise has provided safe harbour for fans from all walks who don’t feel connected to hockey’s roots or too young to remember the Blue Jays’ glory days.
Even TFC has finally turned the corner although they struggle for shelf space in a crowded marketplace. If there’s a victim it’s the Toronto Argonauts who picked the wrong time to have a bad year while moving into BMO Field and may have struggled for oxygen even if they were undefeated, given what’s going on around them.
But to have the Leafs displaying what appears to be a legitimate superstar-to-be in their lineup (this doesn’t seem the morning to bring up Blue Jays flameout J.P. Arencibia’s two-homer, four-hit MLB debut) as they kickoff their 100th anniversary season at the same time the Blue Jays get set to take on Cleveland in the ALCS, while the Raptors are coming off the best season in franchise history — it’s fair to argue that this might be as good a moment the growing and maturing Toronto sports scene has ever had.
Is the success contagious? Is one team’s progress somehow linked to the fortunes of the next?
Analytically, objectively, realistically, it makes no sense, although there have been clusters of success in cities in the past. The run Boston has been on for the past 15 years or so is nearly unprecedented with eight titles in four sports. It is the last of 15 cities to have two teams win titles in the same campaign with the Celtics and Red Sox each becoming champions in their 2007 seasons.
Going back further Pittsburgh won a Super Bowl and World Series in 1979; and even Philadelphia (where in recent years it would seem that failure is contagious too) has had peak moments across multiple sports, such as in 1979-80 when all four major sports franchises played for a title, although only the Phillies won.
Locally there could be something brewing in part because MLSE — who own the Leafs, Raptors and TFC — seems to have finally figured out that hiring and committing to the best management and coaching talent available is a sound strategy. Meanwhile just down Bremner Boulevard from the Air Canada Centre, the Blue Jays have benefitted from top management also while committing significant resources (for all the kvetching about Rogers Communications ownership, the Blue Jays have carried a top-10 MLB payroll for three straight years even as the Canadian dollar has been weakening).
But those in the mix say that there’s something more than just the coincidence of a bunch of well-executed plans coming together.
This time a year ago when the Toronto Blue Jays were flipping bats on their way to the ALCS, waiting patiently outside their clubhouse in the bowels of Rogers Centre were DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry of the Toronto Raptors, there to share in the fun.
Inspired, the pair led the Raptors to the Eastern Conference Finals with regular guest appearances courtside from the likes of Blue Jays Marcus Stroman, Aaron Sanchez and Joey Bats — Jose Bautista — himself.
Their season ended in the NBA semifinals at the hands of LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers and now they’re hoping to see the Blue Jays push past Cleveland’s MLB entry and make it to the World Series.
“A big huge congratulations to the @BlueJays … Amazing series and ending to a game. But we all know YALL NOT DONE!!” tweeted Lowry, who took in Game 3 of the ALDS from a front row seat along the third base line with Cory Joseph. The rest of the team was in a private suite.
“That togetherness, when [Stroman] and them come to our games, our guys know they’re there, it gets them going,” said Raptors head coach Dwane Casey, who saw a similar synergy develop between the Seattle Supersonics and Mariners when he coached there in the early 2000s. He remembers a teenage Alex Rodriguez coming to the gym to watch practice and shoot hoops. “And hopefully they know our guys were there, watching them, supporting them when they swept.”
There is some irony that even as the Cavaliers were earning Cleveland its first championship in 52 years in June, the city’s baseball team was kicking off its season-defining 15-game winning streak and is now hoping to get past the Blue Jays en route to its first World Series championship since 1948, with LeBron as the most visible cheerleader.
Can the success of one team somehow lift the fortunes of another in the same city, with franchises sharing the same regulator on a SCUBA tank as they slowly rise from the depths?
“Successful play in a city rubs off on the other teams, for sure,” said Joseph, the Raptors’ designated Torontonian. At 25 he’s too young to have remembered the Blue Jays’ early 90s glory years, but is locked in on the Blue Jays at the moment. He was seated close to Stroman, who was in the Blue Jays dugout, for Game 3 of the ALDS and had to duck when Edwin Encarnacion’s bat slipped out of his hands prior to his three-run home run (“I was like, Stro, what are we doing here?”) but was rewarded with a perfect view of Josh Donaldson’s scamper home in the 10th inning.
Joseph says what he sees happening in Toronto reminds him of the season he spent at the University of Texas where the varsity athletes on the various teams congregated and socialized together; were invested in each other’s success and generally felt part of something bigger than themselves. Having spent the first four years of his career playing for the Spurs, the only big league team in San Antonio, Joseph feels like there’s a tide here raising all ships in his hometown. “You see how the city reacts to a successful organization and you want to do the same thing for the fans … [And] as a professional athlete you can always appreciate how an athlete from another sport prepares, their professionalism and you can always appreciate someone’s hard work as they do the work to compete in the sport that they love.”
Perhaps more important is that the current run that the Raptors and Blue Jays are on — the franchises with the most U.S. visibility — is changing the way Toronto is being perceived as a sports destination.
“It’s not like they’re bandwagon fans. The same fans that are there at Jurassic Park. It’s very different than what I’m used to,” says Raptors forward DeMarre Carroll. “In Atlanta if you’re winning they’re with you, if you’re not, they’re not. Here they’re with you win or lose, they’re sticking by your side, you just have to give it 110 per cent.
“I feel like we’re in this together,” Carroll said of the bond he feels with his fellow Toronto athletes and the fan base. “It’s us against the world.”
It’s the kind of thing people notice from afar. All those frenzied crowd shots travel.
“It’s all people talk about when you see people in the States,” says Casey. “It’s great advertising for the city, but it’s not fake, it’s not B.S.”
“[There’s] a camaraderie building, but most of all it’s representing our city in baseball, basketball and soon in hockey,” said Casey. “We’re a world class sports city and we want to keep it that way.”