Two and a half years ago, in the middle of researching “Full Count,” my book on the Toronto Blue Jays, I sat across the room from Paul Beeston and asked him how much of a boon Brett Lawrie could be for the team. He shrugged. This was before Lawrie’s body had failed him once again, when he was selling jerseys and was being credited with helping make the Rogers Centre feel a little younger and a little more hip – tragically hip, given how it would all work out.
No way you trade Lawrie, right? I asked the Blue Jays president and chief executive officer. At some point, you have to consider approaching him about a long-term deal, right? The fans would demand it, right? Another shrug. “I wouldn’t say that,” Beeston responded. “I think you’re over-estimating the Canadian thing.”
Beeston turned out to be right, of course. Last weekend Lawrie, from Langley, B.C., was traded to the Oakland Athletics for Josh Donaldson, from Pensacola, Fla. And even though Wednesday’s acquisition of Victoria, B.C.’s, Michael Saunders for J.A. Happ, in conjunction with the signing of East York’s Russell Martin and the presence of Mississauga’s Dalton Pompey as the nominal Opening Day centre fielder, giving the Blue Jays the potential of three everyday Canadians in the lineup, the fact remains that the Canadian “thing” has been a tough nut for the Blue Jays to crack throughout their history.
Indeed, it remains one of the great ‘ifs’ of Blue Jays history: Why weren’t the Blue Jays able to cash in on the great Canadian major league talent boom of the 1990s and 2000s? Where was their Larry Walker or Justin Morneau or Joey From Freaking Etobicoke Votto? For years you couldn’t sneeze at a baseball function across this land without having a Blue Jays scout or executive – hell, maybe even Pat Gillick himself – pass you a Kleenex. The payoff was mostly in the form of goodwill and, maybe, beer sales or television ratings. In terms of talent, though? It was a whole lot of Greg O’Halloran. Or Rob Butler. Or Rob Ducey. Truth is, if Pompey does indeed turn out to be the player some in the organization think he will be, he’ll be the first bona fide regular Canadian-born player drafted and developed by the organization. The recently-traded Lawrie? He was drafted by the Milwaukee Brewers. All-Star Paul Quantrill of Port Hope, Ont.? He was drafted by the Boston Red Sox and didn’t join the Blue Jays until four years after he’d made his major-league debut. True, the Blue Jays had Vancouver, B.C.’s, Dave McKay on their Opening Day roster. But that wasn’t any kind of harbinger.
Truth is, the Blue Jays have struggled with the whole notion of the Canadian ballplayer. Sometimes, as in the case of Morneau and Votto, you get beaten by another scout. It happens. Back in the formative days of the team and throughout the ’90s, it almost seemed as if Gillick and his braintrust were conditioned to second guess a good Canadian ballplayer — they erred on the side of paralysis. Toronto-born Gord Ash, who was one of Gillick’s lieutenants and his eventual replacement and is now an assistant GM with the Milwaukee Brewers, used to fret about “novelty acts.” His successor, J.P. Ricciardi, twice saw Canadian-born players plucked from just in front of him on draft day (including Lawrie) and always believed that criticism of the Blue Jays for failing to land and develop a bona fide Canadian star was unfair. Ricciardi thought the Blue Jays were so sincere and spent so many resources wanting to develop baseball across the country – creating, for example, the National Baseball Institute as a means of allowing Canadian kids to compete without having to leave the country on U.S. scholarships — that they lost focus, that it was in fact other organizations that reaped the benefits of their efforts.
“They were trying to be all things to all people,” is how Ricciardi described the Blue Jays approach.
Besides which, the business of scouting and signing Canadian players wasn’t always as organized as it is now. Canadian-born players were not made eligible for the June draft until 1991; before that, they were free agents much like players from the Dominican Republic, with the exception of those Canadian players who were at four-year U.S. colleges. And it wasn’t until January 2007 that all professional baseball players were granted P-1 work visas by the U.S. government. Until then, any professional player at any level who wasn’t U.S.-born needed an H2B visa to play in the U.S. – and those visas were regulated by the U.S. government. In essence, Major League Baseball received a pool of visas and distributed them to teams. The Blue Jays and Montreal Expos received no preferential treatment, and Ash remembers making trades with teams in order to get extra H2B visas. Yes, those visas were often classified as “future considerations.”
The visa issue was one reason the Blue Jays had a rookie league affiliate in Medicine Hat, and it also worked against Canadian players since it meant that they were competing along with players from Latin America, Mexico and Venezuela for scarce visas. Guess who received the benefit of the doubt in most organizations: the 18-year-old, raw-boned shortstop from the Dominican Republic, or the 22-year-old Canadian?
That doesn’t excuse the Blue Jays’ frequent whiffs in the Canadian player market, of course, but it does show that there were many more vagaries in drafting and developing Canadian players in the 1980s and 1990s. Greg Hamilton’s national team program had yet to be established; it was simply harder for Canadian-born players to get the necessary attention and build up the emotional capital with scouts and player development types.
Which brings us to the present day. Although the number of Canadian-born players drafted each year fluctuates, it is no longer shocking to see a player or pitcher born north of the 49th parallel taken in the first or second round, let alone lower. Canadian-born players have won batting titles, most valuable player awards, and made all-star teams yet most of the time it’s in someone else’s country. That the Blue Jays have yet to hit a home run with Canadian-born players is a largely unfortunate if not damning part of their historical narrative, but perhaps Russell Martin and Michael Saunders and Dalton Pompey can change that and make this year’s Blue Jays team the True North Strongest in club history.