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Fans line up to enter Rogers Centre ahead of Game 1 of the ALCS against the Seattle Mariners in Toronto on Sunday.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Baseball fans from coast to coast turned out Sunday to cheer on the Toronto Blue Jays, as the team opened an American League Championship Series for the first time in nearly a decade.
Canada’s only major-league club is hosting the first two games of the best-of-seven series against the Seattle Mariners. Game three will take place in Seattle.
The stakes are high. An ALCS win would mean a Blue Jays appearance in the World Series for the first time since 1993, the year of Joe Carter’s series-winning walk-off home run. The excitement has spread to parts of the country where enthusiasm for the team – and for Toronto in general – isn’t always a given.
Singer-songwriter Adam Baldwin, a lifelong Jays fan who is based in Dartmouth, had a unique vantage point on the team’s nationwide fandom this baseball season, as he toured the country with Blue Rodeo.
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“Every tavern you walk into, there’s people watching the Blue Jays,” he said, adding that he’s happy to welcome those getting on the bandwagon.
Mr. Baldwin’s most memorable playoff experience might have been listening to the Jays’ final game of the regular season – in which they clinched first place in the American League East – while driving across the Canadian Shield in Ontario.
After a home run by Jays catcher Alejandro Kirk, he said, “I evidently was excited enough that I was going 130 kilometres in a 90 zone, and I was pulled over by the OPP.”
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Helen Vlahos, left, and Wolf Schneider show their Davis Schneider jerseys.Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
Mr. Baldwin recalled that he apologetically explained that he’d gotten too worked up while listening to the game, and the officer said that he, too, had been listening and let him off with a warning.
Amy Dixon, a head nurse in the geriatric medical unit at Kelowna General Hospital, described the playoff run as bringing some much-needed entertainment, solace and bonding to people spending time there.
At the staff’s encouragement, visiting family members and patients – including “a lot of older gentlemen who were avid sports-watchers” – have been filing into the unit’s lounge area to watch together.
Uptake has been high, and Ms. Dixon expected it to be all the more so on Sunday. “It sucks if you’re in the hospital on Thanksgiving,” she said, but the Jays might help lift spirits.
Spending Thanksgiving with her American family, Yellowknife resident Melanie Begalka said she’s thrilled to see the Jays go this far in the season – even if the competition has introduced a little bit of trouble on turkey day.
“My family are big Mariners fans, so I’m going to be watching the Blue Jays with a bunch of Mariners fans,” said Ms. Begalka, who was visiting family in B.C. Her mother is cheering for the Mariners, while her father – a long-time fan of both teams – is seriously conflicted, she said.
“I don’t know if he’s going to be able to actually sit down and watch the game he’s so stressed,” Ms. Begalka said. “These high-pressure games, you don’t want to see anybody fail. There’s definitely some tension in this house about who you’re cheering for today.”
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Kai Zarowny, left, and Kohlman Zarowny shop at the Toronto Blue Jays merchandise store outside the Rogers Centre in Toronto on Saturday.Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
Vancouver has been home to complicated baseball loyalties, with some fans supporting the team whose ballpark is a two-hour drive down the I-5 Highway in Seattle.
Journalist and baseball historian Tom Hawthorn said the 2001 signing of Japanese outfielder Ichiro Suzuki led to a big boost in Mariners support in B.C. It gave baseball fans the opportunity to see one of the all-time greatest players close to home.
However, that energy has eased over the past quarter-century and the Jays are “far and away the more popular league team” in Vancouver, said Mr. Hawthorn, who is author of Play Ball!, an anecdotal history of baseball in Vancouver.
Much of that is likely due to broadcast access. The Jays are covered across Canada, while it can be difficult to find a Mariners game. Also, the Vancouver Canadians have been a Blue Jays farm team since 2011, meaning that fans who paid a few bucks to see a minor-league baseball game would later see those same players on television, Mr. Hawthorn said.
He noted that when the Mariners have hosted the Jays, “hordes and hordes of Blue Jays fans would go down and essentially invade Seattle, much to the frustration and anger of Mariners fans, who hated all these Blue Jays fans in their stadium.”
He said he’ll be cheering for the Jays to bring a World Series championship to Canada for the first time in 32 years.
Liz McGuire, a hard-core Jays fan in Toronto who became something of a league-wide celebrity last year after she got hit in the head by a Bo Bichette foul ball and remained in her seat the rest of the game, said that she first noticed support for the team spiking in early July, when the Jays swept a regular-season series against the New York Yankees to move into first place.
Ms. McGuire, who now co-hosts the podcast Jay Bird Watching, acknowledged that the sudden surge in interest has caused some frustration, including some related to the prices of tickets, which have shot up. But she has welcomed the new converts.
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An employee creates a custom jersey at the Blue Jays merchandise store.Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
“I’m excited for more people to be involved, and the city to be buzzing,” she said, particularly since baseball has otherwise sometimes struggled to bring in younger fans.
“I feel like there’s room for everyone on the Jays bandwagon,” she said.
Jason Lyons, one of Ms. McGuire’s co-hosts, had 15 people over to his North Vancouver home on Friday to watch the American League Division Series decider between the Mariners and the Detroit Tigers.
Local bars, he said, are uncharacteristically advertising Jays watching parties, and he’s seeing Jays car flags for the first time he can remember.
If Mr. Lyons were inclined toward any skepticism of casual baseball-watchers suddenly claiming fandom, that is outweighed by – among other things – the feeling of a shared experience during an otherwise tense time for Canada.
“We’re all going through tough times right now,” he said. “And if this can unify an entire country, then I’m all for it.”
