... mourning the passing of baseball in Toronto

On Wednesday April 14th I was at an historic event for the Beloved Blue Jays as they drew their smallest attendance ever at Rogers Centre. Now, it's highly possible that there have been smaller crowds than the one that night (The Blue Jays used to have a convoluted way of reporting attendance that inflated each night's total. Not as bad as the NHL's borderline corrupt way of reporting it which makes every game seem like a sell-out...but more on that later).

Being at the game, I can tell you this:

1. I'm still willing to say that the number was over-inflated. It was very very VERY empty in there, no matter how cavernous the venue.
2. It does impact how much you enjoy the game. It's tough to get really involved when you feel as conspicuous as you would were you on a street corner wearing a tin hat and ranting about socialism.
3. None of it surprises me

Let's take away that this is an April game, early in the season when a lot of teams struggle at the gate. Let's look at the following factors

1. The team was arguably playing well: They were first in the AL East and were on a bit of a streak having taken 2 of 3 from the Misbegotten Rangers and swept the Lowly Orioles. True, it's a bit of an illusion, but a win is a win is a win
2. It came one day after Ricky Romero nearly threw a no-hitter, something that even people with the most passing knowledge of baseball can figure out, and was well reported
3. It came at the end of actually a pretty nice day - not nice enough to have the dome open, but definitely a day when people had summer on the mind.

If anything, those three factors should have mitigated the fact that it was an April game even by a little bit - it wouldn't have sold out, but it would haven't have been as bad. No, you weren't going to get a lot of families because it was a school night, but other Toronto teams play on a school night and can draw in more than that and have ZERO chance of playing a meaningful game, so I dismiss that argument with a wave of my hand as easily as I would dismiss a bunch of dead leaves.

So why was attendance so low?

Well, there was the Raptor's last game of the season, which they needed to win to have any playoff hopes. But more importantly, it was the first game of the NHL playoffs, of which Toronto has, at least count....lemme see...yes...zero teams in.

I've said this before, but Toronto is pretty much a one team/sport town - it's all Leafs/hockey, all the time. As such, ANY sport playing in this city is going to be second best, and it shows. The Raptors aren't the draw they used to be, and so few are aware that the Rock even exist that when the league nearly folded it was sidebar story. And before you start, I'll say it again: Don't be so smug, Toronto FC fans. There are already rumblings of discontent in your fanbase, and towards the end of last season there was red in the stands that were seats, not sweaters. You have about one year, possibly two, before a lot of those tickets start getting easier and easier to get.

So...what is my conclusion?

Baseball is dead in Toronto. Long live baseball in Toronto.

"But all they have to do is start winning, and people will come back!" Yes, that is true, and it's all the more proof that baseball is dead.

It's not that people aren't coming to the game because the team isn't winning - people aren't even really talking about the Jays. Traveling through other baseball cities during the season (New York City, Chicago), there's a difference in the air. People talk about the team as part of conversation (even the Mets). They are aware of who is playing and who is not. They have a passing familiarity with the rotation. You hear the game on radios and can see them flicking on TVs. They agree, they disagree, but it never gets heated of boastful. It's part of the fabric of the city and the conversation of its people.

Toronto will never be like that. It just won't. If they win, people will talk and dust of their old hats and banners, but once there's a bump in the road they'll go away. It's not a good thing, it's not a bad thing, it's just the way it is. It's already happened twice in this city (funny how people forget the lean years between the thrill of expansion and the opening of SkyDome...).

There are a lot of cities like this. Dallas has teams in all four sports, but you have to admit that it's a one sport town. Same as Miami, Kansas City, Houston - football is the REAL sport of those cities. There are baseball towns also - New York, Boston, Chicago, St Louis.

Toronto is a hockey town.

So does this mean that baseball is doomed? Does this mean that the city should count the days until the Jays fly south permanently.

No. First of all, there's no where else to go.

Secondly there has to be an attitudinal shift where we as Jays fans admit it: We're not going to draw in large crowds of baseball knowledgeable people, and can we live with that. But we can rebuild IF we are realistic about the outcome. It goes to the heart of what I've been mulling over for the past few years: How does one remain a fan of a team that won't compete yet not be a sucker as much as Leafs fans are? How do you embrace the inner Cubs fan?

There's one word in there that is the key: Cubs. It's about taking an interest in the game as a whole, in the 30 teams and two leagues that play it. It's knowing your team and their team, and talking about them. We're not going to win fans over by beating them over the heads with how great the game is, nor can we lie to them and say it's an exciting young team and that you only need the edge of your seat. The team is in a rebuilding process, so we as fans have to do our part and rebuild the base. We need to find ways to weave the topic of baseball back into the patterns of summers. We need to quietly but steadily show our love of the game and hope that by our example we lead others into a conversation about the sport and why it's worth following. If then they start coming to the games to see the GAME, not the uniforms, then when the team does better there's a base to grow on. A base that hopefully can remain there during the lean years. It's about pride in victory, stoicism in defeat.

I'm not a religious fellow, not in the least, but I guess it comes down to how we want to win converts: By the light shinning through us, or by knocking on people's door and bothering them until they say "Fine, I'll come to the game." I don't know about you, but the first option is what we need to do: Baseball is a game of patience.

Baseball in Toronto is dead. Long live baseball in Toronto.

Do not look directly into the navel
This week the Chicago Sun Times ran a story on the poor showing. Alex Rios and Ozzie Guillen made some great points that echo what I've been saying for a while: It's a one horse town etc.

A lot of strum und dang and pearl clutching came out of some comments in the piece that suggested that baseball would be better served moving out of Toronto and into Latin America.

Three things:

1. As a former Expos fan who still carries that wound, it's kinda hard for me to get too wrapped up in a team moving. Again, I didn't see many of you blocking the road from Montreal to Washington. (And I admit, Montreal is a one sport town also. Baseball, sadly, is not coming back there though I'm convinced it's a better baseball town than Toronto).
2. Cowley is wrong that moving is the only solution.
3. Yeah, it really sucks when someone writes a story about how a sport doesn't belong in your area, that the people aren't fans and don't care, and really the whole sport would be better served by picking up those teams and moving them to places where people really love the game. I'm so glad that we Canadians are completely and utterly blameless in this regard, and would never be so parochial about a game as to sit in judgement of how it's working somewhere else, nor go so far as to try to make it a political issue.

... respecting unwritten rules

The following post contains spoilers for Glengarry Glenn Ross. A good chunk of my life also seems like a spoiler for Glengarry Glenn Ross.

Today was the season opener for the Beloved Blue Jays against the Hardscrabble Rangers. For the first 6 1/3 innings Shaun Marcum didn't allow a hit (though he did walk one batter and hit another). Despite not having pitched for a year, he was cruising towards one of the rarest feats in baseball, the opening day no-hitter - it's only happened once.

There is a tradition in baseball that when someone is cruising towards a no-hitter or perfect game where no one speaks to them, nor does anyone mention what is happening.

The logic is that you don't want to take the player out of his zone.

The superstition is that you don't want to anger the baseball gods, to whom we are like wanton flies (look it up, kids, look it up. It works on a couple of levels).

Today on twitter there was a mild heart attack by all baseball people when those who should know better, including Blue Jays beat writer Jordan Bastian and Roger's Sportsnet's Buck Martinez (currently the second worst manager the Jays have had not named 'Cito'), actually said the word aloud. "Oh, but it doesn't matter," they say, "it won't affect the game."

No, it won't. And it also won't impact my life at all. But...that's the point. Nothing I can do will influence the game, and nothing in the game will actually change my life. So why have a superstition handed down from baseball generation to baseball generation.

There's a scene in Glengarry Glenn Ross when Roma berates Williamson for speaking out of turn and costing him a sale - "You don't open your mouth 'less you know the score". It's the same with everything in life - you don't count your chickens, etc.

Williamson isn't the only one who makes this mistake as not two seconds later Levene, joining the dogplile on Williamson, opens his mouth without knowing the score and manages to incriminate himself in the robbery of the office. Levene is a wily veteran fallen on hard times who taught Roma everything he knows, including (we can assume) that very adage.

Baseball is a game of skill or training, but it's also a game of luck. It's a game of bounces, breezes and bumps. For every great play in history there's the sheer flukiness of the ball bouncing off of Jose Canseco's head, Bill Bucker misjudging a routine ground ball, or the Merkle Boner. It happens. It's part of the charm of baseball - it breaks your heart as it heals someone else's. It's the Wheel of Fortune, spinning in the same rotation as a nasty breaking ball.

And you don't temp the fates. You respect them.

I don't care that you don't think it matters but if you study the game and report on it, you should one that one of the allures of it are these traditions, these unwritten rules. It's a game where people embrace rally caps, videos of monkeys, "Sweet Caroline", and french fries (look it up...I'll give you a hint...Mariners). You should know that what people love about it is the mix of athleticism, drama, and the fact that as you watch the game you can play strategy along with it - you are engaged.

But it's a game of chaos. We respect the chaos, but also don't want to surrender to it so we try to find some order so we don't feel as helpless. It's why it's the most stats heavy of any game, because we want to try to quantify the luck. It's why there are great legends and superstitions around the game because there are so many things that CANNOT be quantified, and we don't want to surrender to that. One of those ways we do that is by not opening our mouths until we know the score - 'less we expose ourselves and our team.

In the end, The Beloved Jays lost 5-4. We all knew there was a nary a chance that Marcum was going to pitch the no-hitter. But there's that word: Chance. And as long as there is a chance, there is hope. And where there is hope, there is also the belief that we can influence what we cannot control even if it is completely irrational.

That's the score.

... opening the 2010 Baseball season

It seems I write one of these every year. I know there's another one on this site somewhere, as well as on old journals and in emails sent to various co-workers.

It's the feeling that grips me every year as April rolls around. There are rumbles of it in February as pitchers and catchers report, and then in March as the Opening Day lineups start to take shape. But it's in April, right at the start of the month, when I start to get excited every time I hear those two little words that mean the world to me, that take me back to when I was a kid and summer stretched out before me like a series of identically memorable days. These two words are the ones that have kept my heart beating since November and tell me that it's finally time to clear the pocket change out of my winter jackets:

"Yankees SUCK!"

Now, this is normally where I go on about the beauty of Opening Day, about how it's one time of year when everyone is equal. And then I say that yes, other sports are like that, but baseball is special because the season is so long, the games HAVE to be won (no ties or overtime loss point for showing up here, kiddies), and there are so few playoff spots that in reality any team can make a run for it. Think I'm joking? Here are some teams - Rockies, Rays, Brewers, Twins, Tigers, Phillies - stick those in your Wikipedia and see how they preformed over the past ten years. There are times when you would have considered their games eminently missable one year, and the next you'd be saying "Bless them boys!"

It's a little harder for me to write that this year because there also another joke I make - Right after the opening pitch of Opening DAY (which for me is always going to be the Reds home opener, you can have opening night, but that one Reds game is when I consider the season good and underway) where I say "And the insert team name is mathematically eliminated". There's always one or two teams that you know WON'T make it - it used to be the Rays, and for a while it was the Tigers, and last year it was the Royal or Pirates. It's harder for me because insert team name are The Beloved Blue Jays.

And it's not just the loss of Halladay going to The Hated Phillies. It's the CitoBot 2000's lame(r) duck managing year. It's a lackluster starting rotation and cardiac-inducing bullpen. It's a third base that you COULD ACTUALLY CALL "I Don't Know", an outfield that still looks a little unsettled in the middle, and a few players who may be the stuff that Quadruple-A legends are made of. In the years before this I could have pointed to "This could be Vernon's year" or "Maybe Rios can calm down and work on those fundamentals," or "If Roy stays healthy and Ryan and Burnett get their confidence" as ways to derive hope. The best this year might be "Hopefully the fans will see what a great situational hitter Overbay is and stop pulling their typical Toronto boo-bird crap on him," even though he couldn't hit a left handed pitcher even if he pitched underhand.

So, what do I have left?

I have the game.

I have the patience it teaches you over 162 games. I have the belief in luck that you see in every game. I have the allure of it being a thinking-person's game where you can strategize along with the manager (unless he's the CitoBot 2000. With him, it's all subroutines). I have the great conversations you get in the stands with other fans, even when you don't agree. I have the great heckling (but please, no wives / sisters / mothers / daughters, okay guys?). I have the memories that no beer ever tastes better than on a warm June night with the roof open. I have the little portable radio I keep at work for the afternoon games. I have the great literature that baseball has produced from The Natural to the works of W.P. Kinsella to Ball Four to The Bullpen Gospels.

Most importantly, I have the feeling that I get every time I walk into a park, when they take your ticket and you go to the end of your aisle and see that field for the the first time, how it seems to stretch out to infinity no matter where the walls are. How it reminds you that it's a pastoral game that is played in the heart of the city. How there are the little traditions and little legends that make up each ball park. And how each year there were fans of the Pirates, the Devil Rays, the Tigers, the Twins, the Royals, the Mariners who came out knowing that their season wasn't going to end in November, and that there it was going to be a long season no matter how you cut it. They went anyway because they knew that they never knew what they were going to see. They knew that it was a game where you could be down 17-0 in the ninth and with two out, but if the right batter came up against the right pitcher....

Every year I think of the great line from Summerland by Michael Chabon - "Baseball is the length by which we measure a summer's day." In the end, that's what baseball means to me - it's a summer's day that moves at its own leisure, great moments of speed and action followed by the sun on your arms, and you're more than welcome to come along.