Baseball… Doesn’t seem like a very Canadian sport. In a country where it’s known to be winter six months of the year, cold another two, with the potential of snow two more, it seems odd that a country could love baseball as much as we do! Add to that we actually only have one team that plays nationally, and it does not seem like a recipe for success.

However, the Toronto Blue Jays are immensely popular, and they have a massive following in Canada! From west to east, they are Canada’s team (and not just because they are our only choice of a team in the bigs). Back in the early 2000’s, Canada did have two teams – the Blue Jays and the Montreal Expos. Unfortunately, the Expos relocated to Washington, DC and became the Washington Nationals.

Back in 2013 or so, my Mom and my step-dad started watching the Jays play. Through their love and their yearly travel to a different city to watch the team play, the entire family started watching games. Their kids, grandkids – everyone came to watch ball – and knew, at the very least, if you were in the house when the game was on, you’d never get an answer to a question (or dinner)!

One year, my kiddo decided he wanted to play ball. So, we found a little league team in a neighbouring community and signed him up. He had a good season, slugged a couple of doubles, had a RBI-y or two, and I learned coordinating a bunch of parents into doing anything for a year-end wrap up party is worse than herding cats on crack. Unfortunately, he was too young to move up into the next league that fall, and by the next spring, too many things got in the way of playing again. But… He always wanted to see the Toronto Blue Jays play at Roger’s Centre!

Through some lucky events, I happened to be in Toronto at the end of the Jay’s 2022/2023 season! It only made sense that my favourite human being take a plane and come meet met and help me strike a few things off my 50×50 list!

We were astounded at the insane line-ups to get in to see a game! There was a hoodie give-away the day we went. Now, we were hopeful we might get one, as we were more than two hours early for the gates to open. However, we learned that people had actually lined up more than five hours before the gates opened in order to get the ‘free’ give-away! It was crazy waiting in line like that! Two hours was more than enough standing around in the hot and humid Toronto fall weather. It was some 28 degrees Celsius the day we went! I cannot imagine it in the throws of the really hot summer days!

Now, my kiddo is not a small boy. At 16, he stands just over six feet four inches tall. He’s a big kid and I can tell you, the seats at Roger’s Centre are not. I intentionally booked seats at the end of a row, by the end of an upper aisle specifically so he could drape his legs over he rail. Our row, and the one in front of us was sold out when I bought our tickets, however, come game time, our section was deserted. Thank goodness! At 5′-9″, I had trouble in the seats! We were able to take a little more room.

It was amazing to watch the team take the field! Real, live baseball players! The only problem? They were really hard to see. We were second level, directly in line with first base. Good seats, close to the field, but far enough, they looked like Lego people to us. We would have had to have been first level, but that would have put us in direct line of the sun for the first few innings. We learned there are definitely trade-offs watching the game live vs watching it on television! There are no play-by-plays watching it live, and no one announces each batter, or tells us which pitch is which. You also can’t see the pitches from the second level, so it makes arm-chair umpiring much harder. Haha!

But! What you can do is cheer, participate in the wave, and chat with fellow fans (if it happens to come up). You also can’t wander the concourse and get snacks. Giant rainbow tubs of popcorn, footlong hotdogs, and drinks that hold a litre of fluid! The big blue jay mascot doesn’t wander around your living room and your favourite ball players aren’t just a few hundred feet from your eyes, live and in person!

A once and a lifetime experience and I’m so glad I got to share it with my favourite TroubleMaker. They also won that game – 12 to 1!