Spectrum Records
Summer 2020, VOLUME 1
Blue Jay Way
When I was ten years old, we took a family trip to Toronto. This would have been 1977. My parents didn’t fly, so any vacations had to be within driving distance of our home in Syracuse, NY. The Canadian National Exhibition was happening, so this must have been sometime in August. We stayed at the Holiday Inn by the airport. The hotel pool was enclosed in a Bucky Fuller-style clear dome. My sister and I floated in the pool and watched the planes fly overhead. Besides the Toronto Zoo, which also housed North America’s largest McDonald’s, the highlight of this trip for me was going to my first Toronto Blue Jays game. They played the Seattle Mariners in the old Exhibition Stadium, their first home before Skydome (now, Rogers Centre) was built. I don’t remember the score, although the Jays probably lost. It was their first year in the majors and they went 54-107 that season. What I do remember is falling in love with the club. I’m sure it was a superficial attachment and not based on any specific love for individual players. My love was, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, mostly for the uniforms. That relaxing sky blue, that (to me) smiling blue jay with the exotic red Canadian maple leaf worked into the baseball behind his head, that Seventies-era font with the split-letter design. Toronto was in a foreign country. The Jays sucked for a long time, but I always rooted for the underdog. When the Syracuse Chiefs, our local AAA team, switched from the hated Yankees to become the farm club for the Blue Jays, I was ecstatic. It felt as good or better than your best friend who lived across town suddenly moving next door. To be honest, I didn’t follow them every year, and my fandom strangely went missing when they won two back-to-back World Series’ in 1992 and 1993. Yet here I am again, in the midst of a pandemic, watching my Blue Jays playing to empty stadiums with cardboard cutouts in the seats and piped-in crowd noise. I’m just learning the players’ names and getting to know, as much as I can through the looking glass of my TV screen, their personalities. The players change, but the uniforms don’t (except for that ugly period in the 90s when they wore those horrible black and silver numbers). Although nostalgia can be an addictive drug, it can also soothe us in times of stress. Baseball is more than a game. It’s a decades-long conversation that stretches back to the moment you first fell in love.