Pull up your socks

There have been hundreds of thousands of workers in the sports industry affected by the COVID-19 shutdown, a group that includes everyone from arena staff to restaurants and retailers.
One small local company that was founded in my neighborhood in Toronto’s east end is in that group.Major League Socks created by Jake Mednick and Tom McCole four years ago, has sold hundreds of thousands of socks branded with hockey players’ faces. If you’re a Leafs fan, you’re probably familiar with their original idea, Babsocks, which were dedicated to then-Leafs coach Mike Babcock.


After Babsocks took off — selling more than 400,000 pairs since their launch in the fall of 2015 — Mednick and McCole went on to partner with the NHL Alumni Association and later the NHLPA to add nearly 100 more faces to socks and get them into team stores across North America.
They also have an agreement to begin selling socks with Major League Baseball players on them that is on hold until the baseball season resumes.
Their quirky little idea has become big business. Or at least it was, until the shutdown.
“We were finally starting to build up some traction in markets outside of Toronto, especially in the U.S., which is really exciting,” Mednick said of the momentum the business had. “Honestly, the timing couldn’t have been worse.”
Full disclosure: I’ve gotten to know Jake and Tom fairly well the last few years, after first writing about them in the Globe and Mail  back in 2016. I see them around the neighbourhood, and we play beer league hockey once in a while. It’s been great to see them turn into a local success story.
The reason I wanted to write about them was twofold.
One, they’re representative of the wide array of businesses and people in sports affected by the shutdown. Their business has basically been decimated the past few weeks, with most retailers cancelling all orders. Major League Socks has raised more than $150,000 for mental-health charities since the company was founded, in part thanks to Babcock’s endorsement, and all of that work is on hold now that revenues have evaporated.
The other thing that is unique about their story is the Babsocks themselves, something I had intended to write about before the shutdown. When Babcock was let go by the Leafs back in November, the company still had a huge inventory of socks bearing the coach’s likeness — 13,000 pairs to be precise. Boxes and boxes, to the chagrin of Jake’s parents, whose basement is filled with them.
So, for the past four and a half months, they’ve been wondering what exactly to do with 13,000 socks that have an unemployed NHL coach’s face on them.
“Well, I never have to buy another pair of socks again,” Mednick said when we connected the other day. “At least that’s crossed off the balance sheet in the future, you know?”
“Maybe, you know, Seattle could be blue?” McCole added, joking that the new franchise might be where Babcock ends up.

The pair are hopeful that Babcock will be rehired somewhere, and the momentum behind the brand will come back. Realistically, however, that may not happen. And that’s a lot of socks.
The company recently donated 1,000 pairs of Babsocks to one charity,  Souls for Socks Canada which provides the homeless with footwear. According to their website, socks are “the most needed but least donated item of clothing to homeless shelters” and more than “20 percent of medical problems experienced by homeless people are related to foot care.”
The donation means Major League Socks still has 12,000 Babsocks to somehow dispose of, something they’re willing to take suggestions from our readers on. Unless Babcock signs on with another NHL team in the near future, it’s unlikely they will be able to sell them — only 150 pairs have been purchased in the past five months.
Some of the controversy around Babcock after the Leafs let him go damaged his reputation with hockey fans, too. While he arrived in Toronto hailed as the best coach in the game and the team steadily improved in his first two seasons,he was left under a cloud of negative stories related to the way he treated his players.

Despite losing his job and leaving the city, Babcock made the four-hour drive from Michigan to coach the Midget AAA Elgin-Middlesex Chiefs in January at Chesswood Arena. The practice was vintage Babcock, apparently, with plenty of preparation and tutoring turned into an hour-long grind on the ice.

“He put everything into it,” Mednick said. “He did a great job.”
Babcock also spent time with the team’s captain, Eric Smith, and spoke with his parents, who had been devastated by a recent suicide in the family.
“The entire community rallied to make sure that they won this practice with Babcock,” McCole explained. “I know that he got a hold of the parents that lost their son and had a private conversation with them. He’s always been so good to us. It’s awesome he kept his word.”
“With the help Babcock, we’ve done a lot of good charity work,” Mednick said. “So it’s nice as the socks can continue in that vein.”

Mednick and McCole hope that Babcock will coach again in the NHL — and not just for the sake of their company. They saw a lot of good in the man in the years they spent turning his face into a sock empire, and Babcock never asked for anything in return.
It’s Babcock’s charitable spirit, they said, that they hope to carry on even with business ground to a halt these past few weeks. Major League Socks is working on another initiative that will be announced soon that will support front-line health-care workers fighting COVID-19 in hospitals around the world.
Their goal is to create a line of socks with doctors, nurses, and other medical staff on them and donate 100 percent of the proceeds to helping them combat the pandemic.
“We usually celebrate hockey heroes on our socks, but there are some more important heroes to celebrate right now,” Mednick said. “That’s the goal of the program.”

Arod & J - Lo seeking the Mets

Retired baseball star Alex Rodriguez and his fiancé, recording artist and actor Jennifer Lopez, have retained JPMorgan Chase to raise capital for a possible bid on the New York Mets, people familiar with the matter said.

The superstar couple is working with managing director Eric Menell, the bank’s co-head of North American media investment banking, said the people, who were granted anonymity because the matter is private. Menell didn’t respond to several requests seeking comment.
Representatives for Rodriguez and Lopez did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Wilpon family, which owns the Mets, said in December they were in talks to sell up to 80% of the Major League Baseball team to hedge fund titan Steve Cohen in a deal that valued the club at $2.6 billion. Under terms of that proposed deal, the Wilpons would’ve maintained control of the franchise for five years.
Negotiations fell apart after Cohen sought to amend the terms.
The Mets have retained Allen & Co.’s Steve Greenberg to oversee the sale process.

It isn’t uncommon for an athlete, entertainer or celebrity to hold a limited position in a professional sports team. A-Rod’s former teammate, Derek Jeter, for instance, is a part owner of baseball’s Miami Marlins. The team’s managing partner is venture capitalist Bruce Sherman, while Jeter, who owns about 4% of the club, runs business and baseball operations. Jeter contributed about $25 million to the purchase of the team, which was sold for $1.2 billion.
A-Rod and J-Lo, as the recording artist is known, would similarly require deep-pocketed partners in order to pull off the purchase. Their combined net worth is about $700 million.
As a player, A-Rod entertained signing with the Mets as a free agent in 2000. He ultimately signed a record 10-year, $252 million deal with the Texas Rangers. He was then traded to the Yankees, where he won a World Series.
J-Lo is from the Bronx, home of the Yankees.


Unlike with Cohen, no preconditions regarding control of the team will be attached to the sale. Cohen holds an 8% stake in the Mets.
The Wilpons assumed control of the franchise in 2002 at a valuation of $391 million. Whoever buys the team will assume annual losses of at least $50 million.

Who;s next Marilyn Manson buying the White Sox ?

Take me out to the ballgame..

Baseball is music to me, the rhythm and words depict that song that I love.

The story, as Julian Casablancas tells it, is that he wrote the song “Ode to the Mets” on a subway platform after a disheartening trip to Citi Field. The track is not necessarily about the Mets; it does not mention baseball, Queens or even David Wright. No, it’s more about how one might feel while waiting for the train after a painful loss in October.

“They should play it after every Mets loss at the stadium,” Casablancas, the lead singer for The Strokes, said during a recent online listening party for the band’s sixth studio album, “The New Abnormal.” “You know, like they have celebratory songs for when the teams win.”
Casablancas, a child of New York, is a Mets fan. That much is clear. “The team of my youth,” he said. In 2010, he told Rolling Stone he wanted to write a theme song for the team (“I’m totally serious,” he said), and it seems as if the painful loss in question might have been the 3-0 loss to the San Francisco Giants in the 2016 NL Wild Card Game, though some of the details seem a bit hazy.
“I was waiting for the train,” he said. “That’s why we called it that. I assumed it would change and it somehow never did.”

   The Strokes are not the first member of the indie rock canon to find inspiration in the Mets — John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats released a song titled “Doc Gooden” last year — and Casablancas is certainly not the first famous musician to be charmed by the sport. Eddie Vedder and Billy Corgan love the Cubs. Ben Gibbard roots for the Mariners. Same for Jason Isbell and the Braves. Riley Breckenridge, the drummer for Thrice, played at Pepperdine and runs the Twitter account @ProductiveOuts with Kowloon Walled City bassist Ian Miller.
Stephen Malkmus (Pavement) has played in a fantasy baseball league with Mike Mills (R.E.M.) and Ira Kaplan (Yo La Tengo). And yes, Yo La Tengo is named for a (probably) apocryphal Mets reference.

   The marriage between music and baseball dates more than a century. The attraction, Darnielle said, is simple: We all die. We all consider our own mortality. And athletes, well, they get old.
  “I’m fascinated by sports because I assume if you are a pitcher, your craft gets better, but what doesn’t get better is your arm,” Darnielle said, while discussing his 2019 album, “In League With Dragon.” “(As a songwriter) your powers of writing and observation get better. I don’t think my oldest stuff is my best stuff at all. We face this as we go on. What’s the nature of our magic?”
   In this way, “Ode to the Mets” joins a very specific tradition of songs about baseball, about considering an athlete’s end and the experience of being a fan.
   “It’s more like something that you set your heart to and that you love unconditionally but that continues to disappoint you,” said Fab Moretti, the drummer of The Strokes. “Which was kind of what I gathered from the song, too.”
   With The Strokes joining the canon of baseball tracks, and the sport waiting to return, here are the 30 songs we believe stand above the rest.

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30. “3rd Base, Dodger Stadium,” Ry Cooder
Cooder, the legendary sideman, spent his youth in Santa Monica and graduated high school two years after the doors opened at Dodger Stadium. In 2005, Cooder crafted an album called “Chávez Ravine,” a series of songs, including this one, about the Mexican-American community that was displaced during the construction of the ballpark. Consider this record a companion to “Stealing Home,” the wonderful new book by Eric Nusbaum.
29. “Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown on a Bad Bet,” Fall Out Boy
“If anyone knows anything about Pete Rose and gambling and where the Baseball Hall of Fame is, then they probably understand the title,” Fall Out Boy bassist and lyricist Pete Wentz said in a video for NME in 2008. “Otherwise, it’s like talking about Liverpool soccer club — Football Club to an American. We know little, and should not talk about it.” The song appears to have very little to else to say about Rose’s case — it is hard to apply lyrics like “tempest in a teacup, get unique; Peroxide Princess shine like shark teeth,” as John M. Dowd was balding and Rose these days always seems to be wearing a hat. For what it’s worth: Wentz has suggested Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame.
28. “OK Blue Jays,” The Bat Boys
In baseball, the range of team-centric motivational anthems spans from delightfully catchy to dolefully preposterous. “OK Blue Jays” resides closer to the former pole on that continuum. The kitschiness of the tune does not override how much fun it is to shout the chorus during the seventh-inning stretch at Rogers Centre. The song is dumb. The dance is dumb. It is timeless. It is baseball. —
27. “Right Field,” Peter, Paul and Mary
The theme is universal, applicable to the gawky, uncoordinated youth; to the hungover sophomore trying to aid his dorm’s softball team while not puking; to the creaky-kneed Boomer hoping to stay fit but avoid embarrassment. The apprehension of standing in the outfield, hoping the baseball is not hit your way. Have no fear, the story of our protagonist ends in joy, rather than despair:

Then suddenly everyone’s looking at me,
My mind has been wandering, what could it be?
They point at the sky and I look up above,
And a baseball falls into my glove!

26. “Ichiro’s Theme,” Ben Gibbard
The departure of Ichiro Suzuki from Seattle filled the Pacific Northwest with sorrow. Along with Félix Hernández, he had been a beacon for Mariners fans during an otherwise fallow stretch of baseball. When he requested a trade in summer 2012, an era came to an end.
There was one benefit, though. The deal inspired Gibbard, the Death Cab For Cutie frontman, to release a tribute he had written to Suzuki a few years earlier. Gibbard was in the stands at Safeco Field when Suzuki took the field with the Yankees.

“One day he was a Mariner, the next day he was walking across the field,” Gibbard said. “I had gone to that game, just because I had to see the spectacle of it all. I stayed to see one at-bat and then I was like, ‘I don’t feel good. I want to go home.’ That seemed like a good time to put it out in the world, out of appreciation for everything that he did in Seattle.”

The lyrics offer the bona fides of Gibbard’s fandom, with references to broadcaster Dave Niehaus and Suzuki’s cannon for an arm “throwing out runners on a frozen rope,” not to mention an allusion to Ichiro’s NPB club, the Orix Blue Wave. It is a jaunty little number from a legitimate fan: Gibbard in 2019 that Suzuki was his third-favorite Mariners player of all time, behind Alvin Davis and Spike Owen.

25. “Mickey Mantle,” WATERS
The footprints that ballplayers leave on our cultural memory extend beyond the diamond. For “The Mick,” his ability to carouse was almost as legendary as his ability to clout a baseball. Hence the line in this mournful tune from a band from Norway of all places: “I was feeling Mickey Mantle … wasted.”
24. “Bill Lee,” Warren Zevon
Consider this a product of mutual admiration. “The Spaceman” was in his final season with the Red Sox when Zevon released “Excitable Boy,” a record that included the smash “Werewolves of London.” Lee loved the album and started incorporating the lyrics into his already voluble, already chaotic interviews. When Zevon found out about Lee’s affinity for the music, he penned this song for his next record, 1980’s “Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School.”
The song lasts only 97 seconds. It says all you need to know about why Lee was an iconoclast, and why his memory endured long after his career ended.

You’re ‘sposed to sit on you ass and nod at stupid things,
Man that’s hard to do.
But if you don’t they’ll screw you,
And if you do they’ll screw you too.
And I’m standing in the middle of the diamond all alone,
I always play to win when it comes to skin and bone.

23. “Ode to the Mets,” The Strokes
The irony of “Ode to the Mets” is that the opening line is “Up on his horse, up on his horse,” and all I could think about was Wade Boggs and the 1996 World Series. The rest of the lyrics remain fairly ambiguous, though, so perhaps we can pretend that Casablancas was sitting on that subway platform, thinking about Endy Chavez “on his horse” while making that sensational catch during Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS.
22. “Doc Gooden,” The Mountain Goats
The Mountain Goats are the project of Darnielle, one of the most prolific and acclaimed singer-songwriters of the last 25 years. His 2019 song, “Doc Gooden,” from the album “In League With Dragons,” was not his first foray into baseball. But he found Gooden to be an intriguing character, and his career arc to be perfect subject matter for a song. The track is centered around the final years of Gooden’s career, looking back at his no-hitter in 1996 with the Yankees and his time as a star with the Mets in 1980. From the second verse:
Deluxe coach to the ballpark
There’s champagne on the snack trays
Summon up the spirit of a brighter time
Looked bad last week against the Blue Jays
“When you’re watching a baseball game, you have so much idle time, between pitches, between innings, to think about your life,” Darnielle said during an interview in 2016. “It’s one of the things about baseball.”
21. “The Greatest,” Kenny Rogers
The first single on Rogers’ 1999 album, “She Rides Wild Horses,” “The Greatest” is a nostalgic tale of a little boy and a baseball. It spent 20 weeks on the country singles chart, peaking at No. 26, which represented Rogers’ first chart success in seven years.
20. “Night Game,” Paul Simon
This was the final track on side A of Simon’s 1975 stunner, “Still Crazy After All These Years.” It is a strange one. Simon charts the passage of the seasons through the on-field death of a player. “There were two men down, and the score was tied, in the bottom of the eighth, when the pitcher died,” he sings. Over the strum of a guitar and Toots Thielemans’ harmonica, Simon speaks of the stars and the moon before wrapping up. “There were three men down, and the season lost, and the tarpaulin was rolled, upon the winter frost.”
19. “Don’t Call Them Twinkies,” The Baseball Project
If you are a fan of Minnesota Twins references and the music of The Hold Steady, this may be your favorite song of all time. The Baseball Project is a supergroup of musicians and baseball fans (including Mills and Peter Buck of R.E.M.), and it has released three albums of baseball-themed songs. Yet their best is likely their 2011 collaboration with Craig Finn, leader of The Hold Steady.

The opening line verse:
In 1965, I wasn’t quite alive yet
But I’m told they gave the MVP to Zoilo Versalles
Oliva hit the singles and Harmon hit the homers
Mudcat Grant won 20 games and they didn’t play in a dome yet
Finn has roots in the Twin Cities and a long-time affinity for the hometown team. So, as the song says, “grab yourself a 3.2 beer, raise a toast to Gardy.”

18. “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio,” Les Brown & His Orchestra
They don’t make ditties like they used to. This right here is a ditty. It sounds like a song you fall asleep listening to in the back of your eighth-grade history class. The lyrics tell the tale of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak — and it would have ranked higher if the band found something to rhyme with “Ken Keltner.”
17. “The Cheap Seats,” Alabama
Is “The Cheap Seats” good? I’m not exactly sure, though I do know that if you go to a college baseball game, there’s a 97 percent chance you will hear this song played between innings. In fact, my high school baseball team would play it on a stereo during batting practice. It was released in 1994, just a few months before a strike ended the major-league season, and was the title track on an album of the same name.
The song is set in a “middle-size town in the middle of the middle-west.” According to the opening line, “This town ain’t big, this town ain’t small.” The folks in said town note that their “ball club may be minor league but at least it’s Triple A.” Scholars have guessed that “The Cheap Seats” is likely set in Des Moines, Iowa.
16. “Glory Days,” Bruce Springsteen
Even amidst the pop sheen of the “Born in The U.S.A.” album (which has “Dancing in the Dark” and “I’m Goin’ Down”) “Glory Days” feels particularly hokey. There’s that opening guitar riff and the reference to the kid who “could throw that speedball by you, make you look like a fool, boy.” There’s also the music video, which features Springsteen on a baseball field, throwing pitches up against a wooden backstop (and a reference to Graig Nettles!). There’s something about it, though. I once saw a Springsteen concert in Phoenix during spring training and ended up sitting about 10 feet from a veteran major leaguer. He was there with family and stayed rather reserved the whole night, but when “The Boss” started playing “Glory Days,” they all went nuts.
15. “Dream of Mickey Mantle,” Bleachers
Jack Antonoff, lead singer of Bleachers, sometimes producer of Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and others, grew up in New Jersey. His first experience with death, as he recalls, was when Yankees legend Mickey Mantle died in 1995. “That was the first memory I had that anything could leave,” he said in 2017, “that things weren’t permanent, was Mickey Mantle.” The memory inspired the leadoff track on Bleachers’ 2017 album, which features this lyric: “Mickey Mantle left on a Sunday, and all of the neighborhood rushes home to pray.” For a heavy tune, it’s quite anthemic.
14. “Look, It’s Baseball,” Guided by Voices
Guided by Voices were one of the seminal acts of the indie underground in the 1990s, and in late 1996, the band released a limited-edition vinyl LP with a song about baseball. The album was called “Tonics & Twisted Chasers.” The song was called “Look, It’s Baseball,” and it referenced “candlestick parks” and what appears to be a night out at the ballpark.
It’s unclear where the inspiration came from, but Guided by Voices frontman Robert Pollard was once a college pitcher at Wright State, talented enough to throw a no-hitter against Indiana Central in 1978. And this isn’t even the most impressive Guided by Voices athletic feat: The band once defeated members of The Smashing Pumpkins and Beastie Boys during a pickup game at Lollapalooza.
13. “Major Leagues,” Pavement
Not explicitly a baseball song, “Major Leagues” appears on the 1999 album, “Terror Twilight,” the fifth and final album from indie rock pioneers Pavement. The lyrics are slightly ambiguous but the chorus is pretty straightforward (“Bring on the Major Leagues”). At various points in his career, Malkmus, the frontman, has embraced (and played down) his obsession with sports fandom. But he remains an astute tennis analyst via his Twitter account and a fantasy baseball veteran. “Don’t pick pitchers early, you know?” he told Paste Magazine in 2018. “People who have Max Scherzer or Corey Kluber might disagree with me. You can also wait for people to get impatient and drop people. That’s my advice: Swoop in, especially in these first two months, and look at the peripherals. If the skills are there, the luck will even out. Hopefully.”
12. “Ty Cobb,” Soundgarden
Originally titled “Hot Rod Death Toll,” the lyrics and themes from this 1996 song from Soundgarden reminded bassist Ben Shepherd of Ty Cobb, the Hall of Fame outfielder who collected more than 4,000 hits and a reputation for being a misanthrope. Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell, who wrote the lyrics, once told British magazine Kerrang! that he didn’t know anything about Cobb and that the song is about a “combination of a lot of people I’ve met and didn’t like.” Listen to the chorus, however — “hard-headed (expletive) you all” — and you can see how Shepherd would have thought of Cobb. The real-life historical record of the Tigers great is slightly more complicated than the song, which is frenetic, aggressive and, in the words of Entertainment Weekly, “like metal bluegrass.”
11. “Barry Bonds,” Kanye West
In summer 2007, as West prepared for the follow-up to his genre-redefining records “The College Dropout” and “Late Registration,” Bonds entered the final stages of his summit on Hank Aaron’s home run record. A week after Bonds swatted No. 756, West revealed he had invited Lil Wayne into the studio to record a song commemorating the achievement, with the swollen slugger serving as an avatar for West’s gift for forging gems: “Here’s another hit — Barry Bonds.”
In a way, the song presaged the chaos that often accompanied West’s releases in the 2010s. The hype — Wayne had recently released “Da Drought 3,” and was at the height of his powers — did not exactly match the finished product. But it was still a good time.
10. “Go Cubs Go,” Steve Goodman
Music can serve as an act of communion, the connective tissue binding us. In a moment like this, it is hard not to feel the heartstrings tug when watching this video from the 2016 World Series. We long for those days to return — not just in Chicago, but everywhere — for the chance to share moments with others once more.

9.”Batter Up,” Nelly
The first image in the video for “Country Grammar” is the grin of Cornell Haynes, soon to be known to the world as Nelly, wearing a St. Louis Cardinals fitted beneath the Gateway Arch. He stomped into the public consciousness draped in the garments of his hometown. His charm was enough to coax a hit record out of his pals, the St. Lunatics. There are a variety of baseball metaphors in here, most of them crude. Nelly also vouches for the restorative power of Wheaties.
8. “Tessie,” Dropkick Murphys
“Tessie,” a 2004 song by New England punk band Dropkick Murphys, is a spiritual cover of a 1902 song, “Tessie (You Are the Only, Only, Only)” from the musical “The Silver Slipper.” The earlier “Tessie” was adopted as a rally song by the Royal Rooters, a fan club of the then Boston Americans, who became the Red Sox. The leader of the Rooters was a man named Michael T. McGreevy, a saloon owner who is a central character in Dropkick Murphys’ version of the song. The band recorded the track in 2004, and according to the liner notes from its 2005 album “The Warrior’s Code,” it told “anyone that would listen that this song would guarantee a World Series victory.” The Red Sox ended their 86-year-old drought that fall, coming back against the Yankees along the way, and “Tessie” is now synonymous with the franchise. The song was added as a bonus track to “Warrior’s Code” in 2005; the album also featured “I’m Shipping Up To Boston,” which is not about baseball but did provide Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon with one of the best entry songs in the sport’s history.
7. “Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song),” The Treniers
What better time than now to watch Ken Burns’ “Baseball”? You’ll hear this one in it. There is something soothing about hearing Claude and Cliff Trenier opine about “The Say Hey Kid” running the bases like a choo-choo train and making the turn around second like an aeroplane.
6. “Joe DiMaggio Done it Again,” Billy Bragg & Wilco
In 1998, British singer Billy Bragg and the band Wilco collaborated on an album called “Mermaid Avenue,” which took previously unknown lyrics from Woody Guthrie and put them to original music. The first album gave birth to the song “California Stars,” which became one of Wilco’s best-known songs. It also led to a “Mermaid Avenue Vol. II” in 2000, which included a song about Joe DiMaggio.
Just 2 1/2 minutes, “Joe DiMaggio Done It Again” chronicles a star in his final years. The lyrics, in fact, were reportedly written in 1949, when DiMaggio came back from a painful heel injury and hit .346/.459/.596 at 34, leading the Yankees to a World Series championship.
Wilco, of course, has associations with the city of Chicago, though front man Jeff Tweedy, a native of Belleville, Ill., is on record having grown up a Cardinals fan. 
5. “Piazza, New York Catcher,” Belle & Sebastian
Stuart Murdoch, the frontman of the Glasgow indie-folk band Belle & Sebastian, began following the Mets in the late 1990s when he joined a friend for a game at Shea Stadium. He instantly noticed catcher Mike Piazza. “That’s the thing about him,” Murdoch told Rolling Stone a few years ago. “He was a talisman wherever he went. He was the kind of player people tended to follow, and we thought he was a good guy.” The feeling eventually turned into the 2003 song, “Piazza, New York Catcher,” which features a reference to a Giants and Mets game in San Francisco, a playful nod to the Willie Mays statue outside the park, and a rather infamous line about a Piazza tabloid story that had played out in New York the previous year. In addition, there’s also a fifth verse in which Murdoch sings about Piazza’s exploits (“The catcher hits for .318 and catches every day”) and an unnamed pitcher who “puts religion first and rests on holidays.” The consensus, of course, is that the latter line is about Dodgers legend Sandy Koufax, and gazing at Baseball-Reference, the other line might be a Dodgers reference as well. Piazza only hit .318 in a season once, when he played in 149 games for the Dodgers in 1993, his first full season in the big leagues.
4. “All The Way,” Pearl Jam
A tribute to his childhood team (and conceived at the request of Ernie Banks), Pearl Jam’s Vedder debuted “All The Way” at a concert at Chicago’s Vic Theatre in August 2007, a warmup before a bigger show that week at Lollapalooza. The song had an official release the next year and became an instant staple in Cubs world, and in 2013, Vedder played the song during a summer concert at Wrigley Field, sharing its origins. “You know, the Cubs need a song,” Vedder recalled Banks telling him. “Wrigley Field needs a song. You know, all about the feeling and spirituality and the ballpark and the fans, and as he was saying it, I realized that — I wasn’t going to interrupt — but in my mind, I was thinking: that’s an impossible thing to do. It’s just too grand and too sacred. But it was his birthday, and when Ernie Banks asks you to do something … you go home and do it.”
3. “Talkin’ Baseball,” Terry Cashman
This song, objectively, slaps.
It also offers a tour through baseball history. Cashman wrote the song during the 1981 strike. He saw a picture of Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider standing together in the outfield. The chorus for this song soon followed. Cashman strung together references to Ted Kluszewski and Dan Quisenberry, while managing to rhyme Roy Campanella with Bob Feller. It is quite charming.
The song tanked upon its initial release, but eventually found purchase among baseball fans. In 2011, the Hall of Fame invited Cashman to perform at the annual induction ceremony. Not bad for a song Cashman has said he wrote in 20 minutes.
Bonus points if you memorized all the words to “Talkin’ Softball” in your youth.
2. “Catfish,” Bob Dylan
In 1975, as Dylan was writing and recording many of the songs that would end up on his 1976 album, he wrote a bluesy number about pitcher Catfish Hunter, who had moved from A’s to the New York Yankees the same year.

Lazy stadium night
Catfish on the mound
“Strike three,” the umpire said
Batter have to go back and sit down
Catfish, million-dollar-man
Nobody can throw the ball like Catfish can

The song references his work on “Mr. Finley’s farm” and that the “old man wouldn’t pay,” so Hunter ended up in New York.
It is slow and brooding, and it would be covered by Joe Cocker, but it would not receive a proper Dylan release until 1991, when it ended up on

1. “Cubs in Five,” The Mountain Goats
Yes, another Cubs song. There is something about the Cubs and music. When the team returned to the World Series in 2016, I interviewed Darnielle about his song “Cubs in Five,” which originally appeared on the 1995 EP “Nine Black Poppies” and became a cult classic among Mountain Goats heads and people who enjoyed lo-fi indie rock. According to Darnielle, he became a Cubs fan during childhood after reading a story in My Weekly Reader. He followed the team from afar on WGN, and he wrote “Cubs in Five” while finishing up school at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. It is very much a Mountain Goats song — it includes guitar, bedroom-quality production, a harmony vocal with friend Peter Hughes and an incredibly memorable chorus.

“And the Chicago Cubs … will beat every team in the league, and the Tampa Bay Bucs … will make it all the way through January, and I will love you again, I will love you like I used to.”
In the song, Darnielle lists off a series of highly unlikely occurrences (“They’re gonna find intelligent life on the moon” or “Bill Gates will single-handedly spearhead the Heaven 17 revival.”) On the day he wrote it, he knew he had something. Darnielle has said “Cubs in Five” was actually about an on-again, off-again relationship that had gone south. Which wasn’t too hard to discern. But it was much like his connection with his favorite baseball team.

 He could never stay angry for long.
“Because that’s how it is when you’re a fan,” he wrote in a piece for Slate before the 2016 World Series. “You keep cheering, even when the circumstances might tell a less devoted partisan to seek out fairer pastures. You play nine innings. You keep hoping.”  

But the real number one is Take me out to the ballgame.....

Damo

  I apologize to those who follow me for missing a story that needed to be told. Damaso Garcia died recently and I failed to write about it. Perhas it was because I was not a real big fan of Damaso that I let this one slip by me, perhaps it was becuase he alledgedly burnt his jersey up. I am weraling my blue jays cap as I write this blog, this extra long blog, as a pennace for not reporting it when it happened.

Sorry Damo, I will write a what I have found out about this special man.

García was a complicated man whose headlines often did not do him justice.
Writers loved him early and panned him late, especially after that infamous uniform-burning incident in 1986. Some writers never much liked him. Others found him a convivial conversationalist.
In the clubhouse, beyond prying eyes, Garth Iorg treasured him.
“I can never, ever think of one time where we had a disagreement or a cross word with one another,” said Iorg, another reliable contributor to those early Jays teams. “He was a great friend.”
García was a proud man. He was particularly proud of his two All-Star Game selections, said Buck Martinez, another teammate.
“And we were proud to have him represent us, for sure, because he represented the character we all had, and the fight we all had, and the pride we all had playing for the Blue Jays. He epitomized that.”
In 1991, just two years after his career ended, García underwent surgery to remove a malignant brain tumour. He was 34. Doctors gave him six months to live.
His life was hard after that. For close to half his years, his quality of life suffered. There were hospitalizations, a stroke and breathing issues. Still, for many years he attended to charitable work and kept up his sense of humour. He came back to Toronto and threw out a first pitch.
In recent years, each time his prospects looked grim, he rallied.
Until Wednesday morning, when he died in San Pedro de Macoris.
Gord Ash got the news in a call from a contact in the Dominican Republic. Shortly thereafter, the former Blue Jays’ general manager, who works for the Milwaukee Brewers now, was asked to share his memories of García.
“He was a tremendous athlete with a fiery personality, which served him positively because I think it drove him,” Ash said. “But it also got him in trouble from time to time.”
And now, Tony Fernández and Dámaso García are both gone, almost exactly a month apart. They had formed a marvellous double-play tandem back in the 1980s, when the Blue Jays soared for the first time.
“Tony was 57 and Damo was 63,” said Pat Gillick, the man who brought them both to Toronto. “It’s kind of early to go, you know.”

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Dámaso García’s baseball story is closely aligned with the origin story of the Blue Jays. He was not a shining prospect when he started. When he came to Toronto, nobody knew who he was.
Well, Pat Gillick knew who he was. So did super scout Epy Guerrero. Both had worked for the Yankees before joining Toronto’s new franchise.
Gillick was the Yankees’ farm director. He had worked closely with Guerrero for more than a decade. So when Guerrero said he wanted to sign a kid who had played for the Dominican national soccer team, Gillick said fine.
“Dámaso was a very talented soccer player,” Gillick said in a telephone interview. “Guerrero saw a lot of athleticism in him and really took him in and developed him as a ballplayer.”
García had played very little baseball when Guerrero signed him. But the Dominican was a hothouse for nascent infielders, and Guerrero, better than most, knew an infield prospect when he saw one.
“If you’re playing the infield, you look at hands and look at arm,” Gillick said. “But the other thing is quick feet. You’ve got to have quick feet in soccer too. Quick feet allow you get in position to throw the ball. (García) was a quick-footed guy.”
The signing was low-risk. Guerrero’s success rate was high. Over his career, he signed 54 players who reached the big leagues, including Carlos Delgado, Tony Fernández, Alfredo Griffin and Cesar Cedeño. Gillick had no qualms about taking a flyer on a soccer star.
To illustrate, he told this story.
Thirty-five years ago, Gillick and scout Wayne Morgan flew to Saskatoon for a fast-pitch softball tournament. They had their eye on an Australian who was playing for a team out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. They offered him a contract.
He said no. The summer wages were better where he was.
“He’d never played baseball before,” Gillick said. “He could catch, had a great arm and looked like he was going to hit. We offered him 25 grand to sign. He said, ‘I’d like to come, but I’ve got a job here for the summer and I’m making $50,000 playing for these guys.’
“So what I’m saying is, we looked everywhere for players,” Gillick said. “We drafted Danny Ainge, a basketball player. We drafted a football player, Jay Schroeder. We drafted Chris Weinke, who played with us for a while and then he went on to be a Heisman Trophy winner. We were looking for athletes wherever they were.
“So when Guerrero mentioned a soccer player, it didn’t bother me at all. We were looking under every rock.”

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In August of 1976, Gillick was hired as the Blue Jays’ first GM. He brought Epy Guerrero with him. Iorg, a Yankees’ farmhand, was among the players they picked in the expansion draft. But they knew most of the expansion draft castoffs would not survive for long. They needed fresh blood.
Gillick launched a flurry of trades. García arrived in November of 1979. The deal sent three players to the Yankees for Chris Chambliss, a name player, and two obscurities, García and Paul Mirabella. Chambliss didn’t want to play in Toronto, so Gillick flipped him to Atlanta for three more players.
“When we made the deal with the Yankees, they threw (García) in,” Gillick said. “He was an important guy to us when we made the deal. He wasn’t a particularly important guy to the press when we made the deal.”
A year later, García was Toronto’s everyday second baseman. He hit .278 and finished fourth in the voting for rookie of the year.
In 1980, Iorg was also a Jays’ rookie. He had grown close to García when they played in the Yankees’ organization, once occupying adjacent lockers in Florida. Another mutual friend in that clubhouse was Domingo Ramos, who also became a Blue Jay, thanks to Gillick’s intimate knowledge of the Yankees’ farm system. The GM would later gobble up Willie Upshaw, Fred McGriff and Dave Collins in trades with the Yanks.
“Pat just picked that organization clean,” Iorg said.

Iorg recognized García as a natural, notwithstanding his inexperience.
“Just a phenomenal athlete,” Iorg said. “Everything just kind of came naturally to him. It wasn’t like today when there’s so much coaching going on. We didn’t have a whole lot of coaching back then. And he never played at a young age.”

After five losing seasons, the Blue Jays started to win. Bobby Cox took over as manager in 1982 and fans dared to hope for the first time.

The Jays had flair. They ran and hit for power. They had George Bell, Lloyd Moseby and Jesse Barfield in the outfield, Upshaw at first, Fernández at short and Ernie Whitt behind the plate. Iorg and Rance Mulliniks platooned at third. The rotation featured the peerless Dave Stieb, backed by Doyle Alexander, Jim Clancy and eventually a young Jimmy Key.

Atop the lineup, García provided the spark.
Buck Martinez, currently the Jays’ TV play-by-play man, arrived in 1981 to back up Whitt. He vividly remembers his first impressions of García.
“Passion. Intensity. Fire,” Martinez said. “He loved to play. He had a big personality. He was a guy that always wanted to win. I think he really flourished when Bobby (Cox) came. Damo was given the opportunity to hit first in the lineup and I think that really sparked his career.”

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Cox and his coaching staff took the Jays back to fundamentals, Iorg said. The manager retained pitching coach Al Widmar and third-base coach Jimy Williams and added hitting coach Cito Gaston, bullpen coach John Sullivan and later first-base coach Billy Smith.
“We had a lot of good, young, talented players,” Iorg said. “We needed leadership and really good coaching, and the staff that they put together was really, really good.
“I remember that first time in spring training when Bobby was there, it took me back to those Yankee days. We did all the fundamental stuff that ever since I was a Blue Jay we never really did. And we went right back to the fundamentals – learning how to play the game, become perfect on our bunt plays, our pickoff plays, our cutoffs – all the stuff that you’re supposed to do that we weren’t really good at, we became extremely good at. And that translated into a lot of one-run wins for us.”
In a lineup anchored by sluggers, García slapped grounders past defenders on the rock-hard Exhibition Stadium turf and found gaps with line drives. He also got his share of ground-rule singles.
“On that team, not a lot of us walked,” Iorg said. “We were up there hackin’. Damo would hit a high chopper off of home plate in Toronto and that was a hit. We used to call that a ground-rule single. He would head out to the batter’s box before the game and say, ‘I think I’m gonna hit a ground-rule single.’ It was hilarious.’”
García seldom walked and seldom struck out. Leading off in the Jays’ banner year of 1985, he had 15 walks and 41 strikeouts in 627 plate appearances.

According to a popular motto for Dominican players of that era, you didn’t walk off the island. You had to hit your way off the island. Martinez recalled that García could hit anything from the tip of his toes to the top of his head.
“Like a lot of young Dominican players, he was a free swinger,” echoed Ash, who was the Jays’ player personnel administrator in the mid-’80s. “At the time we didn’t pay as much attention to on-base percentage as is the case now. That was an area he struggled with. But he was a very, very aggressive player, and we had the type of team at the time he came along where his mistakes didn’t matter as much.”
And when he got on base, he ran. In 1982, he stole 54 bases. From 1982 through 1985, he averaged 40 steals.
In short, García fit the times, and he fit snugly into Cox’s offence.
The first zenith of the young franchise came on the afternoon of Oct. 5, 1985. Upshaw, Moseby and Whitt homered against the Yankees. García singled home Fernández with the final Jays’ run. Doyle Alexander pitched a complete game. And the Blue Jays’ clinched their first division championship.
Then they lost a heartbreaking playoff series to Kansas City.
Shortly thereafter, Bobby Cox left for Atlanta.
And Dámaso García’s decline began.
Next came the season when he lit up his uniform, tangled with a teammate, bickered with his manager and traded insults with an umpire during a rain delay.

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Jimy Williams took over as manager in 1986 and immediately put Moseby in the leadoff spot and dropped García to ninth. García was unhappy. He scuffled at the plate through April. But even though he was hitting just .228 entering the game on May 14 in Oakland, Williams had re-installed him atop the lineup for the previous seven games.
That night, he went hitless and made a costly error. Afterward, he went back to the clubhouse, shed his uniform and cap, placed them in a pile in the shower, doused them with lighter fluid and set them on fire.
“His uniform really didn’t burn,” Iorg said. “It kind of just melted away.”
Williams was furious. He chewed out García in front of his teammates.
“I was just frustrated with myself, frustrated with the way I’ve been playing,” García told reporters.
His friend Fernández came to his defence.
“Damo is a very proud man,” Fernández said. “Latin players are very proud, and sometimes you are so frustrated you don’t know how to express that frustration, and the best way for him to express that was by burning.”
Well, perhaps not the best way. Williams certainly didn’t think so, nor did the media. But looking back, Ash takes a softer view.
“I think in a lot of ways that was misunderstood,” Ash said, “because of the whole superstition thing – ‘I’m not playing well so I’ve gotta change something. If I get a fresh uniform I’ll get a fresh start.’ So it wasn’t as negative as a lot of people made it out to be.”
When the team returned home, the fans rained boos on García. He promptly embarked on a seven-game hitting streak and batted .296 for the rest of the season. But after June 6, he never batted leadoff again.
Despite his offensive rebound, García continued to grab attention for negative reasons.

One day during batting practice, he yelled at teammate Cliff Johnson to get out of the cage. Johnson was on the disabled list with a sore wrist, and García thought he had no business hitting with the regulars.
Johnson, a gruff sort who outweighed García by 50 pounds, expressed his disagreement in profane terms. Briefly, the two went at it.
“Damo came back to the batting cage and said he wanted to fight Cliff again,” Martinez recalled with a chuckle. “It was intense.”
As the season wore on, the media criticism mounted. Stories said García clashed with Barfield and Whitt in the clubhouse. Writers said he was dogging it on defence. In July, he declared a moratorium on interviews. “I don’t talk baseball anymore. Politics maybe,” he told Allan Ryan of the Toronto Star.

Ash recalls a bizarre incident that season during one of Exhibition Stadium’s infamous rain delays when García exploded at an umpire who had come out to check on the field conditions.
“I just happened to be standing there at the time,” Ash said. “He and Joe Brinkman got into one of the most vicious arguments I’d ever seen. It was really about nothing. (García) was frustrated that we were probably going into our second hour of rain delay, and you didn’t need much to trigger Joe at the time, so it became very nasty very quickly.”
García “wasn’t a guy you could sit down and have a reasoned conversation with,” Ash added. “There was no way of reasoning with him. If he had a point of view, that was his point of view and it wasn’t going to change.”
Beyond García’s tribulations, an uneasy feeling seized the whole team. After a franchise-best 99 wins in ’85, the Blue Jays did not reach .500 until mid-June in ‘86. Their final 86-76 record left them in fourth place.
“A lot of things had gone wrong in ’86,” Martinez said. “We were disappointed that Bobby Cox left, coming off the high of ’85. A lot of things changed. I think that was part of it. Everybody was a little bit disappointed. We had expectations of Bobby being there for a long time, and I know Damo loved playing for Bobby. I think we were all a little bit down in ’86 because of that.”
After the season, Gillick intimated that García’s days as a Blue Jay were numbered. The GM had better choices waiting in the wings.
“Damo’s just too up and down,” Gillick told The Toronto Star. “We need somebody we can depend on (at second base) and right now I like the other guys better.”

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At the 1986 winter meetings in Hollywood, Fla., García and Williams sniped again at each other in the media over the uniform-burning incident. Two weeks before spring training opened, Gillick traded García and Luis Leal to Atlanta for pitcher Craig McMurtry, who would never appear in a game for Toronto.
Injuries all but grounded García for the next two years before he finished his career in 1989 with an 80-game turn for the Expos.
Two years later, after experiencing double vision, he underwent brain surgery to remove a tumour. He was never the same. His vision, speech and mobility were permanently impaired. Those who visited him in recent years said he sometimes did not recognize them.


He did recognize his former GM during Gillick’s scouting visits in the early years after his surgery.
“After he got out of the game, I stayed in touch with him from time to time over the years,” Gillick said. “When I went to the Dominican I’d always try to stop in and say hello. I don’t think there was ever any lasting grudge against the Blue Jays. He was a good person. Solid values.”

In 1992 García came back to Toronto and threw out the first pitch before a playoff game. Alfredo Griffin, his friend and a former double-play partner, served as ceremonial catcher.
García and his wife, Haydee, have a son, Dámaso Jr., who has hemophilia, a condition that inhibits normal blood-clotting. In the years following García’s surgery, they launched a charity to provide education and medical supplies to hemophiliac children in the Dominican, as well as an annual baseball camp for hemophiliac kids.

“His public life has been limited,” Haydee in 2002, “but this health condition has not kept him from working with those less fortunate.”
Whatever his ordeals as a player, García was a longtime friend and part of a special quartet of Latino Blue Jays, Iorg said, citing his fondness for Fernández, Griffin and Bell as well.
“Dámaso was incredibly liked by everybody,” Iorg said. “I was fortunate to play with four Latin players that were amazing teammates and liked by every group on the team.”

 Added Martinez: “Damo and Alfredo Griffin and Tony Fernandez all had that same passion and had a lot to do with the personality of the Blue Jays during that time because of their joy and their love to play. They were all very close and very intense, and that helped us all stay very upbeat and continue to remind ourselves how fortunate we were to play this game.”

It was a special team that launched a streak of 11 straight winning seasons, capped by two World Series championships. García was the linchpin of those early ‘80s teams. As Gillick put it, “he was not a tremendous player but a very good player” for a while.
And like most people, he was a complex character – by turns fun-loving, thin-skinned, generous and intractably stubborn.

Gillick remembers him as “not only an emotional guy, but sensitive, sometimes too sensitive. Down deep, a good guy and a very intelligent guy.”
The record shows that García was a career .283 hitter with a .686 OPS and 203 stolen bases. It doesn’t begin to tell the whole story.
Iorg understands that. But when he thinks about the man, he also remembers the gift.

“I would look at his talent and go, ‘Oh my gosh, I wish I had that talent,’” Iorg said. “He was a special athlete.” He was a special athlete, and an even more special person.

Maple Leaf Stadium

 Sit back and remember when , remember when Toronto had 2 franchises named the Maple Leafs.


 It was located across from TipTop Tailors, hard by Front Street almost on the water, right where I left it.

I used to take the street car down to HMCS York in the summer of 74, marching around in my sailor suit, learning to tie knots and to haul guns around on Warriors Day, for $150.00 every two weeks.
Enough of my as personal history, now onto the real good stuff.


Exhibition Stadium was a messy compromise, as any baseball fan who remembers what the place looked like can attest. An auto racing grandstand turned into a football stadium in the 1950s and remodelled for baseball in the ’70s, Toronto’s own “mistake by the lake” was vaguely horseshoe-shaped, with thousands of useless seats flanking a vast expanse of no man’s land beyond the right-field fence.
Because of its dual purpose, many seats were oriented toward the football configuration’s 50-yard line. Two-thirds of the stands were uncovered, leaving fans to bake in the midsummer sun. And its proximity to Lake Ontario made the park a magnet for seagulls — Yankees star Dave Winfield was arrested by Toronto Police for killing one with a warmup throw in 1983 (the charges were later dropped).
When SkyDome opened with great and cringeworthy fanfare in June 1989, few tears were shed by baseball fans at the thought of leaving the Exhibition Grounds behind. The Blue Jays, one of the great teams of the 1980s, were moving into a dream home worthy of the ’90s. The new building, with its gargantuan, slow-moving retractable roof, was a marvel of the age. In those days, the team would boast about the scale of it all, flashing facts during breaks in play on the massive Sony Jumbotron scoreboard. The one I can most vividly recall, though my memory may not be accurate, suggested there was enough concrete in there to build a sidewalk to the moon.

The Blue Jays were on top of the world at the start of the ’90s, and Jays fans wouldn’t trade those early SkyDome years for anything. But the team got old and torn apart by free agency, the 1994 strike hit, the record-setting crowds dwindled, and the club’s owner, Labatt Brewing Co., was gobbled up by an indifferent conglomerate. The novelty of baseball games being played in a cavern of thousands of tons of concrete wore off quickly.
New Comiskey Park (now Guaranteed Rate Field) opened in Chicago just two years after SkyDome’s debut. Oriole Park at Camden Yards came along a year after that, and Jacobs Field (now Progressive Field) in Cleveland two years after that. Intimate, “retro,” baseball-only venues were all the rage. The Jays’ new home was a relic before all that concrete had even fully dried.
It didn’t have to be that way.

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If you follow municipal politics in Toronto even a little bit, you will not be surprised to learn that much of the history of Toronto’s quest for a big-league-quality ballpark is one of institutional inertia and backroom dealings. That is not to say there weren’t visionaries involved, fighting the good fight. Jack Kent Cooke, who would later go on to famously own the Washington Redskins, Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Kings, made his bones in the pro sports game as the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs — not the hockey team that endures to torment Toronto sports fans, but the long-defunct Toronto Maple Leafs baseball club, charter member of the Triple-A International League.
When Cooke bought the team in 1951, it had been playing for 25 years at Maple Leaf Stadium. Known locally as the Fleet Street Flats (or sometimes “Hank’s Hangout”), it was a utilitarian 1920s-era stadium with its expansive field hidden behind a pretty arched facade on a piece of landfill jutting into Lake Ontario at the foot of Bathurst Street. It was a peer of Yankee Stadium, with a hint of San Francisco’s Oracle Park about it, thanks to the water beyond the outfield walls and the ships that could sometimes be seen gliding through the western gap in or out of the inner harbour.
Granted, it was maybe not quite so picturesque, given its position on Toronto’s then very industrial waterfront. And those who remember its final days in the late 1960s don’t do so with much fondness for the structure itself. But the site had potential. So much so that in Cooke’s mid-’50s heyday it was practically the centre of the minor-league universe. The Maple Leafs were successful on and off the field, with their maverick owner — often compared to the legendary Bill Veeck — marketing the team on the radio station he owned and cooking up contests and promotions that kept attendance on Fleet Street as high as in some major-league cities.

The site also had room for the stadium to grow. Throughout Cooke’s tenure, there was talk of enlarging capacity, from the 18,000 seats it held all the way up to nearly 40,000 — enough for a major-league club. By some estimations (various city councillors of the ’50s and ’60s may differ) it could have been a fine place for major league baseball, echoing some of the great old parks stuffed into imperfect plots of land in evolving neighbourhoods, like Boston’s Fenway Park or Chicago’s Wrigley Field. If Maple Leaf Stadium had been better cared for, expanded in the right way or at the right time, or constructed better in the first place, it might have become as cherished as those parks. It might have been worth trying to save from the wrecking ball in some form, unlike the Blue Jays’ outdated current home, which is loved for its downtown location and little else.
Naturally, Toronto’s powers that be found a way to screw it up.

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Back in the mid-1930s, the Maple Leafs had run into some financial troubles, and in lieu of the payback of a significant tax bill, the Toronto Harbour Commission took ownership of the stadium and the land it sat on. For a time, the setup worked well enough, despite the fact that the commission was not exactly versed in, or necessarily even interested in, stadium management. A 15-year lease for the club to play its home games on the waterfront was signed in 1947, which gave the club stability in the early Cooke years it would crave once the lease expired in 1962.
Early in his tenure, Cooke recognized Toronto’s big-league potential. He also recognized that not owning the stadium was a complication.
In early 1953, while he was in hot pursuit of a deal to purchase the St. Louis Browns or the Philadelphia Athletics, Cooke also tried to buy Maple Leaf Stadium — albeit reluctantly.
“I don’t want to own the stadium,” he told Al Nickelson of the Globe and Mail in April of that year. “But its purchase by the Toronto Baseball Club is the only way I can see right now whereby we’d be able to get the extra seating necessary for a big league club.
“Actually, it would be better for the city to continue to own the stadium and give us a deal,” he added.
His preference for the second path, and the heavy involvement of the city that came with it, would ultimately set back the efforts to bring big-league baseball to Toronto for more than 20 years.
By early 1955, the City Council had approved in principle a plan to enlarge Maple Leaf Stadium. Unfortunately, the agreement came too late to land the franchises Cooke had initially sought. The Browns had become the Baltimore Orioles in 1954, and the A’s moved to Kansas City a year later. Detroit Tigers president Walter “Spike” Briggs Jr. told the Globe and Mail in January 1955 that “if Toronto had made its decision to enlarge its stadium before the last meeting of the American League in Philadelphia last fall, then the Athletics’ franchise probably would have gone there instead of Kansas City.”
Globe reporter Wilf Smith added that “Toronto had strong support, Briggs said, but with no guarantee of a larger park here the owners authorized the move to the Missouri city.”
The agreement would end up being doubly pointless, as only a month later the Harbour Commission rejected it outright. In a letter to the City Council, the commission outlined eight areas it demanded be studied before any renovations proceed, including looking at parking facilities that may be required, effects on traffic and the need for additional public transit. The letter also asked the Council to consider “the best interests of the city in the development of the stadium property,” either “as a sports arena or for industrial purposes when the existing lease expires in 1962.”
At the time, a faction of civic leaders preferred to build a new stadium on the Exhibition grounds, and with the Harbour Commission eyeing the Maple Leaf Stadium land for industry, by the end of 1957 Cooke was ready to look beyond his aging park to bring major league baseball to Toronto. On Dec. 31, 1957, the Globe reported that Cooke had come together with newspaper magnate John Bassett, owner of the Canadian Football League’s Argonauts, and Canadian National Exhibition manager Hiram McCallum to announce a compromise design for a multipurpose stadium at the Ex. Its proposed layout resembled the eventual layout of Exhibition Stadium (albeit with an upper deck on the left-field side), but thanks to a power play from the well-connected Bassett, that particular version of the stadium never came to pass.

“I do not know why Jack Cooke dislikes John Bassett,” reflected Globe sports columnist Scott Young (father of Canadian music icon Neil Young) in October 1965, “except there was a time when Cooke thought that he was going to get major league baseball in Toronto. … Cooke thought the plan was that he and Bassett together would persuade Toronto to help build a grand all-purpose stadium. There major league baseball and Canadian football would prosper side by side. Then one time Cooke turned his back. When he came to, Argos had completed the deal by which the city put up $750,000 of public money to renovate Exhibition Stadium for the Argos, to be paid back at $75,000 a year. There was no mention of baseball.”
The Argos would move from Varsity Stadium on Bloor Street to their new football-only stadium at the Ex in 1959. Cooke was discouraged but would continue the push to take Toronto to the big leagues.
His next move was to get involved in the Continental League, a proposed third major league that was announced in 1959. The brainchild of William Shea, for whom the Mets’ longtime home would later be named, the Continental League aimed to begin play in 1961 with clubs in Denver, Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Toronto and New York City — which had just lost both of its longtime National League clubs, the Dodgers and Giants, to California. Shea had persuaded Branch Rickey to come out of retirement to run the league. Cooke, in addition to owning the Toronto franchise, would be his vice president.
Unfortunately for Cooke’s ambitions, the American and National leagues were threatened enough by the Continental League that they responded with their own plans to expand, announced in 1960. The AL made its first foray into the California market with the Los Angeles Angels. They also allowed the Washington Senators to move to Minneapolis and become the Twins, then awarded D.C. an expansion team (also called the Senators, later the Texas Rangers). The NL granted a new franchise to Houston, then offered a spot in its league to Shea and the group that would have owned the Continental League’s New York club. The Mets: born shady. Denver and Toronto would just have to wait.

Had Cooke not been cut out of Exhibition Stadium, or had Maple Leaf Stadium by then been expanded, Cooke might have gotten his franchise. His inability to win the support of civic leaders the way that Bassett could instead led to his leaving the city altogether.
Cooke’s business interests went well beyond sports. He’d met Roy Thomson in 1936 while selling soap in Northern Ontario. Thomson, who was on his way to becoming a literal newspaper baron and the namesake of Thomson-Reuters, hired Cooke to run a radio station he owned. By 1941, the two were partners in the budding world of media consolidation. During his Maple Leafs heyday, in addition to owning a local radio station, Cooke had purchased the company that published Saturday Night magazine, among others. With a belief that his radio experience was a major asset, in 1960 he headed one of nine groups to make a bid to the federal government’s Board of Broadcast Governors — a group described in a letter to the Globe and Mail published in April 1960 as “a body of men and women, all for one reason or another Conservative Government appointees” — for the license to operate the city’s first privately owned television station.
Cooke “thought he had the inside track,” wrote Ian G. Masters of the Toronto Star in 2000. “So much so, in fact, that he moved his radio station — CKEY — from its rundown home at 444 University Ave. to a new, huge building on Don Mills Rd., specifically designed to accommodate a television station.”
It didn’t happen. Once again, the “new money” of the freewheeling Cooke would lose out to the “old money” of Bassett.
Bassett, a friend of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservative party and operating on behalf of his newspaper-publishing family and the powerful Eaton family of department store fame, was the point man on the winning bid. Wrote Macleans in 1962: “After the award, Bassett declared, in the presence of many witnesses, that ‘Diefenbaker gave me the franchise.'”
Cooke, Masters wrote, “was so infuriated that he sold all his Canadian holdings, moved to the United States, persuaded President Eisenhower to fast-track his U.S. citizenship, and settled in to become a sports and media mogul in California.”
He didn’t sell the Maple Leafs immediately, but he gave up his post as president of the club in January 1962 and sold his stake in the team by the start of 1964. Ironically, one of the people involved with Bassett’s bid for the TV license would himself become deeply involved with major league baseball in Toronto — and would even eventually consider himself something of a saviour of Toronto baseball in the dark days of the early 2000s. An amalgam of the names Bassett and Eaton, “Baton” Broadcasting would become the shortened name for the company that won the bid, but its original name was a bit longer: Baton Aldred Rogers Broadcasting Ltd.
Future Jays owner Ted Rogers was well on his way to building an empire of his own.

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The idea of potentially enlarging Maple Leaf Stadium endured, but as a lesser consideration. In 1958, for example, Cooke had told the city leaders that he would build a stadium in Riverdale Park if they were willing to donate the land, but the proposal, as always, was rejected. Proposals for other stadium sites were by then gaining traction, as Toronto pursued a more car-centric vision of moving people about the city. Set somewhat tightly between the lake to the south and the Gardner Expressway (opened 1955) and railyards to the north, parking would always be a challenge on Fleet Street. And Toronto’s then-new subway system, opened in 1954, did not extend to the waterfront.
Studies were undertaken to determine the feasibility of sites at Ramsden Park (near Rosedale subway station), in the Rosedale Ravine, at various places along the Don Valley, at Downsview Park, on the sites now occupied by Metro Hall and CBC’s Front Street headquarters, by the railway lines west of Union Station (where SkyDome would eventually be built), and elsewhere. In a shockingly prescient 1984 piece for the Globe titled “An architect goes to bat for the old-style ballpark,” Adele Freedman explained with palpable derision where this was all leading: “The 17 baseball parks built in the second major period of stadium construction from 1960 to the present, are closely related to Le Corbusier’s theory of the Radiant City — freestanding objects set in a park-like landscape, only with parking lots taking the place of parks.”
By the late ’60s, Toronto was already thinking about building its own “Astrodome.” Meanwhile, without Cooke’s promotional wizardry, with a troublesome lease that the Harbour Commission would negotiate only year by year, and Maple Leaf Stadium starting to badly show its age, the Maple Leafs had fallen on hard times.
In September 1966, the Globe’s Phillip Dechman laid out the club’s grim financial situation in detail. The Leafs were responsible for about $100,000 in expenses on the stadium per year, including the rental fee, taxes, insurance premiums and stadium operations. They had another $150,000 in expenses on player salaries, travel, office expenses and other incidentals. In 1965, he explained, the team took in only about $155,000 in income, mostly through ticket sales, advertising billboards and concessions.

Old Maple Leaf Stadium

Though the teams on the field were still good — the Maple Leafs won International League championships in 1965 and 1966 — the team’s financial situation was worsening. Partly due to the deteriorating state of Maple Leaf Stadium and its lack of parking, partly because of fans’ increasing access to major league baseball games on TV, and partly because Toronto felt it deserved to play in the big leagues, attendance slumped to just 67,216 for the entire 1967 season. Fifteen years earlier, that number had been nearly 450,000. In the Maple Leafs’ final game on Fleet Street, in September 1967, they drew just 802. (The following year, the club would become the Louisville Colonels, and in 1973 the Colonels would become the Pawtucket Red Sox.)
Minor league baseball, an institution in the city since the 1880s, wouldn’t disappear from the Toronto sports landscape without at least a little bit of a fight. In 1967, Harold Ballard, of all people, took up the mantle. The despised majority owner of the hockey Maple Leafs from 1972 until his death in 1990, Ballard in 1967 was still just a part-owner of the hockey club (alongside Stafford Smythe and, of course, John Bassett), as well as executive vice president of Maple Leaf Gardens.
“A city like Toronto should have professional baseball,” he told the Globe and Mail in September of that year, while confirming that his hockey club had made a proposal to purchase the baseball team. “Naturally, we have long-range plans. This city is big enough to have a big league team, but we know we have to build a stadium first.”
International League president George Sisler agreed. Despite the difficulties caused by the instability the Leafs were continually facing in their final years — for example, the league had to hold up distributing its 1967 schedule as it waited to see whether the Maple Leafs could stay afloat — Sisler saw value in Toronto’s eventual big-league viability. If the American or National leagues were to move into the International League’s territory, his organization would have to be paid for the right to do so.
Once again, the plan became to put money into renovating Maple Leaf Stadium. And, once again, city politics got in the way.
In an October 1967 article, “Ballard lays Leafs’ doom to apathy,” the Globe and Mail reported that Ballard claimed the Harbour Commission had placed a $4 million asking price on the stadium and the land it sat on. That kind of cost, he said, was prohibitive. And the Harbour Commission would not consider a long-term lease.
“Apparently they have plans to tear down the stadium, and would agree only to a year-to-year lease,” he told the paper. “We did have plans to spruce up the property and perhaps, in four or five years, build a new one. But a yearly lease in the interim would have been too uncertain.”

There are plenty of “what ifs” that we can ask about this story. What if Cooke had managed to secure the Philadelphia A’s or the St. Louis Browns? What if baseball hadn’t been cut out of the 1959 renovation of Exhibition Stadium? What if Cooke hadn’t left his homeland in frustration to go make his fortune elsewhere?
The most fascinating question for me, however, comes at the very end. What if Ballard had bought the land or got his long-term lease, secured the team, saved the stadium and become the central figure in Toronto’s quest for major league baseball as the ’60s gave way to the ’70s? Toronto sports fans old enough to remember Ballard’s foul history of futility, micromanagement and penny-pinching as the owner of the NHL’s Leafs will no doubt shudder at the thought.
But what about the stadium?

You guessed it..Jackie Robinson

If Ballard had bought the stadium and land, or fixed the building after signing a multi-year lease, there’s a good chance that when Toronto finally managed to secure a major league franchise its first home would have been on Fleet Street, rather than at the CNE. Dreams of eventually building a domed multi-purpose stadium wouldn’t have gone away, but it would have been much easier to see the charm of whatever Maple Leaf Stadium would become than it was to love the crummy Ex. So maybe having the team play there would have made the need to move to a more modern home just a little less urgent. Maybe enough time would pass before a new stadium was deemed necessary, such that the Blue Jays — or whatever the team would have been called — would be among the first in baseball with one of the new retro-style ballparks, instead of one of the last with a multipurpose cookie cutter of imposing concrete.
Or might the team have found a way to stay permanently on Fleet Street by way of significant upgrades to the existing structure? A template for such a plan existed in the form of Yankee Stadium, built in 1923 and extensively renovated in 1974 and ’75.
Any one of these scenarios would have had a profound effect not only on the history of Toronto baseball but also on the face of the city itself.
Sidewalk Labs has an incredible tool that allows you to look through old Toronto aerial photos and compare them with what the city looks like today. Play around with it for a while as you look at the west end of the city’s inner harbour and you see that not a lot changed between the late ’40s and the mid-’80s. What were railyards in 1947 become railyards, the CN Tower, the Gardner Expressway and some parking lots by 1983. By 1992, they became SkyDome, the Tower, the Gardner, the aforementioned CBC Broadcast Centre and Metro Hall, and a whole lot of undeveloped land that has since been filled in almost entirely with condos.
There’s a reason that nearby Queen Street West gradually became the city’s hippest area after the opening of the Bloor-Danforth subway line in 1966 began to push the artist and musician types out of Yorkville with the rising housing costs. The transitioning industrial area was a gentrifier’s dream. Adding four million baseball fans every summer — along with the convention centre, concert venue Roy Thomson Hall, the CBC’s headquarters and more — sped up the transformation of the west side of downtown into a hub of culture and nightlife. That part of the city grew up around SkyDome and continues to do so, from the upscale Maple Leaf Square area to the forthcoming Rail Deck Park project.
If baseball had instead been played on the waterfront, a little farther west and to the south of the Gardner, Toronto might well be a very different city. Queens Quay might have developed at a faster pace. Public transit between the park and Union Station, which could have then continued along the existing rail lines to Weston and beyond (as the UP Express now does), might have been prioritized. The incentive to remove the physical barrier that is the expressway might have been great enough to have seen it buried or torn down.
We should have been so lucky! Yet, given how the city has so often been unable to get out of its own way when it comes to transit, that history would have played out in such a way seems unlikely.
A more likely scenario is that Ballard’s sprucing up of the derelict facility would have been insufficient, public funds would have been sought for a new building, and any major league team would have ended up following a similar path, from the Ex to the Dome, that the Jays did. With Ballard in charge, Toronto’s baseball history would surely have been altered for the worse, but its physical geography might not have ended up looking all that much different from today.
Ending up with nicer ballpark at the SkyDome site would have been nice, but there’s nothing to be done about that now. As Cooke’s Toronto experience demonstrates, things just sometimes have a funny way of working out in ways you don’t expect and can’t control.

 Sometimes you can only look back at the twists and turns of history and wonder: What if?

As time passes

As baseball continues to explore a variety of ways to conduct the 2020 season, league officials are not ready to commit to one idea before the timeline of the nation’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic becomes clearer.



   Since a brief, initial conversation on April 6, officials from MLB and the players’ union have yet to resume talks about a plan to start the season in Arizona with players under quarantine and games taking place in empty parks, sources said.
The pause in the discussions should not be confused with a lack of activity. Both sides are speaking to medical experts, and MLB continues to investigate the Arizona plan, sources said.
   “Different plans require different levels of restriction for players, different economics associated with it, different start dates,” one league official said, explaining why conversations with the union were on hold.
   At one point last week, MLB signaled to the union it was preparing to move quickly. But a planned call between the league and the union produced only a basic message: The coronavirus had made the future too uncertain to advance the discussions. The two sides expect to remain in contact this week, though MLB has yet to bring a specific proposal to its owners.
The Arizona plan is drawing support from some federal officials, and might be the only way for baseball to return in 2020. The logistics would be complicated: Players would be tested for the coronavirus regularly and exist in a sealed environment of hotels and ballparks in the Phoenix area.      
  But over time, the quarantine might be relaxed as the nation gradually re-opens, allowing the plan to evolve.

   As league officials study all options, they say that staying nimble would enable them to pivot if state governments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) begin to lift restrictions on social gatherings, potentially creating a different road map for playing in 2020. The CDC has recommended against assemblages of 50 or more through May 10, and every state with a major-league team currently is operating with a stay-at-home order for its residents.
    The possibility of fans attending major-league games might be remote until a vaccine for the coronavirus becomes available, a development that is not expected anytime soon. But even a gradual easing of restrictions might make it easier for baseball to adopt a plan less stringent than the Arizona quarantine, which could require players to separate from their families for an extended period.
For example, some in the game speculate that if government officials deemed the virus under control in certain cities with domed or retractable-roof parks, the sport might be positioned to resume in certain regional hubs. Six teams could be assigned to five areas – say, Phoenix, Miami and Tampa Bay, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston – then spend two to three weeks playing each other in round-robin style before relocating to another facility.
     Such a scenario is perhaps overly optimistic: The format, requiring less travel than a normal season but more than the Arizona plan, might be more realistic as a second phase of the season. The advantage of opening in Phoenix is that all 30 teams would be at a central location, enabling baseball to limit travel to bus rides and reduce the scope of workers in lodging, food preparation, transportation, security and television production, all of whom would need to be kept safe.
The Arizona plan, though, is fraught with obstacles.
    Temperatures in Phoenix in the summer months routinely soar over 100 degrees, making for less-than-ideal playing conditions. The city’s location potentially would reduce the size of night-time television audiences. The potential inclusion of families in the sealed environment – an idea many players advocate – would dramatically increase the number of people quarantined and tested.
   To implement the plan, baseball would need to reserve entire hotels, arrange for food service and ensure extensive testing for everyone under quarantine, all in advance. Such a commitment might turn out to be premature if a better alternative became available in 45 to 60 days. But the Arizona plan could morph into that better alternative as well.

Some of the 15 clubs that train in Florida, meanwhile, would prefer the league to explore playing in both that state and Arizona, sources said. Baseball is considering the two-state concept, but the training camps in Florida are more spread out than the complexes in Arizona, and some are in relatively remote locations, creating other challenges.
Television – which will be the sole outlet for fans to see games if they are prohibited from entering parks – is another issue the sport would need to address. If a quarantine was in effect, would broadcasts emanate from the usual on-site production trucks or off-site control rooms? Would the announcers be on location? Would robotic cameras replace individual operators? Whatever baseball decided, its local and national TV partners likely would need significant time to prepare.
    Time, for now, is not the biggest roadblock. The players and owners have agreed to extend the regular season through October, if necessary. The postseason could be played at neutral sites in November. The problem is that the spread of the virus makes it impossible to predict what route might be the most logical for baseball in 30 days, 60, even 90.

“It’s just not at all clear at this point what’s going to be feasible and what’s not going to be feasible,” one league official said. “Right now, very little is feasible. We’re all sitting in our houses.”