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.
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.
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.
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.
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| 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?
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| 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?
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