The Jays’ season has just begun and already I am optimistic about their prospects this year. Taking two of three in Cleveland before losing to Boston in the home opener (a game at which I got extremely inebriated and cursed the Red Sox quite loudly in the ninth), the Jays rebounded with a big win in the second game of the series on Tuesday night despite another shaky bullpen performance. And Wednesday afternoon the Jays have a chance to win the first series against the AL East rival Sox and give Romero a chance to bounce back from his rough first outing. The Jays have started the season strong and look like they should be a contender this season, and almost as important: people are watching.
With the Leafs and Raptors spending another spring in the basement, and the Toronto FC off to an 0-4 start, Toronto sports fans are starting to put their faith in the only team that has brought the city a championship in the past 40 years. After spending Opening Day at a packed Opera Bob’s drinking with Andrew Stoeten of the Drunk Jays Fans blog and watching a thrilling 16 inning game that wound up making my tab a lot larger than it should have been, I was lucky enough to have tickets to the home opener at the Rogers Centre. Tickets to the game sold out in less than an hour and it’s always great to attend a game where the stands are full. Tuesday night’s game had noticeably less in attendance, but it wasn’t just the packed stadium that was encouraging on Monday night, people were watching at home, too.
So far this season, Rogers Sportsnet is reporting record viewership for the first few games. On Tuesday they announced in a press release that an average of 1.3 million people watched the home opener, with a peak of 1.74 million viewers in the top of the 9th, the most ever for a Blue Jays’ broadcast on Sportsnet. Not only that, but over the course of the first four games (not including Tuesday night’s game against Boston) they are averaging 874,000 viewers per game, a 72 per cent increase over last year’s numbers. Of course this number is likely to take a dip as the year progresses and casual fans begin to lose steam during the 162 game marathon, but it is encouraging to see that people are watching the Jays, because they are really good.
I’m not sure whether it’s the dismal play of Toronto’s other professional sports teams, or that people are just getting back into baseball, but surely the product that is on the field is playing a big part in the fan resurgence. All of us old enough to remember the championships of the nineties recall that the Toronto Blue Jays led the league in attendance through the late eighties and early nineties before the Colorado Rockies’ expansion in 1993 pushed them into 2nd. Regardless, more people showed up to Jays’ games than any other team in the American League during their back-to-back World Series Championship years, but since the strike they have struggled bringing people to the stadium.
Starting with a drop to 4th in the league in 1995, the shortened season after the strike, less people began going to the Skydome (yes, it was still called the Skydome back then) as the decade progressed. Yearly attendance has hovered around two million for most of the 2000s, compared to over four million during their peak in the nineties, and in 2010 the Rogers Centre drew only 1.5 million fans out to games, the third worst attendance in the league and ahead of only the Oakland Athletics and the Cleveland Indians. In the eleven years since Ted Rogers purchased the Blue Jays from Labatt, it has been a struggle to get people to watch the Jays, but so far this year there is hope that smart moves off the field may improve the situation.
I have to admit, for a while there during the early 2000s, my interest in the Blue Jays waned. Sure I would keep track of what they were doing, but watching a team that consistently missed the playoffs was hard on a fan in his early twenties, especially when Toronto’s other sports franchises were winning games. The Maple Leafs were a different, better team, and made deep playoff runs several times between 1999 and 2004, before a labour dispute yet again thwarted a Toronto team’s run at success. Since then the Leafs have not made it back in to the postseason, and the Raptors have faired just slightly better. I, on the other hand, have grown older and wiser and years ago began to once again appreciate the subtleties of a great game of baseball, and I am lucky enough that my favourite team has managed to build a winning organization through intelligent player management. Sounds like such a novel idea doesn’t it? Brian Burke: take notes.
Listening to Mike Wilner talk after Tuesday night’s game on the Fan590 post game show, someone called in and made note of all the younger fans he saw at the park that seemed to be getting back into the Jays . While Wilner admitted that it might be indeed “cool” to like the sport at the present time with the Jays playing as well as they are, he also felt encouraged by the new viewership noting: “If you get seriously into baseball, it’s hard not to fall in love with the game.” I couldn’t agree more and am excited to see more people show interest in the sport. It’s awesome going to the ball park when the fans get into it and know all the players’ names (Colby Rasmus had his own cheering section up in the 500 level in left field at the home opener), and when I go to the afternoon game on Wednesday against the Sox wearing my jersey and beat up lucky Jays’ hat, I hope I’ll be in great company, and I hope they win.
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Nick McIsaac is Toronto Standard’s sports writer. Follow him on Twitter (for everything sports related) at @nickclass.
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