Eric Elliott, Centretown News
Hundreds of Toronto Blue Jays fans joined team members at the St. Laurent Shopping Centre for an autograph session. The Toronto Blue Jays accomplished a remarkable feat with their 2015 season. While erasing a 22-year-long playoff drought, the team resurrected a once desolate fan base into a nation-wide fever for years to come.
“It’s always rewarding to hear how we revived the love of baseball in people that really lost faith in baseball and lost interest in Toronto,”outfielder Kevin Pillar says. “It’s a different feeling, the way people care about the Blue Jays.”
The fever hit Ottawa recently as Pillar and three of his teammates—Ryan Goins, Marco Estrada and Justin Smoak—made their way north from Toronto for the last stop of the annual winter tour across Canada.
Nowhere was the Jays fandom more apparent than the autograph session at the St. Laurent Centre where hundreds flocked, many only able to get a glimpse of the players because of the long lines.
“It’s crazy,” infielder Ryan Goins says. “I kind of feel like I’m in a boy band back in the early 2000s, honestly.”
For many, it was a chance to reminisce on the season that was in 2015. For Centretown resident Charlie Crabb, it was all about remembering the team that went from mediocre to top-of-the-league while watching Blue Jays fans come out everywhere.
Crabb says he witnessed a big difference in Centretown with many sporting the team’s memorabilia and going to local bars to watch the games.
“You really started to see people start to care about baseball which is not really a thing in Ottawa,” he says.
Orleans resident Kevin Luke says he felt this Jays’ hysteria that caught the city in August and into the fall as the Jays were on track to break their postseason drought.
“People would see me on the bus with a Jays’ hat or a Jays’ sweatshirt and they’d come up and talk on the bus,” Luke says. “Normally, you’d never have a conversation about baseball in Ottawa but certainly during that stretch you really did have a lot of conversations about it.”
By October, the Jays had sealed their ticket into playoff baseball. With the Jays not making the playoffs since their 1993 World Series title, 2015 was a first-time experience for many die hard fans like Crabb.
Like millions across the country, Crabb tried frantically to purchase tickets for the playoff games, but was unsuccessful, instead relegated to watching the games on television.
Luke however, says there were moments he couldn’t even do that.
“I watched them on TV but in a lot of cases I found it too stressful,” he says, describing how he repeatedly turned the TV on and off to avoid the pressure of the moment. “I turned it on just shortly after Bautista got that three-run home run that put them ahead so I’m glad I at least got to watch the end of it.”
As bright a moment as Jose Bautista’s bat-flipping home run was, the Blue Jays came up short in the following round against the eventual World Series-winning Kansas City Royals.
Although it wasn’t the outcome they wanted, Pillar says the sense of national solidarity isn’t lost on the players as they head into the 2016 season.
“It’s unreal,” Pillar says. “You can’t describe it to people. You can only really experience it by doing what we’re doing right now and travelling across Canada and seeing how important the Blue Jays are to them.
“There’s nowhere else like that. You can play in Los Angeles and play for a lot of people in a big city but it’s just one city that are Dodgers fans. To be able to from coast to coast and be the team people root for, it’s extremely special.”
With only weeks remaining before spring training begins, another season of Blue Jays baseball is around the corner. An enlarged fan base means bigger expectations, more drama and, for fans like Crabb and Luke, the hope of riding a country-wide Blue Jays fever once more in 2016.