If you’re a fan of the Toronto
Blue Jays and you’re looking at getting some tickets to go see a game in
September, good luck--you're going to need lots of it--and be prepared to pay more than face value. Go to Ticketmaster and all you’ll get are singles. You can
get tickets through Stubhub, but it’s going to cost you. The 500 Level,
tickets usually $16 a game are selling
for more than $20 already, and as the long as the Jays continue to do well,
that price will rise as we hit the stretch drive.
It’s been a long time since
admission to a Blue Jays game was the hottest thing in town, but here we are.
Toronto’s baseball team is dominating the headlines in the city’s newspapers.
You don’t hear much about the Leafs and Raptors, and considering training camps
for the NHL and NBA clubs open in the next month or so, that’s saying
something. The Argos are in first place but the CFL has not, unfortunately, been
a big league sport in Toronto for quite a few years.
It’s the early nineties all
over again. For those of you who are two young to remember, or just plain
forgot those handful of years when Toronto was a baseball town, I’ll fill you
in on what it was like to be a Jays’ fan twenty-five years ago.
The Rogers Centre (previously
known as SkyDome) was electric. Sold out crowds pretty much every night were the norm since
it opened in June of 1989. The Jays won the American League East title in 1989,
1991, 1992 and 1993. The Jays were able to attract big-time free agents like
Jack Morris, Paul Molitor, Dave Stewart and Dave Winfield. All-star players
wanted to come to Toronto because they wanted a shot to win a championship. The
David Price, Troy Tulowitzki deals are reminders of other hired guns such as
David Cone and Rickey Henderson who both came to Toronto and won championships.
And tickets were hard to come
by. I remember, as a family, going to one game a year, usually on a Friday
night during my Dad’s vacation in July. We would have to order tickets in March
to make sure we got seats. And I was usually the one filling out those old
ticket application forms (there was no internet to buy tickets back then and
the cost of a stamp was a lot cheaper than the cost of a long-distance phone
call to Toronto) and then dropping the envelope in the mail and hoping we
wouldn’t get a reply stating the game had already been sold out.
With the team winning and in
contention for the post season this late in the year for the first time since
1993, it has that feeling again. And if you didn’t have your tickets a few
weeks ago, well, see what I said in the first paragraph of this post.
It’s good, though, I don’t mind.
That means the team is winning and I can remember when I lived in Toronto from
2002 until 2014, the team wasn’t winning and you could pretty much go to a game
whenever you wanted (Opening Night was usually the only sellout). I’d get home
from work, have a quick nap and get back on the subway and head to the stadium,
confident that I would have no problem getting a ticket at face value.
I hope those days don’t come back
for a while. It’s good to see the Jays the talk of Toronto again, even though
it may be for a moment. Let’s hope they ride this wave late into October and we
don’t hear anything of the Leafs, Raptors or Argos until the second week of
November.
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