Columnists
Home for the Blue Jays?
It’s going to be an interesting next three months or so for sports fans, as the leagues rendered inactive by the coronavirus pandemic all restart their schedules.
Major league soccer has already restarted, and will run until August 11. The baseball season —which never got started—begins on July 23 and will run into late October. The NBA season resumes on July 30 and will run until mid- October. The NHL season resumes on August 1 and runs until late September. Meanwhile, the NFL begins its regular season on September 10. And, just to be comprehensive, the CFL stands “postponed.”
Aside from abbreviating their schedules, the leagues have also changed their definitions of home field. The Toronto Maple Leafs will be playing all their home and away games in their usual roost at Scotiabank Place, while Toronto FC and the Toronto Raptors will play their games at a Disney sports complex in Orlando.
And the Toronto Blue Jays? We’re not sure: all we know is that it won’t be the Rogers Centre. According to our federal immigration minister, who gets paid the big bucks to make these decisions, it’s too risky to let the Blue Jays—and the visiting teams—back and forth across the border as frequently as the schedule requires, especially when teams will be required to travel to US virus hot spots. The Blue Jays, therefore, won’t get a special “national interest” exemption, even though they have already been permitted to conduct spring training in Toronto.
The homeless Blue Jays are scheduled to play their first home game on July 29, against the World Series champion Washington Nationals. So there is an opportunity just waiting to be seized—to offer up a low-risk, virus-free home venue for the Blue Jays in Ontario. Why not provide them with a home field in Wellington, which hasn’t seen a new case since May?
All the teams will be playing before empty stadiums— so the number of seats in the stands doesn’t matter. Wellington just happens to have two floodlit baseball fields available, along with a nearby arena building that is largely unused.
Why is Wellington particularly suited to safely hosting home games? The answer lies in the strategic location of our fields—just up from the Wellington harbour. Teams playing in Wellington could charter cruise ships that are sitting around feeling sorry for themselves in Florida, and bring them across Lake Ontario to within spitting distance of the Wellington Harbour, where smaller boats could tender players, coaches and staff to shore. From there, limousine services could take the teams the short distance up Belleville Street to the Lehigh Arena, which could serve as a massive locker room. After the games ended, both teams could scoot back to their cruise ship home bases following their arrival procedure in reverse. The coronavirus footprint would be so light, Wellington would hardly feel a thing.
Admittedly, there would be some cost and inconvenience. We would probably have to dredge the harbour channel again. We would have to cut off public access to the harbour, Belleville Street and the Lehigh arena on game days. But in the overall scheme of things, these would not be significant, compared to the revenues the rental charges would bring in—enough to pave every road in the County twice over, or at least festoon Wellington Beach with new No Parking signs. And the fields would become a tourist attraction in future years.
Of course, Wellington residents would have to be on their best behaviour, as tensions with the United States could easily boil over. The last thing we would want to do is have an incident in Wellington that carried echoes of the Gulf of Tonkin incident (the contretemps that precipitated US involvement in the Vietnam war). Donald Trump may be just desperate enough to find a pretext upon which to invade Canada in order to appropriate our medical resources. But we are sensible people who know enough not to get drawn into unnecessary controversies. We could be counted on to ignore the Blue Jays and their visitors and just go about our own business.
So how about it, Major League Baseball and the Toronto Blue Jays. Want to make a pitch for Wellington to the immigration minister? It could happen faster than you can say “Fred McGriff.”
We lost two friends last week. Art Hewer was a dedicated and good-natured volunteer who served with the Lions Club and the hospital auxiliary. Harold Cronk was a Wellington old-timer who had lots of stories to tell. I will miss them both.
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