The Voices of Baseball by Kirk McKnight

Author:Kirk McKnight [McKnight, Kirk]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2015-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

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Rogers Centre: Toronto Blue Jays

You’ll see a different sort of look from visiting teams on a pretty routine basis when they’re in Toronto because they don’t want their older players or their star players out there on the turf that much.

—Mike Wilner, Toronto Blue Jays radio play-by-play broadcaster

North of the Canadian border, the Montreal Expos were Major League Baseball’s lone representative for eight years. Predating interleague play, this meant only the National League players had the unfair disadvantage of having to adjust for the exchange rate on hotel room service and gratuity, convert the playing depth from meters to feet, and get two minutes less sleep after a 7:07 local time start. After years of “wooing” Major League Baseball, Toronto was awarded its own franchise, the Blue Jays, thus forcing American League players to update their passport photos and metric conversion charts as well. Perhaps surprised by being granted an expansion team, Toronto was unprepared in 1977 when the Blue Jays began playing baseball, as there was no new stadium built or even talk about development. For 12 seasons the Blue Jays played their home games inside the retrofitted-for-baseball Exhibition Stadium, which from a batter’s perspective looked more like an unfinished, turf-lined NASCAR track than a ballpark. Inside their temporary home, the Blue Jays made the playoffs once, in 1985, where they lost to the underdog and eventual World Series champion Kansas City Royals. A year later ground was broken in downtown Toronto for the future home of the team, a dome that proved to be a baseball pioneer in the field of engineering and architecture. Three years and $500 million later, the (then named) Skydome opened, on June 5, 1989, with more than 50,000 in attendance.

U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago had taught the world that a stadium can be erected in 711 days for $150 million, as long as the owners don’t mind shelling out another $100 million to fill in the gaps over the next 6,570 days. Perhaps foreseeing that the exchange rate would shift in their favor two decades later, Toronto chose to take its time and “splurge” by including the world’s first “functioning” retractable roof. Covering eight acres and rising 282 feet, Rogers Centre’s roof introduced the world to “convertible facility” baseball. Blue Jays radio play-by-play broadcaster Mike Wilner, who grew up in Toronto, describes the retractable roof: “For its time, it was revolutionary. I remember being in there on June 5, 1989—when we were getting ready for the first game ever there—and being blown away by it. You still catch visiting players who have never been there before checking it out and seeing how it works when it opens and closes during the game. It is a really cool thing to see. Here in Toronto, we forget how revolutionary it is.”

Made up of four panels—three of which move—the roof takes 20 minutes to close, which in its 26-season history has only delayed the Blue Jays twice. Mike Wilner notes, “There are never any weather issues.

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