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I used to be a pretty serious Toronto Blue Jays fan.
When I hit my teens I got myself a newspaper route. I would get up six mornings a week and deliver 135 copies of The Globe & Mail throughout a vast tract of Richmond Hill, Ontario, and starting each Spring the first thing I did every morning was turn to the sports page of my first paper of the day and check the baseball scores from the previous evening. This was the early ’80’s; if you check the Jays stats from those years you’ll know that I started out pretty much every morning with a big disappointment.
Those rare days that the Jays won my papers would get delivered with a little extra pep in my step, but generally they were delivered begrudgingly and from beneath a dark Charlie Brown-esque cloud of doom.
This ticket is from a couple of years later, after I had moved back to Moncton and then back to the GTA again. By this time I had graduated from walking a paper route to pushing a factory broom (I guess my greatest skill was walking) and on June 7th, 1985 I treated myself and my girl to cheap seats at the old Exhibition Stadium on the CNE grounds in downtown Toronto. The Canadian National Exhibition is the world’s longest-standing annual exhibition and I used to go every year when I was a kid, or so it seems. As such, this was a bit of a walk down memory lane for me and I remember having fun showing Angie around, pointing out one nostalgic trigger after another.
The game was against the Detroit Tigers, and superstar* Dave Stieb was pitching for the Jays. This was before the venue was licensed (the Blue Jays were the last team in baseball to introduce liquor sales at games). I was only seventeen years old and very poor at the time so that had no bearing on me, but in retrospect it’s hard to imagine watching live major-league baseball with no access to alcohol whatsoever.
Imagine.
I don’t recall if this was a good game or not but there must have been plenty of action in a very relative, baseball-action sort of way, as the Jays won by a score of 9-2. It was only my second-ever baseball game (for that matter it was only the second time I had seen any major sports team play in real life) so I suspect I was very engaged in the game if only for the novelty of it.
I’m sure it was well worth the $8 I paid for the tickets. Heck, for all I remember I might even have bought them from a scalper outside at half the price.
*Overstating it? Perhaps. I was young.
Todd Man Out 