Coronavirus be damned: At Long Last, Buffalo Is Big League
It took 135 years, but Buffalo, N.Y. is finally back in the
major leagues.
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Bo Bichette greets a teammate while wearing the Buffalo Bisons' "Blue Jays Weekend" jersey at Sahlen Park in July 2019. (James P. McCoy/Buffalo News) |
Justin Trudeau, Tom Wolf, Mark Shapiro, Mike Buczkowski, and
a host of other important people somehow revived a dream that died in 1991.
Okay, okay, we’ll reel it in a bit now. It’s not permanent.
The Blue Jays will go back to Canada just as soon as their government allows. But
for 28 glorious summer days and nights, Buffalo will be one of the most important
places in the sports world.
For the countless people in this town who have bled Bisons baseball
since their first time at Offerman War Memorial Pilot Dunn
Tire Coca-Cola Sahlen Field, this is a big, big deal. I wasn’t born
in the stadium’s heyday, in the midst of the city’s push for a National League
expansion team, but the reminders of those glory days are still very much felt 30
years later.
We all know the stories of Jimmy Griffin and Bob Rich making
Buffalo feel like it could have competed in the majors. Hell, the fans here were
more than SIX MILLION strong for a stretch in those days. That remains a minor
league record, and also remains one of the biggest remaining arguments about
why the Queen City should have been chosen over Miami (are those crickets I
hear?).
Things have changed since then. The numbers at the ballpark
have dwindled, save for special events like July 3 or Star Wars nights. It’s
pretty apparent Buffalo can no longer support a major league club permanently.
We just don’t have the corporate money needed to land something that massive.
Since Ban Johnson spurned Buffalo for Boston in 1901, our people
have been on the outside looking in. There was brief hope with the Federal
League in 1914. Another chance passed by in 1969, which sunk the city into its
only baseball-less stretch since 1877. 1991 stings the most, but maybe that’s
just recency bias.
It’s not like we don’t love baseball here. Go to a Bisons
game any day of the week and you’re guaranteed to see hats and jerseys from the
Yankees, Pirates, Indians, Blue Jays, Mets, Expos (usually me), Red Sox, and so
on. TV ratings in the for the 2019 World Series between Washington and Houston hovered around 6.6, but with a series that featured two markets that don’t have much fandom here, that’s
still pretty strong. When big names are rehabbing (Jose Bautista) or get called
up (Steven Strasburg, Aroldis Chapman), the people recognize the importance of
something like that, and they pack the park to see them play.
For the next two months, this city will embrace the Jays as
our own. Several of the team’s top players (Vlad, Bo, Cavan, just to name the
obvious ones) have worked their way up the ladder and made Buffalo their last
stop before reaching The Show. The logo updates have already circulated on
social media. It’s only a matter of time before shirts and hats and god-knows-what-else
will be sold lovingly calling them the "Buffalo Blue Jays."
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reddit: u/NYC54 |
Even though we can’t sit in the stands and enjoy it, it goes
without saying that we’re going to puff our chests out a bit with this news.
And think of the young kids whose fandom is still being
internalized and nurtured. This can expose them to a team of their own, one
they can grow up watching and cheering for well after they return to
Ontario.
Ultimately, this news was long overdue. Buffalo should have been named the choice weeks ago. But regardless of how long it took, how many
wrong stories made it out, how many cities the Blue Jays would have preferred,
all we can say is
welcome home.