  A sea of blue seats can be seen in the background as Jays pitcher Brett Cecil delivers to the plate against the Red Sox Wednesday night. (QMI Agency/Alex Urosevic) |
TORONTO - Another gloomy night with too many empty seats at the Rogers Centre paints a confusing, confounding and contradictory picture of the present and future for the Blue Jays.
Neither the sky — nor what they used to call the SkyDome — is falling.
But never has a three-game series against the popular Boston Red Sox been played in so dismal a Toronto atmosphere.
“It’s a shame,” said Aaron Hill, the Blue Jays’ best player. “I really wish everybody would get to know these guys. We have a good bunch of guys who play the game the right way. That’s what baseball fans should want and should appreciate.”
“We see the stands, we notice it, but there’s really nothing we can do about it. We don’t have any answers for it.”
The Blue Jays have become the latest sporting equivalent of pornography. People will happily watch it from their homes. They’re just not ready to buy tickets or be seen at the ballpark: The Blue Jays average attendance of 15,877 is the lowest in all of baseball.
The Monday and Tuesday night crowds at the Rogers Centre were alarmingly small and silent considering the Red Sox were the opponent. But the televison numbers on Rogers Sportsnet were amazingly strong. That is the contradiction: People are watching not buying. The audience for Tuesday night’s game was 525,000. The night before, opposite Game 6 of the Montreal-Washington playoff series, the Jays did 351,500 on Sportsnet. The home opener had a television audience of 796,000.
Baseball may be dead at the ball park: It isn’t dead in Canadian homes.
“I keep hearing people are alarmed by the crowds, but I’m not,” said Buck Martinez, the former Jays player and manager and current play-by-play man. “Given the history of what’s gone on here for several seasons, the fans need to be encouraged to come back. And they won’t be encouraged to come back until the club starts winning.
When told of the pornography analogy, Martinez said: “That’s your analogy, not mine. To me, it’s more like they’re pulling the curtains back to have a look before they reach in their pockets and buy a ticket.”
Television may, in fact, wind up as the financial savior of the Blue Jays. This is the bonus of having the Red Sox and the Yankees in the same division rather than the apparent curse. One reason for the financial strength of the New York Yankees is they operate their own television network and it’s proven to be a financial windfall.
The Jays, owned by a cable company, are considering the power of HD television and the strength of their national television numbers as a means of possibly operating the team in the future.
The crowds are never expected to come back to the 50,000 range of the World Series years, but they aren’t expected to be in the 15,000s, either. A happy medium with a strong television situation could wind up as the solution. There are those who today still credit the remarkable strength of TSN as a national network with the rise of the Blue Jays.
“Almost a quarter of our schedule is against the Red Sox and Yankees,” said club president Paul Beeston. “If you add our games against Tampa Bay, I think what we have is a very valuable television package, a very valuable package. I see that as a selling point. We have a helluva television product.
“If we can monetize the television, and get our rate card up, that can really change things.”
But, in the meantime, there is a stadium playing to about 30% capacity and an embarrassment of empty seats.
The drop in Blue Jays attendance can be explained in numerous ways. For one thing, the announced numbers this season are real. While no one will go on the record and say so, the Jays’ figures in recent years, with discounted tickets, Toonie Tuesdays and some house papering, weren’t exactly accurate. The numbers this season are the actual numbers, startling as they may seem. The numbers may seem astounding to fans and media, but they are not to Beeston or the owners, Rogers Inc.
The fallout from the eight seasons of the flim-flam man, J.P. Ricciardi, still reasonate with Blue Jays fans and some Jays workers.
“That turned a lot of people off,” said Martinez. “Fans were told things were better than they actually were. You can’t lie to fans. And if you disguise what you have in the minor leagues and tell people you have legitimate prospects, well, that catches up with you.”
Beeston would rather look forward than back.
“We broke their trust,” Beeston said of the paying customers. “We have to rebuild that trust. That’s a tough thing to do. We don’t need to criticize the past or say what they did was wrong. We just have to believe that what we’re doing now is the right thing.
“Of course, you’re concerned when you see the numbers. But I also know what the genesis of this is. I also believe in what we’re doing here and I believe it’s the only way to succeed. I also believe, and I tell people this: You’re missing an opportunity to watch this team grow. You’re missing an opportunity to see a team that will grow together. Last year, we didn’t have a minor league guy we can talk about. This year, we can give you three or four guys. And hopefully soon, a whole lot more than that.”
This may be the worst period in the history of Toronto professional sports. The Leafs are in a down cycle and the Raptors have rarely been anything beyond average. The Argos are all but lost to small but rabid group of fans with an active television audience and then there are the Blue Jays, from an attendance point of view, closing in on rock bottom.
If you’re wondering what or where the marketing plan is for this season, don’t wonder any more: There isn’t one. The money that may have been originally budgeted for marketing has instead gone into baseball development. The Blue Jays’ marketing plan for the season was to be honest with the public.
“We didn’t mislead anyone,” said Beeston. “If we’ve been unsuccessful, at least we haven’t lied. We told people we’re building this team and that’s what we’re trying to do. And we don’t have those marketing dollars because we’ve chosen to plough that money into baseball. Everything we’re doing right now is about baseball.”
This has been a competitive and interesting ball team in the early going. It isn’t the disaster some predicted post-Roy Halladay. And oddly, there are reasons to go to the ball park. Among them: Easy access to tickets, no trouble finding parking, no lineups for concessions. And these aren’t the reasons anyone would necessarily advertise.
“They have some good young pitchers here and some good players, but they don’t have the Jason Heywards or the Mike Stantons,” said Martinez. “They need one of those. You need to hit some home runs in the draft. You need a 6-foot-6 David Price, a Heyward, an Evan Longoria. That’s what Alex (Anthopoulos) is trying to accomplish now. You need to have the Mosebys, Barfields and Stiebs coming through the system the way it once did. And then we’ll see what happens.”
But it’s hard to look forward when the best days were all in the past. Nick Leyva, the Blue Jays coach, understands as he walks around Toronto in his second go-round with the club.
“It’s funny,” said Leyva. “If I’m walking around and somebody recognizes me, they recognize me as a coach from 1992 and ’93. They recognize me from hopping around third base and giving Joe (Carter) high-fives, winning a world championship. They don’t recognize me as a coach from this year and last year.
“And I still remember the number: 50,511. That was the attendance every night. I don’t think you’ll ever see that again. But what we see now, I don’t think that’s the future either.
“This town needs a winner and I know what it can be like when we’re winning. It’s not up to the fans. It’s up to us to start winning.”
steve.simmons@sunmedia.ca
