Blue Jay Fever Is Sweeping Canada

At the Fran’s restaurant chain, they’re selling Bluejay Pie. At Notre Dame High in Brampton, Ontario, school principal Lorne Howcroft sports a baseball cap to celebrate Blue Jays Day. At several plants, workers are churning out T-shirts, pennants and other paraphernalia to cash in on the phenomenon sweeping Canada.

Across the nation--from Gerard Meaney on the Atlantic coast to Peter Gillies on the Pacific seaboard--Blue Jay Fever has set in.

“Even the most diehard workaholics in our office are leaving work early to catch a game on television,” said Gillies, a 32-year-old marketing analyst in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the west coast. “Canadians are so preoccupied with comparing themselves with the Americans. Now we’re about to beat the Yanks at their own game.”

On the other side of the country in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Meany, a 27-year-old photocopy machine repairman, also has the fever.

“Anyone who’s serious about baseball here is a Blue Jays fan-- it’s very big here down east,” he said. “At one time a lot of people were Expos fans but you know what happened to the Expos. Everyone has swung Blue Jay way.”

In Toronto, where the Blue Jays are heroes, newspapers are packed with baseball news, countdowns to division titles and pictures of young women holding baseball bats and wearing Blue Jay caps and cut-off T-shirts.

There hasn’t been this much excitement over sports in the city since the Toronto Argonauts won the Canadian Football League’s Grey Cup in 1983--and that marked the first time in 31 years. The last time the Toronto Maple Leafs won the National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup was 18 years ago, before many Blue Jays fans were born.

In Vancouver, where radio stations frequently play the Blue Jays theme song, Gillies suggested nationalism was at the heart of the baseball fever.

“I’m not really a baseball fan but I intend to be at the World Series in Toronto,” he said while watching a recent game in a Vancouver pub.

Home game attendance figures and television audience statistics show sports fans in the nation have focused on the Blue Jays.

After the three-game sellout series against the New York Yankees closing out the regular season, the Blue Jays will have drawn 2.45 million people to Exhibition Stadium this year. That compares to 2.1 million in 1984 and does not take into account two missed dates with Baltimore during the short-lived August baseball strike.

The Canadian Television Network, which broadcasts Blue Jay games nationally, said its audience has increased substantially.

For example, CTV registered 2.2 million viewers for the Sept. 15 Toronto-Yankees matchup at New York. In a game at New York Sept. 5, 1984, CTV recorded an audience of 1.3 million.

Another barometer is the sales level of baseball caps, T-shirts, pens, beer mugs, coffee cups, ponchos, radios, helmets, pennants and buttons emblazoned with the Blue Jays logo.

“We’re having trouble even getting supplies ourselves,” said Blue Jays’ marketing director Paul Markle. “It is quite a phenomenon.”

Bob Haggert, president of Sports Representatives Ltd., Canadian agent for New York-based Licencing Co. of America, said the licensed manufacturers producing Blue Jays paraphernalia report booming sales.

“Pennant fever has captured the hearts of all the consumers, there’s no question about that,” he said.

Haggert said rules prohibit releasing sales figures but current sales are better than ever before.