Blue Jay Fever Appears to Be Mild Malady : Torontonians Are Proud, Even If the Game and Players Are Imported By

Down at the Zanzibar tavern, the strippers are taking it off to honor the Blue Jays. Over at Fran’s restaurant, the special is Blue Jay pie and the scantily clad Sunshine Girls pictured daily in the Toronto Sun are covering up their intimate parts with ballplayers’ gloves.

The Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulation newspaper, filled two-thirds of its Saturday front page with Blue Jay stories and recently devoted its weekly fashion section to dressing for a game.

It’s everywhere, an intense preoccupation with the Blue Jays and the agonizing effort to win their first major league baseball championship. But unlike most other cities that go through this, here, in Canada’s largest city, pennant fever isn’t quite the same.

Some of the differences are easy to explain. Toronto, for instance, is new to the major leagues, acquiring an American League expansion franchise in 1977. And this is the first year the team has seriously challenged for a title, so the fans don’t always show the insider’s appreciation and sophistication found in places where the game is more a part of life.

They are given to cheering routine fly balls by Blue Jay players and sitting on their hands when a batter advances a runner by hitting to the opposite field. There is very little razzing of umpires or opposing players, and spectators are often heard asking why a ball that bounces off the hard, artificial turf over the wall isn’t a home run.

At the same time, there is a fresh, enthusiastic and good-natured quality to Blue Jay fans. It was best seen Friday night when center fielder Lloyd Moseby dropped a fly ball that allowed the New York Yankees to score what turned out to be the winning run in a game that could have clinched the American League’s Eastern Division championship. Instead of booing and jeering, the 47,000 disappointed fans cheered Moseby as he left the field.

And in spite of the ever-present Blue Jay logo on shirts, caps and billboards and the newly composed Blue Jay song played incessantly over the radio, there is a reserve, even a politeness that is alien to, say, New York or Philadelphia fans, and is in keeping with Toronto’s reputation as a nice, some say, boring place.

Spectators don’t run on the field after a crucial victory, and there are very few police and no guard dogs in evidence in Exhibition Stadium. Although the team is owned by a brewery and beer has been sold at games for several years, drunks are seldom seen and spectators are never confronted with the clouds of marijuana smoke or the rolling fights of the bleachers of Boston’s Fenway Park.

When New York Yankee fans unmercifully booed the Canadian national anthem last month and a New York singer later butchered both the lyrics and the melody, Blue Jay fans pointedly cheered the “Star Spangled Banner” with which the Yankees opened their last series here.

Blue Jay fans, for the most part, don’t even complain about what is easily the worst ballpark in the majors, a stadium more suitable for rodeos and tractor pulling than baseball and what the local writers often refer to as Excruciating Stadium, when they are not calling it Excretion Stadium.

They sit smiling in an arena where only 12,000 of the 45,000 seats have backs and the rest are aluminum bleachers that could pass as refrigeration coils for much of the season and they stand in line to buy seats that require a contortionist’s talent to see home plate.

And while baseball is a working man’s sport in Baltimore or Pittsburgh, it has acquired a patina in Toronto that attracts matrons from snooty Rosedale and giddy Yuppies from Yorkville as well as finding its way into the musings of commentators usually given to pontificating on politics and sociology, sometimes with amusing results.

Trent Frayne, a sportswriter for the Toronto Globe and Mail wrote of the season ending series against the controversial Yankees that it “is more than a matter of winning the mini-flag in the American League East. It’s also a matter of human dignity.”

Norman Snider, a normally astute observer of Canadian life and politics in books and his Toronto Globe and Mail weekly column, got caught up enough in the Blue Jay fervor to pen a column explaining why more home runs are hit now than in olden days. His explanation: ball parks were huge fields before Babe Ruth and thus more difficult to hit balls out of.

But while inexperience with both baseball and pennant races as well as a more placid character explain some of the differences between Toronto’s behavior and what is found in some American cities, there are other, more subtle reasons.

Canadians, particularly Torontonians, are often described by their own commentators and frequently themselves as dull and incapable of competing with a more dynamic American society.

And they have suffered here from the failure of other sports franchises to win. The Canadian Football League Argonauts are one of the league’s worst teams, and the once powerful Maple Leafs are the door mats of the National Hockey League.

Now, the Blue Jays have given them a sense of pride, particularly because the Blue Jays are, in the Toronto view, a Canadian team beating the Americans at their own game.

This was carried to such an extreme in some cases that one electronic store ran full page ads in the papers saying “Yankees go home. We only accept Canadian Money. (And our national anthem sounds better, too.)”

There is a certain irony in this theme, which is pushed hard by the nationalist Toronto Star and Toronto Sun. This team that has been taken as the symbol of Canadian pride and national character is about as Canadian as chicken fried steak is chicken.

Of the regular team roster, 21 of the players are from the United States and four from the Dominican Republic. None accepts his pay in Canadian currency, and there’s not a permanent Canadian resident among them.