N.B.-born sports columnist recalls how Blue Jays inspired Canadians
CBC
Gregor Chisholm was a nine-year-old in Saint John when the Toronto Blue Jays won the World Series in 1992, and it had a profound impact on his choice of career.
More than 30 years later, he’s a baseball columnist for the Toronto Star and covered the Blue Jays improbable playoff run and ultimately heart-breaking World Series loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers in the fall.
“I was soaking it all in,” he said of the Jays' success in the early 1990s. “It's probably one of the reasons why I became a huge baseball fan, and one of the reasons when I went into journalism, I went … knowing I was going to work in sports.
"And when I moved to Toronto from Saint John, I wanted to cover baseball. A lot of it was because of those teams in the early '90s.”
The Blue Jays also won in 1993, on Joe Carter’s series-ending home run in the sixth game against the Philadelphia Phillies, only the second time ever a World Series has ended like that.
“You can't really beat hitting a walk-off home run to win a World Series,” Chisholm said. “It's an incredibly rare thing.”
Chisholm said those earlier teams influenced his choice of career and inspired a generation of new fans and Canadian baseball stars like Justin Morneau, a four-time all-star and 2006 American League Most Valuable Player, and Joey Votto, a six-time all-star and 2010 National League MVP.
“We saw a lot of Canadian baseball players come up 10 years after the run in the '90s,” Chisholm said. “Baseball in our country really picked up and the calibre of players really picked up because more people wanted to play and be involved and more people wanted to watch.”
Chisholm said last year’s team, even though it didn’t win the World Series, got Canadians excited like this too.
“What's really remarkable about the run [last] year was, you know, the ticket sales were one thing, but the television ratings that they had were on another level,” Chisholm said.
"It just shows that, when the Jays put a good product on the field, this country has a huge appetite for baseball, and the sport is thriving in this country.”
The team was immensely talented, but it also had a closeness that’s unusual for baseball teams, Chisholm said.
“This team really kind of convinced me of just how beneficial the chemistry can be because these guys were very, very tight,” he said.
“Usually in a professional clubhouse with baseball, you've got 26 individuals. You might have a lot of clicks, almost like high school. The relievers tend to hang out with the relievers, the starters tend to hang out with the starters.
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