When it comes to baseball and the city of Toronto, teams don’t have to go home, but they can’t stay here. That’s the message to the home town Blue Jays, baseball’s only Canadian team and now the league’s resident nomads. With the calendar closing in on today’s Opening Day, Toronto officials told the Blue Jays they wouldn’t be able to use the Rogers Center in Toronto as their baseball home. That’s because the Canadian government said no to both the Blue Jays and baseball teams from all across the US potentially spreading Covid across a country that now counts new daily cases in the hundreds. Which meant that the Toronto Blue Jays would have to find a new home stadium in the US for their compressed 60 game season.
That has not gone so well. As of this recording, the Jays were denied residency in their assumed new home of Pittsburg, and they have less than a week until their, well, home opener against the Nationals on Wednesday. Leading contenders right now are Baltimore and simply just playing on the road for 60 straight games. Kind of like the Astros do for two weeks when the rodeo comes to Houston, only for a lot longer and with masks. There’s still an outside shot that Toronto’s minor league home Buffalo plays host, but the Jays seem to only want a major league stadium, which feels like a thinly veiled jab at the city of Buffalo. But with increasing probability, the Toronto Blue Jays will be a vagabond circus for the 2020 season.
To be fair, they’re not the only sports franchise staying completely away from home. In fact, the entire NBA, NHL, and MLS are all playing away from home in sports bubbles, where there’s never really a home team and no one travels. Basketball and soccer are at Disney in Orlando, while hockey will split between Edmonton and, yes, Toronto, where once everyone is in, they’re in for the duration. There are no fans in any of these situations, making any notion of home field advantage fairly obsolete anyway. So in three major sports, every team will basically play in a neutral location wearing a jersey of their home town. And as the NFL tries to figure out a reasonable fall season, I’d assume at best it will run in empty stadiums with piped in ambiance.
Of course, this is the best, and perhaps only way to have pro sports this summer and fall, so most sports fans will more than take it. It does take a moment to adjust to all the empty seats, but you can get over that pretty quickly. And this may sound blasphemous, but I kind of like the fake fan noise. I suppose it’s the fake laugh track of 2020 sports. I assume that over the course of these weeks and months, viewers will watch in large numbers, both because they miss live sports but also because there’s not a whole lot else to do. But what might be most interesting is who they watch.
For the history of spectator sport in this country, teams were routed in a sense of place. Which made obvious sense when live attendance was the primary revenue stream and people didn’t move around much. But obviously today’s world is far different. We consume sport mainly – and in some cases exclusively on screens, and you can watch pretty much any team and any athlete from around the world. And athletes themselves are extremely mobile, allowing for stars to play for a long list of teams and cities. Just consider the work history of LeBron James, which feels a lot different than the resumes of Magic Johnson or Larry Bird – two NBA stars whose legacies are firmly planted in their two coastal cities. As we may affirm through this unintended sports Covid experiment, it may not matter if a team is in Denver or Dallas, as long we all get to watch on TV. And particularly for the newest generation of sports fans that have grown up consuming sport from YouTube on a mobile device and who were unlikely to afford to attend in person anyway, they may be just as happy to watch an entire league headquartered in Orlando as they would one scattered around the country – or even two, as the Blue Jays have reminded us. Maybe the future of sport isn’t trying to find a city to call home, but instead realizing place just doesn’t really matter, and home is simply where the court or field is.
For the Toronto Blue Jays, it’s not quite that simple. They may not need a home, but do need someplace to stay.
Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him on twitter at @KeithStrudler
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