Signage is familiar. Well, really, that’s it. But well, it doesn’t beat anything. Or, to be faster with the Toronto Blue Jays, it’s more productive to see your call on the back of a dialer in a visiting stadium for a game that’s “at home” just through a call.
Baseball nomads will walk over the box at Sahlen Field in Buffalo, New York, Tuesday night as the host team for the first time in 2020.The Canadian government would not allow the Blue Jays to host games at Toronto’s Rogers Centre, fearing the Outdoor Entities arriving in the town in the middle of a pandemic. Pittsburgh showed up to let the Blue Jays play at PNC Park when the Pirates were on tour, but Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf did not sign.
That left Buffalo, who hosted a regular major league season game in 1915, when the Buffalo Blues finished sixth in the eight-team Federal League.
The wait hasn’t been that long for the Blue Jays. Toronto spent the first two weeks or more recovering from Tampa to Washington, Atlanta and Boston, waiting for the 16,600-seat arrangements to be completed at Sahlen Field (some will be empty).
Yes, it will take some time to get used to, no matter how many times the well-known Blue Jays logo splashes on everything from the sinks to the elevator doors and canoes. Instead of a Marriott on the ground fence in the right center, Ellicott Square, which served as the backdrop for all the hotel scenes in the 1984 film “The Natural,” is across the street.
“We don’t play in Buffalo, so it’s a road trip,” said Toronto coach Charlie Montoyo, whose team is 5-8 after traveling on the East Coast. “But I’m going to say that after the first two games, it becomes our ballpark.”
By the way, this isn’t the one that Robert Redford’s Roy Hobbs turned off all the lighting devices at the climax of “The Natural.” The film was shot at the War Memorial Coliseum, which gave way to Sahlen Field in the past 1980s, Miami Marlins manager Don Mattingly, whose team will be visitors on Tuesday, for mixing things up.
“I had never been to Buffalo in my life until last winter,” said Mattingly, whose team faced a COVID-19 outbreak two weeks ago that interrupted their own season. “I think of the Bills and then ‘The Natural’. Are we betting on this very stadium?”
I am sorry.
Instead, the Marlins and Blue Jays will be running into a facility that could well be a snapshot of the 2020 season. Of course, lighting fixtures have been improved, the infield has been renovated and almost every wall you have earned a touch of blue paint. However, genuine work has focused on aligning the 32-year level with MLB’s fitness protocols in position to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Batting cages became locker rooms. The bathrooms have become educational spaces. The lobby is now a well-equipped gym. BAM Productions, which is helping MLB organize the Little League Classic and NHL to host the Winter Classic, has taken the lead in the transformation process. Some of the settings will be temporary. Some will be permanent. All are designed to help the Blue Jays and exhale, if briefly, about 160 kilometers south of the Rogers Center.
“We, our boys, felt at home,” said Tile Vice President Marnie Starkman.
First impressions were promising. Starkman called the reaction of Toronto’s training staff a brief stopover at the facility on Sunday night as “pretty cool.”
Although the final touches were not put in place until this weekend, the procedure was not as chaotic as the club feared in the first place. The Blue Jays had already designated Buffalo as Toronto’s preferred educational site before Sahlen Field was suddenly discovered as the most productive candidate to provide the Major League Baseball club with transitority excavations, meaning lighting fixtures were among the first things that took position when the transformation began.
The procedure led Mike Buczkowski, president of Rich Baseball Operations, the asset organization that runs the Bisons, to think again about what the franchise will do when things return to “normal,” or anything that goes through “normal” in a post-pandemic. World.
“We opened our eyes in terms of” Do we want the batting cages where we had them? “Things like that, ” said Buczkowski. “This leads us to reinvent space.”
However, this will not allow Buczkowski to reinvent Sahlen Field through a full-time primary championship. Buffalo in the race in the early 1990s, when MLB expanded to Denver and Miami. The economic facets that made sense at the time would possibly cease to make sense three decades later. Buffalo is the 52nd largest TV market in the country and Toronto, New York and even Cleveland are within driving distance.
“We said it’s not that we wouldn’t have enthusiasts who would help MLB in Buffalo, but that we’re a big enough market,” Buczkowski said. “You look at all the other profits you want to generate, that’s the question … We haven’t really looked at that, it’s anything if we do it right, we’d become major league candidates.”
That doesn’t mean Sahlen Field may not seem to be in a position for the primary leagues when the city hosts its first championship game since Woodrow Wilson’s first term at the White House. Buczowski will take him out of his office, giving him a pretty clever view of the action. The view will be even greater for the Tiles, despite everything at home. More or less.
___
AP Sports editors Kyle Hightower in Boston and Steven Wine in Miami contributed to this report.
___
More AP MLB: https://apnews.com/MLB and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports