Plate Appearances

The Toronto Blue Jays, remarkably, will play their fiftieth season in the major leagues next year. From the baseball club’s snow-filled debut on April 7, 1977, at Exhibition Stadium to its more recent pushes for post-season glory (thank you, hugely expanded playoff format) at the Rogers Centre, the team has carved out a significant place in the country’s sports history, including two iconic moments twenty-two years apart that remain touchstones for generations of fans. Add in a pair of World Series championships, as well as plenty of stars and personalities, and there will be stories to tell.

Jeff Blair, a Sportsnet 590 The Fan host and former Globe and Mail columnist, took a swing at telling the stories of the team in Full Count: Four Decades of Blue Jays Baseball, but that 2013 book mostly ignored the first two decades’ worth of players. Now, with Keegan Matheson’s recounting, fans of the club can relive the halcyon days of Dave Stieb and Joe Carter along with those of José Bautista and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

Matheson covers the Jays for MLB.com and does a fine job of drawing readers in by retelling well-known Jays highlights and profiling some of the most popular stars. He memorably introduces his chapter on Josh Donaldson, the 2015 American League MVP, by writing, “There’s only one Josh Donaldson, which is probably for the best. If there were two, there would be a brawl.” Of Bautista, he of the legendary seventh-inning bat flip the same year, Matheson says, “José Bautista was better than you. He knew it, but that wasn’t always enough. He wanted you to know it, too.”

Toronto Blue Jays is not a chronological tale. It’s the book version of a spray hitter: a player who knocks the ball to all different parts of the field. This structure gives less of a narrative arc and less drama to the club’s story, but there are still plenty of great yarns. Matheson has a section on “the storytellers,” for example, and reports the affecting anecdote of the long-time play-by-play announcer Jerry Howarth turning over the mic to Tom Cheek during game 6 of the 1992 World Series. The two had been taking turns calling innings from Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, and Howarth was up when Dave Winfield “pulled a two-run double down the line” to take the lead in the top of the eleventh. In the bottom of the inning, he graciously stepped aside. That meant Cheek, who had been in the booth for every Jays game since the team’s inception, was the one to declare, “For the first time in history, the World Championship banner will fly north of the border!” With those words, “Cheek’s voice lives alongside a moment that will never die.”

Matheson often lets the players do the talking. Carter, for one, gets a lot of airtime recounting his celebrated walk-off three-run homer to win the 1993 World Series. But we also hear from the likes of Pat Gillick, J. P. Ricciardi, and Cito Gaston. Matheson uses long quotations from interviews and other public appearances, and they give the book an intimate feel that fans will love. He also has a superb account of the chase for Shohei Ohtani, the coveted free agent whom the Blue Jays nearly acquired in 2024. He includes copy he had written for instant publication in case the rumours of Toronto signing Ohtani had proven to be true. The most exciting player in the game, however, went with the Los Angeles Dodgers for $700 million (U.S.). “The fallout was crushing.”

The subtitle of this book is instructive. This really is a “curated” history of the Jays. As a result, Toronto Blue Jays comes across as a love letter to the club and its followers. It skims over or completely ignores some of the most challenging moments, such as the sticky departure of Alex Anthopoulos in 2015 and some of the dubious trades and playoff collapses over the years. A deep dive on the Roy Halladay and R. A. Dickey moves, among others, would have been a good addition.

Two other items of significance didn’t make the cut. First, there are no photographs, an inexcusable oversight in this series of sports books, titled The Franchise. Many iconic moments come up in Toronto Blue Jays, but no images are included to help relive them. History books like this deserve pictures, especially considering that most of the subject’s important moments were captured by dozens of photographers. The other missing piece is an index. A publisher may want to cut costs by skipping one, but it’s a useful aid to readers; to leave one out seems to say you do not care about them. It is difficult to see whether Otto Velez, Doug Ault, or the Pearson Cup is in this book, for instance, without referring to an index. (It turns out none of them is included, but all should be.)

Matheson and his publisher might have taken a page from an exceptionally comprehensive franchise history, Jonah Keri’s Up, Up, & Away: The Kid, the Hawk, Rock, Vladi, Pedro, Le Grand Orange, Youppi!, the Crazy Business of Baseball, & the Ill-Fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos, from 2014. While Keri is no exemplar off the field — he was sentenced to twenty-one months in jail in 2022, after a conviction on domestic violence charges — he superbly chronicled “Nos Amours,” a team that still has a devoted following across the country, despite the fact nearly a quarter century has passed since it played here.

The Toronto Blue Jays have been Canada’s sole MLB team for a while now. Even with its handicaps, Keegan Matheson’s look back at the franchise will delight most of its fans.