Mike Harrington: The long road finally arrives at home for the Bisons

Home of the Bisons. 

Finally, they're back in Buffalo. They were off Monday and play a game here Tuesday night against Rochester. For the first time since Aug. 29, 2019. It's been too long.

Lots of #Bluejays branding will remain in Sahlen Field but “Home of the #Bisons” has returned to the front and back of the scoreboard. pic.twitter.com/GhP8wrcFnp

— Mike Harrington (@ByMHarrington) August 9, 2021

From 1988 until midway through February 2020, the downtown ballpark was a home for all of us. For the last 17 months, however, things have been completely haywire. The Herd had no home. In 2020, in fact, it had no season at all for the first time since 1978.

This year, home was spent in the capable hands of the Trenton Thunder, a top-notch Double-A operation that the New York Yankees shockingly tossed aside in the winter during the avalanche of change that swept through minor league baseball. 

The Toronto Blue Jays spent last August and September here playing in front of no fans. They came back in June and had lots of fans in 2021 over their eight-week stay (OK, lots of Yankees and Red Sox fans showed up, too).

The Bisons have been in Trenton since arriving May 2. It was a marriage of convenience, with a city and a ballpark suddenly dropped from affiliated ball and a team pushed out of its own stadium. It worked. The Bisons – dressed and referred to as the "Thunder" when in the New Jersey capital – went 29-13 there. 

"The biggest challenge was we're in Trenton jerseys (at home) and Buffalo jerseys (on the road) and you're trying to figure out numbers and sizes and a lot of times theirs didn't match up with ours," laughed longtime Bisons clubhouse manager Scott Lesher, who was with the team the entire time in Trenton. "So we play a series in Trenton and then that last day I wouldn't touch Buffalo stuff until we were leaving for the road because you'd have player moves and I'd have to go through everybody's bag and make sure they had Buffalo stuff. Buffalo jerseys, Buffalo hats. All of it. It was crazy at times."

That said, the arrangement worked out for both sides. No one really knew what was going to happen to the Bisons when the Blue Jays sent word they were coming. Thank you, Trenton.

"It was amazing. The biggest success was the front office there," Lesher said. "The situation they were in, losing the Yankees, they were going to make sure that when we left there, everybody from me to (Blue Jays president) Mark Shapiro was going to be happy. They went above and beyond, made my experience amazing. They couldn't have treated everybody better. But when the guys come here, this is going to be a whole other world."

Sure is. The Bisons' new clubhouse complex – the space occupied by the Blue Jays in June and July – will quickly become the talk of Triple-A. It's massive, with plenty of space for player lockers, a gargantuan weight room, training facilities, large coaches offices and plenty of Blue Jays branding. It's incredibly impressive, and I've seen plenty of big-league clubhouses.

Manager Casey Candaele's new office had a fully stocked fridge waiting for him Monday, and I know there are some fans, front office folk – and media tape recorders – eagerly awaiting the reunion with one of the club's most popular players of the 1990s and one of the ace wisecrack specialists in franchise history.

There's never been a feeling of home at Sahlen Field like this. And a lot of the Blue Jays branding will remain, right from the flags on the plaza to logos inside the park. The Bisons want to keep that connection and those memories alive.

"Having Major League Baseball was a tremendous experience and a once in a lifetime opportunity that we got to share with our fans," said Brad Bisbing, the Bisons' assistant general manager. "But the hometown team is the Bisons. It was sad to see the Blue Jays go, but when we announced that yes, in fact, the Bisons were going to come home from Trenton, we received just a tremendous outpouring of fan excitement and support."

Bisbing pointed out how all the amenities are going to give Toronto an advantage when signing minor-league free agents. The parent club is roughly two hours away and you can play in those kind of facilities? That's a win-win for sure.

But that's all in the future. For now, the Bisons just want to open the doors and get people used to coming to the ballpark again. And it's quite a bit easier on the wallet than the Blue Jays were. All tickets are just $10 with general admission seating.

You'll see lots of Bisons shenanigans and fireworks shows, but they want you to pay attention to baseball, too, with the team only one game out of first place.

"We just wanted to be able to have some fun here at the ballpark this summer and welcome our fans back to Bisons baseball," Bisbing said. "Let's get the game going on the field and have some promotions and have some fun."

Watch for the light show you get with each Bisons home run from the new light towers, just like the Blue Jays got, and the light shows synched to music on next month's three festival nights. Superfan Mark Aichinger will make sure in no uncertain terms to tell a visiting pitcher he stinks (Memo to all: No one sits in Section 102, Row D, Seat 15). Conehead will give you his guarantee and pour cheaper suds than he did with the big leaguers here. Pat Malacaro and Duke McGuire will again fill the airwaves with the radio call.

Buster will cavort the dugout roof and Atomic Wing and Carrot will show the evil side of the mascot race, where it says here we should always be rooting for Chicken Wing and Bleu Cheese now that Celery has retired.

Welcome home, Bisons. Play ball.