If you build it, they will come.
That was the idea behind Pilot Field when it opened, in 1988.
So near, and yet so far.
That’s the idea behind Sahlen Field in 2020, as big-league baseball – the “they” in they will come – finally does.
The Toronto Blue Jays will play their first home-away-from-home game in Buffalo on Tuesday. So near they're here, and yet so far we can’t see them. The virus that brings them is the virus that keeps us away. Cruel irony rarely comes so neatly packaged.
Jim Overfield is writing “The Seasons of Buffalo Baseball.” It is an update to a 1985 book written by his father, Joe, the noted historian of Buffalo baseball, who died 20 years ago this summer.
Jim Overfield, with the oversized, framed photo of Offermann Stadium that once hung over his father’s mantel and is now in his office in Vermont.
What would the man who wrote the book on Buffalo baseball think of the saga of the Buffalo Blue Jays?
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“It’s so far-fetched a story, it’s hard to know,” Jim says by phone from his home near Burlington, where he is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont. “I know that on one level my father would be pleased, because he loved Buffalo and would love any positive development for the city. But on another level he’d be mad at Toronto (the team's management) for showing so little respect for our city and our stadium.”
Fair enough. The Blue Jays are here only because Canada said no to playing in Toronto, and Pennsylvania said no to playing in Pittsburgh, and Maryland was preparing to say no to playing in Baltimore.
We’re like the boy who asks the prettiest girl in school to the prom and she says no because she has better prospects. But then – when three other dates don’t work out – at last she says yes. Do you think that boy is mad at her? No! They’re going to the prom, and that’s all that matters.
And so we are getting our first big-league ballgames since the Buffalo Blues played in the Federal League in 1915. We’ve gone, in the space of a century, from Blues to Blue Jays.
As it happens, I caught only one Buffalo Bisons game last summer. That night, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. took a mighty swing and sent a towering home run skyward. The sound, as ball met bat, was like Thor striking his hammer.
Imagine the noise Guerrero’s homers will make at the same ballpark this summer, with no ambient sound from fans in the stands. And you’ll have to imagine it, because you won’t be there.
(Philosophical question: If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does Guerrero touch all the bases? Related: How many Los Angeles Angels can dance on the head of a pin?)
David Chettle understands the concept of so near, and yet so far. He lives in Fort Erie and roots for the Jays. What’s more, he loves Sahlen’s hot dogs. But this summer he can’t cross the border to buy them – and he can’t see the Jays play in the ballpark named for his favorite franks, though it stands just a few tape-measure Guerrero blasts from the grill in his backyard.
So now, after 105 years, we get a big-league ballclub to call our own – or kind of sort of our own. And who knows what could happen? Heck, in this abridged season, more than half of major-league teams will make the playoffs. Then, if the Jays were to catch fire, well, maybe Sahlen Field can emerge as a real field of dreams in this midsummer night’s dream of a season.
“Don’t hold your breath,” Overfield advises, “on the Blue Jays winning the World Series.”
But what if they did? Could the city that’s 0-4 in Super Bowls, and 0-2 in Stanley Cup finals, actually move up to 1-0 in the World Series – with a team that isn’t really ours?
Overfield lets out a long laugh. “Ideally,” he says, “they would beat the Los Angeles Dodgers and win it in Buffalo.”
The updated book was due out in October. Mike Billoni, the Bisons’ former general manager, is publishing it. And now he’s decided to delay publication to see what happens with these newly branded Blue Jays of Buffalo. There’s always a new chapter of Buffalo baseball.
So the Blue Jays are ours, for now. And then, before we know it, they’ll fly away. Think of them as Groucho Marx singing in 1930’s “Animal Crackers”:
Hello, I must be going.
I cannot stay,
I came to say:
I must be going.
I’ll stay a week or two,
I’ll stay the summer through.
But I am telling you
I must be – going!
