SIMMONS: Blue Jays fans getting throwback summer love-in with baseball

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We moved back to Toronto in 1987 and noticed how much the city had changed.

Everywhere we went there was a radio. You got invited to dinner, there was a radio playing alongside your conversation and food. You went to a summer BBQ, it wasn’t music playing by the pool, it was Tom Cheek and Jerry Howarth bringing you baseball. And on the dock at someone’s cottage, the sound was of motorboats roaring but also of Tom and Jerry and Blue Jays baseball.

The truth was: This was a summer of love in Toronto, a summer you couldn’t help but fall in love with baseball and your Blue Jays team for the very first time. Everybody talked a good game and everywhere you went it was paramount to talk about what went on. Last night’s game. Tomorrow’s game. What’s up this weekend? Who’s up, who’s pitching? And do you think George Bell actually has a chance to win the MVP?

We didn’t listen a lot to Whitney Houston wanting to dance with somebody. We were too busy listening to Fergie Olver saying ‘How bout those Blue Jays?’
At its absolute best, baseball can do that to a town – consume it daily like no other sport. It can make you part of today yesterday and tomorrow. It can provide you with your daily small talk, or in the case of this summer, something to gush about.

When you get a season that is this surprising, this delightful — like this one right now in Toronto — with every day mattering, and the bevy of stories coming from so many unsuspecting places that this has been the introduction to an ensemble cast of magnificent performances, so random and unexpected. If this is your first great baseball summer — like we first experienced in 1987 — that carries you and brings you along for the ride, a ride of mostly joy, and its what baseball can do maybe more than any other sport.

There haven’t been a lot of magical summers in Toronto over the years from a baseball perspective. There was 1977, and that was magic because it was brand new and it was ours for the the very first time. It was like opening a gift at the holiday season each day not knowing what would be in the package.

It wasn’t until 1985, or maybe the seasons just before that, that the Blue Jays grabbed our hearts and broke them for the very first time. In 1987, my first year in Toronto after spending eight years in Calgary and three years in London, the Blue Jays had everything but a final week.

They had a 3.5 game lead and seven games to play and on the final weekend of the season in Detroit, they couldn’t find a win. The Tigers won the pennant. The Blue Jays won 96 games, led baseball in all the important statistics, didn’t make the playoffs. The Minnesota Twins won the World Series. They won 85 games that year.

Sometimes summer love ends with the heartache of fall, like it did in 2015.

The Blue Jays have not many seasons like the one they are experiencing right now. Maybe they’ve never had a season like this one at all before.

They won the World Series in 1992 and 1993 with great teams, the first win coming after the team was labelled as chokers. But once Roberto Alomar hit the home run off Dennis Eckersley in Oakland, the gate opened: The Jays were freed from their past. They won back to back and neither win was a surprise, the way this summer has been a surprise.
Home runs defined almost all their big moments. Alomar. Ed Sprague. Joe Carter. Later, Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion.

But since the World Series years and the years building up to that, there has been a lot of nothing.
From 1994 to 2000, nothing. From 2000 to 2015, nothing. More than 20 years without reason to believe.

The second half boost of 2015 was more than magical and explosive. Josh Donaldson hit 41 home runs, Bautista hit 40, Encarnacion hit 39. General manager Alex Anthopoulos traded for all-star pitcher David Price and all-star shortstop Troy Tulowitzki at the deadline and suddenly you couldn’t find a Blue Jays ticket or anything else to talk about. .
The stands were full at Rogers Centre. The crowd looked different, younger, more engaged, more excited, more female, more diverse, louder: Everyone signed up to be part of the Blue Jays summer.

That was a one-time, short term love affair that lasts in your memory forever.

And now this. Baseball taking over again. There is no Donaldson or Bautista getting MVP votes this time. There is Vladdy Guerrero Jr. sometimes being the $500 million man sometimes not, so instead it’s Ernie Clement or Alejandro Kirk, or if not them, Addison Barger or Myles Straw or Nathan Lukes or Joey Loperfido before the demotion doing the impossible or the improbable or dammit, maybe this is just what they’re meant to do.

The world has changed since 1987. We check scores on our watches or our phones now. We go on social media to hear who is saying what about whom. We watch the Blue Jays in 30 minutes. — greatest invention ever — when we miss the game.

But a baseball season like this one is all consuming. The Blue Jays may be almost 50 years old but they’ve had less than a handful of seasons where every day and every game and every at-bat seems to matter.

This is a summer of love in Toronto, baseball love. Love of the game. Love of this team. Love of how it brings us all together.

ssimmons@postmedia.com

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