Epilogue: Ottawa Baseball From 1865 to 2025

For a few years in the early to mid-1990s Ottawa fans thought pro baseball would prosper forever in their city. Sadly, they were wrong. Baseball had a brief period of glory here, then faded. There have been continual stirrings, a series of new beginnings, but the glory days have not returned. Can they?

First, we need to look at what made the Ottawa Lynx so successful. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that a perfect storm of factors worked in their favor. Novelty was one thing, but novelty alone cannot explain the phenomenon. The lack of competition would be a partial explanation: When the Ottawa Lynx first appeared, the Ottawa Senators were just one year into their existence and losing all the time in a cramped and outdated arena. Their fancy new home, then called the Palladium, was not built until 1996.

Other distractions were yet to come. There was no Netflix. Phones were just phones. Video games were in their infancy.

Cultural factors played in. We were in the midst of what I like to call the Thrill of the Grass period—a time when baseball was romanticized within an inch of its life. W.P. Kinsella’s baseball novels (Shoeless Joe, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy and, yes, The Thrill of the Grass) were all the rage. The movie version of Shoeless Joe, Field of Dreams, came out in 1989. Kinsella’s notion of all the world somehow being in fair territory resonated deeply.

A League of Their Own, another affecting baseball movie, came out in 1992. Perhaps most important was the nostalgic Ken Burns documentary series, Baseball, which first aired in 1994. Baseball, the sport, was fashionable. The Lynx Stadium was the place to be.

Your friends were at the stadium—friends you didn’t even know were baseball fans. They talked about it at work. They bought season tickets, or shares of season tickets. You had to be there, too.

And a good stadium it was, to give it credit. There was lots of parking, good seating, good sight lines, an abundance of concessions, real grass (the better to be thrilled by). It was a well-run, locally-owned operation.

Another important factor in the success of the Lynx was the success of the Montreal Expos. The Expos had many fans in Ottawa, some who regularly made the trek down Highway 417 to catch games at the Big O, many others who watched the games on television or tuned in to Duke and Dave on the country music FM station CKBY. The Lynx affiliation with the Expos was part of the draw: we could see Expos stars of the future, on their way up; we could see Expos stars of the past on their way down; we could see Expos stars of the present on rehab assignments. We could see Rondell White, Cliff Floyd, Chris Nabholz, Sean Berry, even Charlie Montoyo, a light-hitting shortstop before he became an ill-fated manager in the American League. We could see visiting stars, such as Carlos Delgado, then a catcher for the Syracuse Chiefs. And we could create fan favorites of our own, such as the versatile F.P. Santangelo and the hearing-impaired outfielder, Curtis Pride.

Finally, the Lynx existed in an ideal media situation. The Ottawa Citizen was engaged in a newspaper war with the upstart Ottawa Sun. Much of that war took place on the sports pages. The Lynx got lots and lots of coverage—profiles, advance stories, and game stories complete with box scores.

You have only to look at today’s media situation to get an idea of how the perfect storm plays out in reverse. Newspapers have tiny sports sections and tiny staffs. Today’s professional baseball iteration, the Titans, receive almost no coverage. If you want to find out when a game is, you have to look for the team website. The same with finding out who won. The Titans’ predecessors—the Champions, Fat Cats, and Rapidz—received a similar fate.

There is no link to the Expos because there are no Expos. Even when there were Expos, they dropped their Lynx affiliation in 2002. Local fans were less interested in seeing the farmhands of the Baltimore Orioles and, later, the Philadelphia Phillies. Some of the less committed of the fans discovered that watching a baseball game in Ottawa in April, and even May, could be a cold experience.

The ballpark still has the grass, but it has less parking, fewer concessions. Its location, something which never bothered folks during the height of Lynx popularity, is now seen as a disadvantage. Like its ill-fated cousin, Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, it is walking distance to nothing. Ottawa’s sometimes chill spring weather, which didn’t bother anyone in the initial glow of the early Lynx years, now keeps people away.

Baseball itself may not have helped. Although the Lynx survived past the 1994 strike, they would, like all of baseball, have been hurt by the general souring of public attitudes toward the game as the result of the steroid revelations. The corporatization of the sport, where players earn millions and stadiums are named after banks, has put it at a remove from everyday life. Some people began to suspect they lived in foul territory after all.

The perfect storm rages on. Spectator sports are expensive and people have only so much. Today’s discretionary sports spending in Ottawa goes to the Senators and, to a lesser extent, football’s RedBlacks, both of which have occasional ups to go with their downs and both of which receive ample media coverage.

Baseball’s role in daily life has diminished. Neighborhood little leagues have shrunk or disappeared altogether. Fields that once held baseball games now hold soccer games, or dogs. Soccer is seen by parents as more fitness-enhancing than baseball, and it probably is. Basketball has grown in popularity.

And of course many kids do not want to play anything, at least out of the house. They want to stay home and play video games, encouraged by their helicopter parents, who don’t want their child exposed to such dangers as bats and balls may pose. Participation in baseball, like participation in other sports, has been hurt by the high cost of training at the elite level.

This is not good. If kids are not playing a game, they have less interest in watching it.

So, who is watching it? Who are those few hundred folks out there at the stadium? Perhaps they hold the key to survival.

Who are they? Well, you can only guess. Some of them will be families looking for something to do on a sunny afternoon or a warm evening. And some of them, perhaps the majority, will be die-hard baseball fans. They will go to a game no matter what. They are unaffected by the parking situation, by the presence or absence of between innings entertainment, craft beer, mascots, loud music between pitches and the playing of “YMCA” or “Sweet Caroline.” On the face of it, at least judging by the Ottawa experience, there are not enough of these to make a franchise profitable over the long run.

Certainly baseball owners the world over sense this, sense that baseball alone is not enough to put seats in the seats. At the major-league level there is so much entertainment happening—on the scoreboard, on the public address system, in the stands, on top of the dugout—that the game sometime seems an afterthought. Does this work? Hard to know, because no one has tried to do without it. Certainly, it would please the die-hards, who would like to be left in peace, the better to hear the infield chatter and the occasional bird, but no serious attempt has been made, to my knowledge, to have a silent baseball game.

The assumption is that there are not enough die-hards, not enough true baseball fans, to support a distraction-free free baseball experience. The Ottawa experience neither proves nor disproves this theory, since the stadium keeps pumping out the oldies, running various mascot suits through the stands and bringing fans onto the field between innings to humiliate themselves in wacky competitions. On the one hand, there are few fans. On the other hand, maybe there would be fewer.

The Saint of Second Chances, a 2023 documentary about the baseball entrepreneur Mike Veeck suggests that more and more stadium wackiness can be the salvation of minor-league baseball. Veeck, son of the legendary St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck, and author of the infamous disco demolition promotion at Chicago’s Comiskey in 1979, is shown to have resurrected a number of minor-league franchises by going all-in on crazy stunts and promotions.

Could that be the answer for Ottawa? Perhaps not, given the capital city’s buttoned-up reputation. Similarly, it is unlikely that Ottawa baseball would go the route of the Savannah Bananas, a team whose recent successes have more to do with comedy than baseball prowess.

A more relevant place to look would be Winnipeg, home of the Goldeyes, also an independent league franchise, also owned by the owner of the Ottawa Titans, Sam Katz. Playing in an independent league similar to the one hosting the Ottawa Titans, and playing in a city with challenges similar to Ottawa’s, the Goldeyes averaged 3,641 fans per game in 20231, compared to the Titans, who averaged 1,540.2 The Goldeyes were third in attendance in a 12-team league, the Titans 13th in a 15-team league.

The comparison is not entirely fair, since the Goldeyes have been around long enough to be a local institution, while the Titans were in their second year of existence. But if you are optimistic you can see the potential for Ottawa. Winnipeg’s population is similar to Ottawa’s, a bit smaller actually. Winnipeg also has National Hockey League and Canadian Football League competition. Winnipeg also has challenging weather in the spring. Winnipeg’s Blue Cross Stadium is similar to Ottawa’s ballpark.

Where Winnipeg has a huge advantage over Ottawa is in the location of that stadium. It is in the Forks, a hugely popular and well-designed area of parks, museums, restaurants and trails. Going to the baseball game can be part of larger excursions. Contrast this to Ottawa’s stadium, whose closest nearby attraction is the train station.

And then there is the unmeasurable issue of civic pride, which Winnipeg has in spades and Ottawa may lack. Winnipeggers, perhaps because of geographical isolation, perhaps because of enlightened leadership, have always supported local endeavors. Professional theatre thrives, as do museums and ballet. Ottawa, where so many residents come from somewhere else, needs the federal presence to provide a cultural imprint. And, of course, the attractions of Montreal and Toronto are not that far away.

Still, Winnipeg’s example shows that it can be done, that good baseball, coupled with intelligent management, is viable in a city of this size. In Ottawa, there have been some variations over the years, but the quality of ball, has never been the issue. You could always take your grandchildren to the stadium to show them the game played at a high level. And if you’re of a certain age, you can remember when that stadium was rocking.

Times have changed but maybe they can change back. At the professional level, the potential exists. If Major League Baseball returned to Montreal, a remote possibility at the moment, a positive spinoff would be felt here. Similarly, if Ottawa could succeed in landing a Toronto Blue Jays minor-league affiliate, as has been discussed in the past, the impact on local baseball would be dramatic.

All of this assumes that baseball itself will continue to hold an appeal. Its player base is shrinking at the youth level3, never a good sign. At the major-league level, the sport is showing signs of lack of confidence, evidenced most recently in continued tinkering with the rules. Still, those rule changes have been well received.

In many ways, Ottawa’s baseball future is tied to the future of baseball itself. We live in a world of rapid change. Both the smartphone and the pitch clock were unknown 20 years ago. Perhaps baseball’s reassuring sameness, in a world of rapid change, will be the key to its endurance. Whether professional baseball exists in town or not, there will always be kids—and their parents and even grandparents—out in a field, throwing the ball around.

CHARLES GORDON is a former journalist (Ottawa Citizen, Maclean’s), author (At The Cottage, How To Be Not Too Bad) and third baseman in the Ottawa Regional Softball League.

 

Notes

1 Mike McIntyre, “Goldeyes swing and miss in 2023,” Winnipeg Free Press, September 5, 2023, https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/sports/2023/09/05/goldeyes-swing-and-miss-in-2023. Accessed June 11, 2024.

2 Kevin Reichard, “2023 MLB Partner League Attendance by Average,” Ballpark Digest, September 19, 2023, https://ballparkdigest.com/2023/09/19/2023-mlb-partner-league-attendance-by-average/. Accessed June 11, 2024.

3 Statista, “Share of Children Aged 6 to 12 Who Participate in Baseball on a Regular Basis in the United States from 2008 to 2021,” https://www.statista.com/statistics/982278/participation-kids-baseball/ . Accessed June 11, 2024.