Armour: Oh Canada! Blue Jays brought a championship north in 1992
From SABR member Mark Armour at The National Pastime Museum on October 30, 2017:
Twenty-five Octobers ago, baseball’s World Series finally made it north of the border, when the Toronto Blue Jays took on the Atlanta Braves. Canadian teams had been knocking at the door for many years—the Montreal Expos got to the final game of the NLCS in 1981 and competed for a string of division titles, while the Blue Jays had lost three ALCS’s (1985, 1989, and 1991). But until 1992 the World Series had always been an all-USA affair.
Not only had the Blue Jays been a perennial contender (11 straight seasons of 85 or more wins starting in 1983), they had also become an economic behemoth in the game, causing national pundits to wonder how the Red Sox and Yankees would be able to compete with the Blue Jays in the suddenly upside-down AL East.
The reason for the optimism—or pessimism, if you were not the Blue Jays—was the June 1989 opening of Skydome, their wondrous ballpark. Representing the first of what would become a baseball-wide stadium boom, Skydome and its retractable roof were hailed as an engineering marvel, and the stadium featured an adjoining hotel and prepaid luxury suites.
Read the full article here: https://www.thenationalpastimemuseum.com/article/oh-canada-blue-jays-bring-world-series-championship-north
Originally published: October 30, 2017. Last Updated: October 30, 2017.