On José Bautista's Bat Flip & The Making of History in Toronto
Plus saying goodbye to a guitar legend, Simcoe Day and more...
The very first legendary home run ever hit in Toronto was hit all the way back in 1887. More than a century before Joe Carter's famous World Series walk-off at the SkyDome, Cannonball Crane hit a home run into the sky above the Don Valley to end a game at the city’s first baseball stadium, Sunlight Park. It was made all the more impressive by the fact that it came during extra innings in the second game of a double-header — and that Crane had pitched all 20 innings for the Toronto Baseball Club on that Saturday afternoon. Those two victories sparked a 16-game winning streak that brought Toronto our first baseball championship, taking the pennant in the International League.
Cannonball Crane went on to Major League glory with the New York Giants but fell apart soon after, spending his final days as a broke, unemployed, depressive alcoholic who met his end by drinking a bottle of a chloral at a seedy motel just across the lake in Rochester. But thanks to that home run, he'd written his name into the history of Toronto. He was a hero. For decades to come, he would be mentioned with reverent awe on a regular basis in our city. And he still is from time to time. His photo appears on a heritage plaque where Sunlight Park once stood (at the corner of Queen & Broadview). A nearby café bears his name. So does a beer. Nearly 140 years after his game-winning home run, Cannonball Crane is still remembered.
Those opportunities for quasi-immortality don't come along very often. Extraordinary talent has to conspire with a strange amount of luck in front of an unusually large audience. Cannonball Crane was one of the greatest pitchers and sluggers of his time, brought to the plate at just the right moment in front of a record-setting crowd — about 10% of the entire population of Toronto was at Sunlight Park that day.
In 2015, one of the greatest sluggers of our time came to the plate at the SkyDome during one of the strangest innings in baseball history — and more than 10% of the entire population of Canada was watching.
No one ever expected José Bautista to become a superstar. He was drafted in the 20th round. He spent years as a forgettable utility infielder. In his rookie season, he got released and traded four times in just a few months — bouncing around from one terrible team to another. Finally, Pittsburgh traded him to Toronto for a middling minor league catcher. The Blue Jays’ Hall of Fame third baseman, Scott Rolen, was injured; they needed a temporary replacement.
The team certainly didn't expect Bautista to become a superstar. He was nearly 28 when they traded for him, long past the age when most players have already revealed their full potential. But after making an adjustment to his swing — adding a higher leg kick to change his timing — that's exactly what he did become. In 2010, he hit 54 home runs — a dozen more than anybody else hit that year. And it was no fluke. Over the next few seasons, the one-time bench player established himself as the premier slugger in the game. Bautista’s rise was so unlikely that Joe Posnanski of NBC Sports called it "one of the most bizarre and inspiring stories in the history of baseball."
They say that thanks to his early struggles — along with facing the subtle and not-so-subtle racism of the old school baseball establishment — the Dominican Bautista always played as if he had something to prove. And that, in part, is what made him such a perfect fit for Toronto.
Torontonians, too, feel like we have something to prove. We always have. It's our infamous colonial mentality, stretching all the way back to the city’s founding days. This place had already been home to First Nations and their ancestors for thousands and thousands of years, but to early settlers the town felt like a muddy outpost on a distant, snowy frontier. Toronto was founded as a capital — but a tiny capital, thousands of kilometres away from the heart of the British Empire, dwarfed by the American juggernaut to the south. Torontonians have always been secretly ambitious (the city’s founder, John Graves Simcoe, wanted Toronto to become so awesome the Americans would get jealous and beg to be let back into the British fold), but many have felt the same nagging worry: that if we're honest with ourselves we'll find we're largely irrelevant. That inferiority complex was already in place long before Cannonball Crane stepped up to the plate on that September afternoon in 1887. It was, I suspect, part of what drove the crowd's frenzied reaction when he crushed his game-winning home run.
As the fans lifted Crane onto their shoulders and paraded him out of Sunlight Park and onto Queen Street, the team's owner scrawled a triumphant message on the scoreboard: "CITIZENS, ARE YOU CONTENT? TORONTO LEADS THE LEAGUE."
The crowd went wild. In Toronto, we're always looking for signs that we really do deserve our place as one of the leading cities on the continent — even if those signs come from something as random and trivial as the outcome of a baseball game. On that day in 1887, it must have felt like our city was finally coming into its own: a booming metropolis in a quickly growing nation... and now a famous baseball star to call our own and a fresh championship pennant to hang in our brand new stadium.
It felt like that again in the early 1990s, as Joe Carter wrote his own name into our city's history books with his own game-winning home run. We were still a booming metropolis, even bigger now, playing on a bigger stage. At the time, many Canadians were feeling proud of our country and our place in the world — of peacekeeping and Heritage Minutes and top spot on U.N. lists — with yet another fresh pennant hanging in yet another brand new baseball stadium. Those Blue Jays seemed like us, the way many in Toronto were beginning to see themselves back then, an image the city aspired to: cosmopolitan, multicultural, professional, elite...
But in the twenty years that followed, our sports teams didn't exactly help dispel the old inferiority complex. By 2015, no North American city with this many major sports franchises had gone as long without appearing in a championship final. (With apologies to the Argos.) And while sports are supposed to be a silly distraction that ultimately doesn't mean much, it does do something to a city — there is a civic toll that comes with being a city full of Leafs fans. Especially here, where sometimes it still feels like we live on a forgotten, snowy frontier, where blowing a 4-1 lead late in a hockey game seems to confirm our worst fears about ourselves and our place in the world. Even if that's really quite silly.
In Toronto, we're used to getting our hopes up only to have them immediately dashed in spectacular, heartbreaking fashion. Even the Raptors inspiring championship run hasn’t completely erased the feeling — but it was stronger still back in 2015. We were used to feeling embarrassed by our teams, and that feeling spilled over into other areas: embarrassed by sports, by the new name of the SkyDome, by our transit system, by our architecture, by our blandly malevolent Prime Minster, by our crack-smoking mayor...
Even as the Blue Jays began their postseason run in 2015, it felt like it was all happening again. As far as talent was concerned, the team was a juggernaut — some called them one of the greatest baseball rosters ever assembled. But in a short playoff series bad luck can bring down even the greatest of baseball teams. And Toronto is used to bad luck.
When the Jays lost the first two games at home, there was a familiar sinking feeling. And as they clawed their way back into the series over the next two games, hitting thrilling home runs in the distant heat of Texas, many were reluctant to get our hopes up again, a city full of Charlie Browns sick of trying to kick that football.
For most of Game Five, the winner-take-all showdown, it seemed like we were right to be suspicious. For the first six-and-a-half innings, disaster loomed: the Jays quickly went down by two runs, fought their way back to tie the game with a mammoth homer from another beloved Dominican slugger — Edwin Encarnación, walker of the parrot, bringer of hat tricks — and then, almost immediately, there was that bizarre fluke throw by Canadian catcher Russell Martin. The ball clanked off Shin-Soo Choo's bat and sputtered down the line as the go-ahead run dashed home from third base in the person of Rougned Odor (soon to become one of our most reviled villians after punching Bautista in an act of petty revenge for what was about to happen). This was how we were going to end our season? This confusing mess of a run? This absurb stroke of bad luck?
The pathetic, childish, dangerous rain of beer cans that followed wasn't just about that specific moment in the game, it was about twenty years without a Blue Jays postseason appearance, about half a century without a Stanley Cup, about Vince Carter and Chris Bosh and Andrea Bargnani. It was disgust not just with the umpires or the rules, but with all of sports in general, with the whole concept of random chance, with the very nature of the universe itself...
But luck is a funny thing.
Baseball — like life — is at its best when it feels like magic. It's a long, unfathomably complicated thing, a baseball season. It's impossible for a mind to wrap itself around all the pieces and interactions involved: the hundreds of players, the thousands of games, the hundreds of thousands of individual plays that can be broken down into millions of distinct elements. It can be an awe-inspiring experience, watching it all unfold. The almost quantum-like fluctuations of individual pitches gradually build themselves into larger structures over the course of the summer, into the baseball equivalent of planets and stars: games, seasons and careers. At times, luck and human agency come together in a sequence of events that seems to defy the laws of reason and logic and chance — producing moments that seem nearly miraculous. Cannonball Crane hits a walk-off home run on a day he pitches 20 innings. Joe Carter becomes the only player in the history of the sport to hit a come-from-behind home run to win the World Series. We are reminded that amazing, wonderful, stupid, lucky things can happen. Even to us.
There are days when you get to touch them all.
No one has ever seen anything like that seventh inning in 2015. Posnanski called it, "The craziest, silliest, weirdest, wildest, angriest, dumbest and funniest inning in the history of baseball... There has never been an inning like it." That thought was echoed over and over again in the days after it happened — not just by people in Toronto, but by baseball fans everywhere. On her CBS Sports Radio show, Amy Lawrence promised, "We will never forget what happened in that seventh inning." It was, without a doubt, one of the most memorable 53 minutes in the entire history of a sport that has kept records since before the American Civil War... since before Canadian Confederation... since before Toronto's first skyscraper was so much as a glint in an architect's eye... Talent and good luck conspired on an international stage in a way no one has ever seen before. And it happened in Toronto. To Toronto.
Russell Martin tries to throw the ball back to the pitcher and it hits Choo's bat. In the bottom of the inning, the Rangers make three straight errors. José Bautista comes to the plate...
No Blue Jay in 2015 had been a Blue Jay as long as José Bautista had. No Blue Jay had waited longer for the team to make the playoffs. For years, Jays fans worried that bad luck and the lack of talent around him would conspire to waste his years here. That he might be doomed to share the fate of Carlos Delgado and of Roy Halladay: superstars who never played a playoff game with a blue bird on their chest, who will always be remembered in Toronto, beloved, but never had a chance to write their name into the history of our city in one instant, with the indelible ink of a miracle in the postseason or during the final days of a pennant race. They never had the chance to do something extraordinary with our whole city watching, our whole country, our whole continent... the kind of moment that turns you into more than just a baseball player, that makes you, in some very small way, immortal.
You could see it all in that bat flip. The years of struggle. The years spent playing for Toronto teams that were never quite as good as he was. The years of being ignored in favour of the Red Sox and the Yankees. The years without a playoff berth. Gone. In an instant. In one blazing miracle of a home run.
Gone for Bautista and gone for Toronto, too. That bat flip spoke for the whole city — which is part of why I think we fell so deeply and instantaneously in love with it. It was the swagger Toronto was learning to have. The swagger we wanted to have. The Toronto of Drake and of #The6ix. Of a giant new TORONTO sign in Nathan Phillips Square. Of Nuit Blanche and First Thursdays and Friday nights at the ROM. Of a city that was slowly realizing — despite all the real and deeply serious problems we still have to solve — that sometimes Toronto can be pretty great.
And if we still doubt it, Bautista's home run gave us another chance to get the external validation we crave. For one moment at least, we could forget about them flying our flag upside-down in 1992, about Harold Reynolds claiming Canadians don’t know how to catch baseballs, or the fact that Rob Ford was out there somewhere that night in the SkyDome as Bautista's home run soared into the seats. We weren't embarrassed; we were too busy celebrating, we didn't even care. It was a moment when in spite of everything, you could truly believe, as NBC Sports reminded us while marvelling at that miraculous inning, that Toronto really is "one of the world’s great cities."
There were crushing disappointments to come, of course — on and off the field. That magical postseason run would be undone by bad luck and bad umpiring. Players we cheered for would be accused of domestic abuse, use homophobic slurs and make racist remarks. In the years to come, there would be slumps and trades and a rebuild.
But as Bautista’s bat flew through the air, that was all still in the future. In that moment, the Blue Jays seemed to be a true reflection of our city — in much the same way as the 1993 team had. A cast of characters drawn together from all over the world. Truly multicultural. The catcher from Montreal who gave press conferences in both official languages. The young, social media-savvy pitcher from Long Island. The quiet Dominican slugger who bought an entire block of his corrupt-sugar-company-run hometown so the residents could keep living there. The Japanese goofball. The Texan manager. The Australian reliever. The rookie from Mississauga who ran like the wind. The oldest player in baseball, who loved the members of his fan club so much he went to their weddings. The nerdy veteran pitcher from Nashville who battled depression and struggled with childhood sexual abuse, who mastered the mysterious art of the knuckleball when it seemed like his career was over. The whiz-kid CanadiangGeneral manager, who got his start with the Expos, who is usually reserved but let loose on the night his team clinched the pennant, got drunk, cursed and partied with his players.
They’ll all be remembered for decades to come; some of them, for generations. Stroman and Martin and Tulo and Price, Gibby and Dickey, Papa Buehrle and Ryan Goins, Edwin taking his parrot for a walk, Kawasaki’s post-game jokes, the beaming smile of Ben Revere...
But most of all we'll remember José Bautista. And that bat flip. And the night it felt like Toronto really could live up to our spot on the big stage. Just like we did in 1993. And in 1992. And in 1887.
A version of this story first appered on my old Toronto Historical Ephemera Blog in the days immediately following the bat flip. I’ve updated it for the newsletter this week.
That 1887 season was notable for more than just Cannonball Crane’s home run. It was also the year Toronto helped create the colour barrier in baseball. I wrote about it in the newsletter back in June; you can read that story here.
I’ve been working on a very big new project about Toronto’s sports history, which will be unveiled this fall. It’s a little too early to share the details just yet, but I’m very excited to share it with you just as soon as I can!
A quick note of thanks to all of you who support The Toronto History Weekly as a paid subscriber… and a little reminder that if your credit card has expired since you first signed up, your subscription might have lapsed — it has happened to lots of long-term supporters and you might not have noticed. So if you’d like to continue your support, you might have to update your info!
The Toronto History Weekly is a ton of work and I’m only able to offer it for free thanks to those of you who support it with a few dollars a month. Only about 4% of readers have made the switch so far, which basically means that you’re giving the gift of Toronto history to 25 other people — in addition to getting perks like 10% off my online courses. If you haven’t already made the switch, you can do it by clicking right here:
Saying Goodbye To A Guitar Legend
This week we got the sad news that Robbie Robertson has passed away. He grew up in Toronto and at the Six Nations, getting his start in music as a teenager by playing guitar at high school dances. Soon, he was performing with Ronnie Hawkins & The Hawks in the rough taverns of the Yonge Street Strip, an early incarnation of the band that would eventually back Bob Dylan on his legendary first tour after going electric and then morph into The Band. Robertson’s intense, electrifying lead guitar was a revelation in the late fifties and early sixties; there are few people in the history of our city who’ve had a bigger impact on its music. His story deserves much more than a paragraph, so I’m hoping to write a full story about him in the newsletter soon.
Simcoe Day & Slavery
Last weekend was Simcoe Day in Toronto, the holiday named in honour of the founder of our city. I marked the occasion as I do every year, with a Twitter thread about John Graves Simcoe’s strange and complicated relationship to slavery. He was a professed abolitionist who once fought a war to preserve it. It’s a story I shared in the newsletter last year, too, so if you like you can read it here.
QUICK LINKS
The best of everything else that’s new in Toronto’s past…
A HOLIDAY FOR HOLIDAY’S SAKE NEWS — While we call the August long weekend “Simcoe Day” in Toronto, it has various names in cities across the country. Federally, it’s simply known as the “Civic Holiday.” Its roots can be traced back to Toronto in the 1860s and a local alderman who thought people in our city deserved a day for relaxation and recreation at a time when people tended to work six days a week and many activities were banned on Sundays. City council first adopted the holiday in the face of opposition from local businesses and the date bounced around from year to year, often announced at the last minute. It eventually spread from Toronto not only across Canada, but across much of the British Empire as well. Adam Wynne told the story over at blogTO last week. Read more.
BLUE DEATH NEWS — Wynne also took a look at another bit of our city’s history I find particularly fascinating: “how the death and destruction of cholera epidemics shaped Toronto.” And I’ll add a detail myself: the outbreak in 1832 even helped lead to the creation of our municipal government, as authorities realized the town of York needed to become a city with the power to do things like introduce garbage collection, sidewalks, sewers, and rules around the disposal of corpses. Read more.
CARIBANA NEWS — The Toronto Caribbean Carnival turned 56 this year and is recognized by UNESCO as “a Cultural Heritage Property.” But as Camille Hernández-Ramdwar points out in the Globe, “there are currently no archives, scholarly books, or comprehensive records documenting Caribana’s history” declaring that “the history and legacy of Caribana must be preserved.” Read more.
TORONTO HISTORY EVENTS
JEWISH LIFE ON LAWRENCE WALKING TOUR
August 17 — 6:30pm — Meet at Eitz Chaim school (1 Viewmount Avenue) — Heritage Toronto
“Follow the post-war development of the Jewish community on Lawrence Avenue West. We’ll visit the area’s many schools, yeshivas and synagogues, including Congregation Habonim Toronto, founded by Holocaust survivors; and the iconic bakeries and kosher restaurants like United Bakers Dairy Restaurant, where a lunchtime meal has become a decades-long Jewish family tradition.”
$9.85
ON THE EDGE OF A CITY: TORONTO IN 1833 WALKING TOUR
August 19 — 10:30am — Meet at St. James Cathedral — Town of York Historical Society
“In this walking tour, explore the surviving built environment of the original 10 blocks of Toronto and discover how the Town of York, which started with a population of a couple hundred residents, became the City of Toronto in 1834, with a population of just under 10,000.”
$17.31 for non-members; $11.98 for members
DEATH, VIOLENCE & SCANDAL IN YORK WALKING TOUR
August 19 — 2pm — Meet at St. James Cathedral — Town of York Historical Society
“In this walking tour, explore the scandalous side of Little Muddy York as we walk through the surviving built environment of the original 10 blocks of Toronto and learn about the intriguing stories that would have been the gossip of the day.”
$17.31 for non-members; $11.98 for members
WRITING CHANGE IN THE ANNEX WALKING TOUR
August 19 — 11am — Meet at Seaton Park (14 Albany Ave) — Heritage Toronto
“Explore the Annex through the work of women writers who called the neighbourhood home. From Carol Shields to Gwendolyn MacEwen to Kim Moritsugu, these authors spun stories that inspire self-reflection and community action, tackling issues ranging from domestic violence and sexual abuse, to mental health, to poverty.”
$9.85
BUILDING COMMUNITY IN BLOORCOURT WALKING TOUR
August 19 — 3pm — Meet at Bloor Street West and Dufferin Street (northwest corner) — Heritage Toronto
“Explore this neighbourhood transformed by generations of immigrants: from postwar Italian and Portuguese migrants, to more recent Ethiopian and Eritrean newcomers. Home to families and artists, Bloorcourt is defined by the community spirit of its small businesses, celebrated through the local Rosina Shopkeepers Project, and local hubs like the Paradise Theatre.”
$9.85
LOST TORONTO WALKING TOUR
August 20 — 11am — Meet at Sculptor's Inn at Guild Park & Gardens (201 Guildwood Parkway) — Heritage Toronto
“Discover what remains of the historic buildings of Old Toronto at Guild Park, nestled atop the Scarborough Bluffs. As we wander among the architectural fragments of demolished buildings, we’ll hear stories of the artists, advocates, and architects who helped to shape the early landscape of the city, and preserved these remnants from that time.”
$9.85
SCARBOROUGH BLUFFS WALKING TOUR
August 20 — 3pm — Meet at Bluffer’s Park Parking Lot (west end) — Heritage Toronto
“Immerse yourself in the history of the beautiful Scarborough Bluffs, one of the most significant geological features in Toronto. On this walk, we’ll travel thousands of years exploring the area’s lengthy Indigenous history evidenced by the oldest artifacts found in all of Toronto; its unique ecology, including the presence of three endangered bat species; and its heyday as a resort and recreation destination.”
$9.85
THE 90th ANNIVERSARY OF THE CHRISTIE PITS RIOT: LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD
August 23 — 6:30pm — Bloor/Gladstone Library
“On August 16th 1933, close to 10,000 people took to the streets of Toronto in what is known as the Christie Pits riot. The riot was a response to the violence of the Nazi-supporting fascist 'Pit Gang,' who showed up at Christie Pits to terrorize a group of mostly working class Jewish and Italian baseball players. The players and their supporters defended themselves against the far-right attacks for 6 hours that night. The police did not stop the violence and in some accounts, actively supported the fascists. The riot took place amidst the rise of xenophobia and anti-Semitism in the city. Public spaces like beaches, parks, and ball diamonds acted as an arena for this violence.
”This year marks the 90th anniversary of these riots. Please join the Field of Dreamers Cooperative Softball Association for a discussion on the intersections of sport, politics, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, anti-queer/trans* hate, and anti-Semitism today. We will ask what these mean for access to public space and how we might continue to build movements for social justice in the places we play.”
Free!
ROOT OF THE TONGUE BY STEVEN BECKLY
Until August 27 — Wed to Sun, 11am to 5pm — Montgomery’s Inn
“Root of the Tongue is an exhibition of new artworks by Steven Beckly. Situated within Montgomery’s Inn, it consists of evocative images, sounds, and sculptural objects inspired by the Chung family, Chinese market gardeners who resided there in the 1940s. Considering their intimate roots to the site as well as the racism and xenophobia they faced during that time in Canada, Root of the Tongue explores the vegetable garden as fertile grounds for rituals of care and cultivation, ripe with symbolism and queerness.”
Free!
AUTHOR SERIES: MURDER IN RICHMOND HILL
September 7 — 7pm — Toronto’s First Post Office — 260 Adelaide Street East
“David Raymont will present on his editorial review of William Harrison’s Memoirs that focus on the true story of the Richmond Hill Murders of 1843; the historic event that would later inspire Margaret Atwood’s novel, “Alias Grace.” By focusing on contemporary accounts and using a variety of primary sources, Raymont uncovers an intriguing history full of twists and turns while presenting the social aspects of public opinion towards single parents and domestic work in 1840s Ontario. This event is part of our Annual Fall Author Series featuring four acclaimed Canadian historical fiction and non-fiction authors!”
$22.63 for non-members; $17.31 for members
BOOK LAUNCH — TORONTO MAYORS: A HISTORY OF THE CITY’S LEADERS
September 11 — 5:30pm — Old City Hall (Main Lobby)
“Join Mark Maloney in celebrating the launch of his new book, Toronto Mayors, in the Old City Hall. The first-ever look at all 65 Toronto mayors — the good, the bad, the colourful, the rogues, and the leaders — who have shaped the city… Toronto’s mayors have been curious, eccentric, or offbeat; others have been rebellious, swaggering, or alcoholic. Some were bigots, bullies, refugees, war heroes, social crusaders, or bon vivants; still others were inspiring, forward looking, or well ahead of their time.”
$40 (including a copy of the book)
MR. DRESSUP TO DEGRASSI: 42 YEARS OF LEGENDARY TORONTO KIDS TV
Until September 23 — Wed to Sat, 12pm to 6pm — 401 Richmond — Myseum
“The TV shows of your childhood hit closer to home than you might think. From 1952 to 1994, Toronto was a global player in a golden era of children’s television programming. For over four decades, our city brought together innovative thought leaders, passionate creators and unexpected collaborations – forming a corner of the television industry unlike any other in the world. Toronto etched itself into our collective consciousness with shows like Mr. Dressup, Today’s Special, The Friendly Giant, Polka Dot Door, Degrassi, and more. Journey through Toronto’s heyday of children’s TV shows in this playful exhibition.”
Free!
The Toronto History Weekly is written on and about the traditional territories of the Wendat nation, Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.
I will always be convinced that the Rangers committed those errors because the anger of the crowd was so invasive. It's unsettling when there is one angry person in the room. Now imagine the effect of 50,000 of them