Baseball
Baseball was popular in the city at the minor league level since the 1890s with the Toronto Maple Leafs. It was in a game against the Leafs on September 5, 1914 at Hanlan's Point Stadium where Babe Ruth hit his first ever professional home run while also pitching a complete game one-hitter for the visiting Providence Grays. Hall of famer Sparky Anderson was also a member of the Leafs as both a player and a manager. In 1967, the Leafs relocated out of Toronto into Louisville, Kentucky.
In January 1976, San Francisco Giants owner Horace Stoneham agreed to sell the team for $13.25 million to a group intending to relocate it to Toronto. The team would have began play in the 1976 season at Exhibition Stadium, and be called the Toronto Giants. However the plan to move the Giants was quashed by a U.S. court. Big-league baseball would finally come to Toronto with Major League Baseball expansion in 1976. The Toronto Blue Jays commenced operation in 1976, and first contested matches in the inaugural 1977 campaign. Although the team performed poorly, placing last in the American League East for each of its first three years, successful drafting and team management resulted in improved performance that led to the team's first pennant in 1985, and culminated with consecutive World Series victories in 1992 and 1993.
When awarded the franchise, Exhibition Stadium was chosen as the site for the team's home games. Built in the 1950s, it was rebuilt in 1976 to satisfy the requirements for baseball. In 1989, the team moved to the newly built SkyDome (now known as the Rogers Centre).
The city is also home to the Toronto Maple Leafs baseball club of the Intercounty Baseball League.
Toronto has also hosted parts of the 2009 World Baseball Classic.
Read more about this topic: Sport In Toronto
Famous quotes containing the word baseball:
“How, in one short century, has this ersatz sport so strangled the consciousness of the country in the grip of its flabby tentacles that the mention of women’s baseball gets no reaction other than blank amazement?”
—Darlene Mehrer, As quoted in Women in Baseball. Ch. 6, by Gai Ingham Berlage (1994)
“Compared to football, baseball is almost an Oriental game, minimizing individual stardom, requiring a wide range of aggressive and defensive skills, and filled with long periods of inaction and irresolution. It has no time limitations. Football, on the other hand, has immediate goals, resolution on every single play, and a lot of violence—itself a highlight. It has clearly distinguishable hierarchies: heroes and drones.”
—Jerry Mander, U.S. advertising executive, author. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, ch. 15, Morrow (1978)
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)