Popularity
In 1977, after only 50 home games, the Blue Jays set an MLB record for a first-year expansion team, with an overall attendance of 1,219,551. By the end of the season, 1,701,052 fans had attended. In 1991, the Blue Jays became the first MLB team to attract over four million fans, with an attendance of 4,001,526, followed by 4,028,318 in 1992. Each of those records were broken in 1993 by the expansion Colorado Rockies, though the Blue Jays' 1993 attendance of 4,057,947 stood as an AL record for 12 years, until being broken by the 2005 New York Yankees.
Several Blue Jays became popular in Toronto and across the Major Leagues, starting with Dave Stieb, whose seven All-Star selections is a franchise record. He is closely followed by Roy Halladay, who was selected six times, and by Roberto Alomar and Joe Carter, who were selected five times each. José Bautista set a Major League record in 2011 (which stood for one year), with 7,454,753 All-Star votes.
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Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“The popularity of disaster movies ... expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)
“There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“A more problematic example is the parallel between the increasingly abstract and insubstantial picture of the physical universe which modern physics has given us and the popularity of abstract and non-representational forms of art and poetry. In each case the representation of reality is increasingly removed from the picture which is immediately presented to us by our senses.”
—Harvey Brooks (b. 1915)