The very first legendary home run ever hit in Toronto was hit in 1887.
More than a century before Joe Carter's famous World Series walk-off at
the SkyDome, Cannonball Crane hit a homer into the sky above the Don Valley to end a game at 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 very first baseball championship.
Cannonball Crane 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 across the lake in Rochester. But
thanks to that home run, he'd already written his name into the history
of our city. He was a hero. For decades to come, his name would be
mentioned with reverent awe on a regular basis in Toronto. And it still
is from time to time. In fact, next summer Heritage Toronto will unveil a
new plaque on the spot where Sunlight Park once stood — at Queen &
Broadview — and it will include a mention and a photo of Crane. Nearly
130 years after his game-winning home run, the name of 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 Game Five against the Rangers, 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.
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| Ned "Cannonball" Crane |
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 — from one terrible team to another. Finally, Pittsburgh
traded him to Toronto for a middling minor league catcher.
The Blue Jays didn't expect him to become a superstar either. 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 he hasn't looked back. Since Bautista became a
slugger, no other slugger has hit more home runs than he has. On
Thursday,
Joe Posnanski of NBC Sports called Bautista's career "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 has always played as if he has something to
prove. And that, in part, is what makes 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
our early days as a muddy outpost on a distant, snowy frontier. Our city
was founded as a capital — but a tiny capital, thousands of kilometers
away from the heart of the British Empire, dwarfed by the American
juggernaut to the south. We've always been secretly ambitious (our
founder, John Graves Simcoe, wanted Toronto to become
a city so awesome
that Americans would beg to be let back into the British fold), but we
worry that if we're honest with ourselves we'll find that we're largely
irrelevant. That inferiority complex was already in place long before
Cannonball Crane stepped 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 nuts. In Toronto, we're always looking for signs that we
really do deserve our place as one of the most important 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, it must have
felt like our city was finally coming into its own: a booming metropolis
in a brand new 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 with his own game-winning home run. We were
still a booming metropolis, even bigger now, playing on a bigger stage,
proud of our country and our place in the world — of peacekeeping and
of Heritage Minutes and of 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: cosmopolitan, multicultural, professional,
elite...
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| Joe Carter's walk-off |
But since then, of course, our sports teams haven't exactly helped with
the whole inferiority complex thing. At this point, no North American
city with as many major sports franchises as we have in Toronto has gone
this long without at least appearing in a championship final. 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. We're used to
feeling embarrassed by our sports teams, and that feeling spills over
into other areas, too: we're embarrassed by our sports teams, by the new
name of the SkyDome, by our transit system, by our racist Prime
Minster, by our crack-smoking mayor...
For most of this last week, it felt like it was all happening again. As
far as talent is concerned, the Blue Jays are a juggernaut — some say
they're one of the greatest baseball teams 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, we were reluctant to get our hopes up again, a city full of
Charlie Browns sick of trying to kick that football.
For most of Wednesday night, in the sudden death of Game Five, 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 home run from another
lovable 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 clanking off Shin-Soo Choo's
bat and sputtering down the line as the go-ahead run dashed home from
third base.
This was how we were going to end our season? This confusing mess of a run?
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| The aftermath of the Martin-Choo play |
The pathetic, childish, dangerous rain of beer cans that followed wasn't
just about that specific moment in the game, it was about 20 years
without a Blue Jays playoff 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.
No one has ever seen anything like that seventh inning. 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 has
been echoed over and over again in the hours since 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 that 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. The Rangers make three straight errors. José Bautista comes
to the plate...
No current Blue Jay has been a Blue Jay as long as José Bautista has. No
Blue Jay has waited longer for the team to make the playoffs. For
years, Jays fans have 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 Roy Halladay: superstars
who never played a playoff game with a blue bird on their chest, who
will always be remembered fondly 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.
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| Historica bait |
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. We're happy to have that
bat flip speak for all of us — which is part of why I think we fell so
deeply and instantaneously in love with it. It's the swagger Toronto is
learning to have. The swagger we
want to have. The Toronto of
Drake and of #The6ix. Of a giant TORONTO sign in Nathan Phillips Square.
Of one of the world's great music scenes. Of Nuit Blanche and First
Thursdays and Friday nights at the ROM. Of a city that is slowly
realizing — despite all the real and serious problems we still have to
solve — that we really are pretty great, y'know.
We're a city coming to the realization that more than 200 years after Simcoe founded our muddy town, we actually
have
lived up to our original promise. And if we still doubt it, Bautista's
home run gives us another chance to get the external validation we want
so badly. For this moment at least, we can forget about them flying our
flag upside-down and about whatever that moron Harold Reynolds thinks.
Toronto, the scribes of NBC Sports
remind us as they marvel at that miraculous inning, is "one of the world’s great cities."
Now, whatever happens, we'll always remember these Blue Jays. These Jays
who feel in so many ways like a reflection of our own city. Of the
Toronto of 2015. A cast of characters drawn together from all over the
world. Truly multicultural. The young,
social media savvy pitcher from Long Island. The
rookie closer, the youngest player in baseball, who quit school as a kid to work in the fields of Mexico. The
oldest player in baseball, who loves the members of his fan club so much that he goes to their weddings. The
quiet Dominican slugger who bought an entire block of his poor, corrupt-sugar-company-run hometown so the residents can still keep living there. The
nerdy veteran pitcher
from Nashville who has 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 Australian reliever.
The Japanese goofball.
The Italian-American who spent years playing in the independent leagues before finally getting his big break. The
catcher from Montreal who gives press conferences in both official languages. The
rookie from Mississauga who runs like the wind. The
whiz-kid Canadian General Manager, who got his start with the Expos, who is usually reserved but who
parties, gets drunk, and curses with his team on the night they clinch the pennant.
Even if the season ends next week, even if the Jays don't win another
game, people in Toronto — people all over Canada — will remember
Donaldson and Tulo and Price and Sanchez and Papa Buehrle and Pillar's
crazy catches and 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 '92. And in 1887.
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A version of this post originally appeared on The Toronto Dreams Project Historical Ephemera Blog.
Rob Ford was there, by the way, somewhere at the Dome as Bautista's
home run soared into the seats. But we weren't embarrassed — we were too
busy celebrating, we didn't even care.
You can ready my full, illustrated history of baseball in Toronto here. I've also written more about the tragic tale of Cannonball Crane here, the 1887 Toronto Baseball Club here, plus the greatest second baseman in Toronto (who isn't who you think it is) here, Babe Ruth's first home run here, and Joe Carter's World Series-winning dream here.
