Toronto Blue Jays Home Opener

On April 2^nd the Toronto Blue Jays will put a start to the 2013 season by facing the Cleveland Indians in probably the most highly anticipated home opener in recent memory!

The home opener to me has always been a day where baseball is King, a day where fans can come together & share their passion for a team, a day where every team is still in the race for a world championship, a day where long standing traditions are nourished and built, a day where everything is pretty much right with the world!

Well with saying that you would think that I would be a pretty much sure thing to go each and every year to the home opener, but last year I made a decision to stop going!  Now I love going to Jays games and I’ll probably make it out to at least 10 games this year, but the home opener over the past few years has become about something else in Toronto.

No longer do I feel that that I can bring my family to the home opener and actually enjoy the game. Toronto has always been an event driven city and with that you don’t necessarily get the cream of the crop that show up to Ball Park.  In the past four years I’ve seen a manager pull his players off the field for 30 minutes for safety reasons, countless fights, people pouring beers over balcony’s onto other fans, fans littering the field with promotional items, and not to mention some of the least clever heckling you could ever imagine (Don’t get me wrong heckling is great if you’re not someone with the brain capacity of a 2 year old who does nothing but yell our curse words).  All of these things are not something I want my boys to associate with going to the ball park at such a young age.

To be honest I don’t think all of these issues are the fans fault!  The Blue Jays organization is just as much to blame for the whole mess.

Why not provide proper security for the event?  If they were to treat the home opener like the Buffalo Bills do for any one of their home games you would not even have close to the type issues that it currently has. If you go to a Bills game you can’t look more than 10 feet without seeing some massive security guard in a bright yellow jacket holding down sections of fans.  Do the fans still have fun?  Sure do. Do some issues still arise?  Sure, but they are put to rest very quickly.   

Why give away promotional items at the start of the game?  They have to know that there is going to be a ridiculous amount of drunken people at this game and if you give them something to throw, they are going to throw it!  If you want to give them something (Which is actually stupid in itself, why giveaway something to a game that you are going to sell out???), give it to them on their way out of the building after the game.

In the end I’m still going to go to games, I’m just going to wait until after the home opener to make my way down to the Rogers Centre, where it’s a little more likely that my family can enjoy the real experience of going to a Blue Jays game. 


**Updated April 8th, 2013

Just wanted to add an addendum to this Post from a few months ago.... Here is a overview of some of the happenings over the course of the opening weekend down at the Roger's Centre.

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-league-stew/toronto-blue-jays-lead-league-unruliest-fans-232337796--mlb.html

All this just proves my point and re-affirms my intent on not going to any opening day type games and waiting until the Morons weed themselves out before I start to go to games.