GHOSTED: EXHIBITION STADIUM
FROM APRIL 2018 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX
Exhibition Stadium before the Toronto Blue Jays faced the Chicago White Sox on May 27, 1988
Image: Jerry Reuss, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
A lot of guys called Exhibition Stadium “Exorcism Stadium” and made fun of it, but for me, it was always home. I used to drive through the city with Josh, my oldest boy, and whenever he saw the stadium he would shout, “Baseball, baseball, baseball!”
Hitting-wise, I loved Exhibition Stadium. The wind blew out to right-centre field and I took advantage of that. The team had a promotion with Trader Vic’s, where if a player hit a home run, he would receive a free dinner for two. Instead of saying, “home run” we used to say, “I gotta hit me a Trader Vic’s!” That promotion came in handy, before I started making decent money.
And then there was that turf. I had never played on turf before, but I liked it because the ball got to you quicker in the outfield and it also got through faster, so it was good for both hitting and defense.
With the wind coming off Lake Ontario, that stadium could get really cold. Often, during a pitching change, we would get behind the team logos on the wall, like the Brewers or the Mariners logo, and we would use those to shield ourselves from the wind. Early in the 1985 season, we had been complaining about the cold a lot, when our manager Bobby Cox finally held a meeting and said, “Guys, enough with the complaining. This weather is really to our advantage. But if the other teams come in here and catch us complaining, we’re going to lose that advantage. Let them be the ones who complain.” We stopped complaining and it helped: We won the division title in ’85, which remains my best memory of Exhibition Stadium.