JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

Globe and Mail , April 7, 1977. This installment of my "Retro T.O." column for The Grid was originally published on April 3, 2012.  Fur coats, parkas, and snowmobile suits—not the garb traditionally associated with an afternoon at the ol’ ball game. Yet for baseball fans at the Blue Jays’ franchise debut on April 7, 1977, heavy winter gear was necessary to endure snow and bone-chilling wind. Though many of the 44,649 attendees left Exhibition Stadium after the first inning to escape the inclement weather and to start bragging that they were there, those who stayed (“assuming they survive the pneumonia that is bound to set in,” noted the Globe and Mail ’s Allen Abel) were warmed by the team’s performance on the field. The team received over 200,000 requests for opening-day tickets. Some devoted fans of the old minor-league Maple Leafs franchise that left town after the 1967 season felt they deserved a place at the front of the line. According to George Holm, dir...

From November 2011 through July 2012 I wrote the "Past Pieces of Toronto" column for OpenFile, which explored elements of the city which no longer exist. The following was originally posted on December 16, 2011. The paid attendance figure said it all: 802. A venue with a capacity of 18,000 that had once crammed as many as 4,000 more people than that into it was going out with a whimper. The sparse number of fans who witnessed the last baseball game at Maple Leaf Stadium on September 4, 1967 didn’t even have the satisfaction of seeing the hometown Maple Leafs achieve a final victory. A 7-2 loss marked the end of upper-level minor league ball in Toronto and 40 years of play at the foot of Bathurst Street. Ironically, the winning team, the Syracuse Chiefs, later became the farm club for Toronto’s long-awaited major league ball club. Yet Maple Leaf Stadium wasn’t far removed from its glory days. Under Jack Kent Cooke’s ownership during the 1950s , the Maple Leaf...

Just as the baseball season is moving into full gear, a round of lazy YouTube surfing resulted in three clips of the clubhouse celebration after the Detroit Tigers cliched the American League pennant on September 17, 1968. From the following day's edition of the Toronto Star . I'm guessing that it wasn't the Star 's sportswriting style of the day to place "the" in front of a team's name: Tigertown is nursing a monstrous hangover today after a noisy horn-honking celebration of Tigers' first American League pennant since 1945. You can hardly blame the celebrants. It was a long time between drinks. By the scoreboard in Tiger Stadium, it was 10:19 when Don Wert stroked a wrong-field single to right field with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth inning to score Al Kaline with the winning run in the 2-1 triumph over New York Yankees. But officially Tigers had been champions for 20 minutes. That was when Boston Red Sox compl...

Thinking about my aunt prompted me to search on YouTube for the animated tiger graphic WDIV used for their Tigers broadcasts during the 1980s (she watched the game with Dad and I if one was on). If the Tigers won, the clip above was used as the broadcast drew to a close. If they lost, a whimpering tiger with an icepack on its head let out a sad meow, followed by a grumble worthy of Muttley/Mumbly . So far, no sign of the losing cartoon online.

It's opening day for the Tigers and Blue Jays, who will battle it out at the Skydo...Rogers Centre tonight. Cue a baseball-themed ad as today's pick. It's safe to say that there were baseball nuts on both sides of my family. Aunt Gladys was a decent player in her youth and followed the Tigers closely for years. Dad could rattle off the names of anyone who played for the Toronto Maple Leafs AAA team in the 1950s. During my childhood, he attended two Tiger games a year—one with his fellow teachers and one with me. Our usual pattern was to take a special tunnel bus from Windsor to Tiger Stadium, grab a handful of programs and yearbooks, pray our seats weren't one of the infamous obstructed views (which other family members were the lucky winners of one year) and wolf down as much junk food as possible. This always included a thick, steaming hot dog that the grizzled sellers would slather a thick layer of mustard with a wooden stick that looked like a tongue depressor. ...

It's 1977 and there's a new ball team in town. You don't feel like battling for a parking spot to see the Jays for the first time. How will you get down there without feeling as jittery as the fellow in this ad? How about special TTC and GO services? Thanks to the detective work of James Bow at Transit Toronto , here is some information about this service. One account of the service, from Bill Robb: I'm looking back through TTC Headlights and I believe this service was short-lived. Express buses to hockey and football games date back to before widespread subway service. These express services operated to ALL home games. The Blue Jay special buses ONLY operated to weekend and holiday home games. The sporting fan was used to service to all games and people would show up for weeknight games, wait and find no bus. Also these were extra fare express services and as the subway lines reached further and further out the extra fare became a tougher sell. Sunday and...

The Maple Leafs in Intercounty League action at Christie Pits. The team derived its name from the triple-A minor league Leafs (1895-1967 - the team moved to Louisville, then Pawtucket, where they continue as Boston's farm team). Dad frequently went to games at long-gone Maple Leaf Stadium with his grandfather in the early 1950s. He often rattled off period lineups with no prompting, starting with managers Burleigh Grimes or Bruno Betzel. A treasured signed ball still sits in the basement back home. Taken near the beginning of a Toronto Psychogeography walk that stretched from the Pits to La Paloma at St. Clair and Lansdowne, July 27/06. - JB