SPECIAL FROM ROB SPARROW, HIGH PARK, TORONTO. MARCH 28, 2024. When the Toronto Blue Jays finished their 2022 season, they made a determination that the status quo wasn’t acceptable. To that end, both a strategic and cultural shift for the Blue Jays in 2023 featured a vastly different style compared to many of the teams […]

SPECIAL FROM ROB SPARROW, HIGH PARK, TORONTO. MARCH 30, 2023. 4:15 PM EDT. [NOTE FROM CW EDS : The Sparrow’s much awaited review of “Canada’s MLB Team” at the start of the fateful year of 2023 has arrived just in time for the Jays’ season opener in St. Louis today. And it is divided into […]

SPECIAL FROM ROB SPARROW, HIGH PARK, TORONTO. APRIL 8, 2022.O the Joy of Opening Day 2022. Games provide distraction. In a world where one delicately navigates the atrocities and reckless tyranny in Ukraine, the continual struggle to cope with the ongoing complications and uncertainty of COVID-19, every little bit of joy matters. Baseball aficionados always […]

SPECIAL FROM ROB SPARROW, HIGH PARK, TORONTO. APRIL 1, 2021. Life for the Toronto Blue Jays, like everyone else for that matter, was and continues to be upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. A year ago, Canadian government border restrictions forced them to be baseball’s version of the nomadic warriors playing all of their games south […]

SPECIAL FROM ROB SPARROW, HIGH PARK, TORONTO. JULY 24, 2020. The sporting world, like most everything else, stopped earlier this year on March 11 when Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz became the first athlete to test positive for COVID-19. In many ways the shut down of the NBA, and the other sports leagues that […]

And then there were none … With the firing of John Gibbons at season’ end, and the off-season release of Troy Tulowitzki and trading of Russell Martin, the last vestiges of the best Blue Jays team in a quarter century are gone.  Slowly it seemed and then suddenly, the faces on the famous September 2015 […]

From the outset of 2017 something was amiss. The day before the first full-squad workout in the spring, all-star Josh Donaldson suffered a tear in his right calf and did not find his stride until late July. Then Canadian Blue Jay prospect Dalton Pompey suffered a concussion at the World Baseball Classic and spent the […]

Baseball is back in the great white north, signaling spring revival, while also commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Blue Jays’ inaugural game (April 7, 1977) at snowy Exhibition Stadium on the north shore of Lake Ontario. While it was an entertaining 2016 down at the ballpark known previously as the Skydome, last year once […]

There is symmetry in numbers…200 of them to be exact.  For that was how many days the Blue Jays had in 2015.  A mercurial season that began in early April and ended on the 200th day in heart breaking fashion, eliminated on a cold and rainy Kauffman Field in Game 6 of the AL Championship […]

As the Blue Jays head north after one of the longest winters in recent memory, they come loaded with baggage and a lot of questions.  Baggage in the sense that they now carry the longest playoff drought (21 yrs.) of any of the 124 teams in the four North American major sports.  Compounded by questions […]