“Touch ‘em all, Joe!”
“Touch ’em all, Joe! You’ll never hit a bigger home run in your life!”
– Tom Cheek, Toronto Blue Jays announcer, 1993
Introduction
Baseball has been played in Toronto since the 1850s, but in its early days it was dismissed as an amateur sport played by so-called undesirables. Owing to the city’s British roots, Toronto’s upper classes preferred cricket, but only the rich had time to play it – games often lasted days. A city-wide ban on sports on Sundays, coupled with a six-day work week, meant that baseball – which only takes a few hours to play – became the sport of the working classes.
City leaders embraced the game when they realised baseball could yield hefty profits. But in decades to come, even as the sport brought our city together, baseball would continue to highlight class, race, gender, and religious divisions in our city.
