The front office weighs in

Holy cow!

When Your Working Girl expressed the simple wish to have the Blue Jays front office show they cared about the fans, she’s afraid she shocked a good many of her Gentle Readers by the fact that she cared about baseball at all.  And she was as stunned as anyone to think that her future calling might be as a baseball writer.  But in her humble effort to reach out in her hour of baseball need what she marveled at most was that, you, her Gentle Readers soothed her baseball soul with a flood of poetic baseball musings worthy of the memory of Phil Rizzuto:   

•  "I was in the Jays’ dressing room on opening day in April of ’77 at Exhibition Stadium shooting a Shoppers drug commercial and I still have an autographed ball signed by the whole team.”  
• "What do you think about Michael Iggy saying he is a Die Hard Red Sox fan- And he wants to be Prime Minister- Would that be Prime Minister of Boston, Massachusetts?
  ”
• “You might just be lucky enough to see Lind hit one just over the first baseman's head to drive in  the winning runs in the bottom of the ninth rather than hit one right at him.”
• "Pretty stunned of them not having enough programs to go around.  I notice there was no shortage of them at the F1 race in Montreal last year.”
• "Contrary to what baseball bards think, it's not the opera.”  

Your Working Girl was entertained, moved and inspired by the missives of her Gentle Readers.   In fact, she was so distracted by them, she almost forgot that the previous evening she had dashed off sternly-worded emails to Howard Starkman and Paul Beeston saying she would not darken the door of the Rogers Centre until she felt the Blue Jays brass cared.  (Your Working Girl believes it is important to be specific in her negotiations.)   But Paul Beeston’s email, which arrived at precisely 12:20pm on Monday afternoon, snapped her to her baseball senses.   As she read the note from Paul saying he wanted her to know the Blue Jays did care about the fans, didn’t want to make excuses and apologized for running out of programs, she could feel the ice melting in her cold, cold heart.

And when she received Howard Starkman’s note the following afternoon recalling his memories of the strike, the fun of baseball scoring, details of how the programs were printed, how he wanted her to know the Jays cared about the fans  . . . .and that he read Your Working Girl’s blog and liked it . . . she was pretty much convinced.  That two of major league baseball’s top executives responded so personally and so quickly to a baseball fan whose very good friend refers to as The Devil Lady of Baseball seems to be . . .  oh, what’s that adjective my sports fan friends use to describe their team when it does something well off the field . . .  uh, let’ see . . . classy.  Yes, classy.  How Paul Beeston and Howard Starkman responded was classy. 

For a lot of people who love the game, we just want it to love us back. 

And for anyone reading this who believes scorekeeping is the new knitting, I want to share a little authentic Phil Rizzuto with you.  As a man who had a brilliant career as shortstop for the New York Yankees, and broadcasted Yankees’ games on radio and television for 40 years, Rizzuto came up with a unique scoring notation:  “WW”.   It stood for "Wasn't Watching."

Unbelievable!

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The outlook wasn’t brilliant

To Howard Starkman VP, Special Projects  and Paul Beeston, CEO of the Toronto Blue Jays, it might seem like a trifle that there were no programs available for Sunday’s Opening Weekend game. To them it might register as a pesky detail that fans like Your Working Girl who invited a friend, carefully selected our seats, and spent $160.50 on tickets, could not review the team’s 2011 line-up and keep score of the game. 

Maybe they would think it overly sentimental to place such importance on what is, after all, only paper; Possibily they view it as old-fashioned to use the program as a means to survey the promise of a new season when anything is possible.  

They might chortle at the silliness of baseball fans like me who bought a new “baseball scorecard eraser” to keep my scorecard less messy this year and arrived 45 minutes early to “get organized”.

Well, Dearest Most-Wonderful Gentle Readers, I have a message for the Messrs Starkman and Beeston, and all those in the Blue Jays organization who bleed fans to death with a thousand little cuts like this one:  I love baseball.  And I like the Blue Jays.  As a mere slip of a thing, I spent many games watching the team from the bleachers in Exhibition Stadium, learning about the game, watching the plays, the strategy and how high the outfielders wore their socks.  In the off season I kept company with great baseball writers like Roger Angell and Roger Kahn.  I had lunch with Willie Upshaw for Chrissakes! (See my very first blog.)

But baseball broke this Working Girl’s heart.  The strike of 1994/95 outraged and sickened me so much that it ruined the game for me.  The debacle which culminated in a year with no World Series showed that major league baseball cared nothing for the fans.  And fans thumbed their noses at baseball by staying away in droves when the regular season opened in 1995.  I personally responded by not watching or attending a baseball game for 12 years.   Baseball has never really recovered from that time.  But in the last couple of years, with a few tentative steps, Your Working Girl came back to baseball, bought a few tickets, checked the box scores and followed the progress of the home team. 

 
Time, after all, is supposed to heal all wounds . . . and, just to be on the safe side, many people who worked in baseball during the strike had retired.  And when, during last year’s National League play-off, the Giants’ Tim “the Freak” Lincecum dueled with former Blue Jay and now Phillies’ starter, Roy “Doc” Halladay, my heart fully embraced the calculus of the game once more.  This year, I decided to dive in and attend the Blue Jays Opening Weekend.  Like patching it up with an old friend, I was eager to get started. 

But guess what, Gentle Reader?  My old friend wasn’t interested my fanship.  He hadn’t changed his spots at all.  While I could buy a Blue Jays hat for $30, I couldn’t buy a program.   I walked around Level 1, then around Level 2 of the Rogers Centre checking in at all the guest services.  I stopped a well-dressed man with important-looking ID tags on his waist and a cellphone in his hand.  “Do you know where I might get a program?” “I’m not with the “Blue Jays organization itself”, he said and cheerfully offered that “about 20 people have asked me the same thing.”   There were no programs to be had.

“How can you run out of programs on Opening Weekend?”  I asked as I pleaded with the guest services clerk in disbelief.  My anticipation of blissfully scoring the game as it ebbed and flowed on the field was quickly evaporating.  How could this be?  She made a call.  “Well, there are more people than expected,” she said when she put the phone down.

“More people than expected?” 

“Yes.”

“So the Blue Jays are all out of programs on opening weekend?”

“Yes.”

“Because they didn’t know how many people to expect?”

“Yes.”

Hell hath no fury . . .  and clearly scorned, Your Working Girl registered a formal written complaint while standing at the Guest Services booth in Section 236 of the Rogers Centre, missing the second and third inning.   I have since written a sternly-worded email to Paul Beeston and Howard Starkman (both of whom were, incidentally, working in baseball during in the strike and have not retired).  I will keep you, Gentle Reader, posted on any response. My friend began to refer to me as The Devil Lady.

For people who run a team in a game that adjusts a pitcher's earned run average according to the qualities of his ballpark and his league, but runs out of programs on opening weekend, says one of two things:   We are idiots or we don’t give much thought about the actual people attending the game.    

If we view baseball as a prism through which to view life (and I assure you many fans do), the symbolism of Sunday’s game was poignant.  It was the bottom of the ninth, the score was 4-3 Minnesota, two men on base, two men out, Jose Bautista himself at the plate.  Fans are on their feet.  Bautista walks to first.  Bases are loaded.  The crowd is wild.  Adam Lind hits a curveball on the first pitch.  It was scooped up rolling down the first-base line.  Game over.