For many Canadians, the winter chill that has settled across this country has not numbed the exquisite pain of the Toronto Blue Jays’ uniquely heartbreaking World Series Game 7 loss. That Canada’s team came so close – inches, even – from taking the top prize in America’s pastime is a fact that will make baseball hard to think about for some time.
It may seem incongruous to be thinking about baseball at all in the dead of winter, but it’s time to let hope spring again. Despite the lingering agony, Major League Baseball pitchers and catchers are set to report to camp this month, and the satisfying thwack of cowhide on cowhide will soon ring out in ballparks across the American South. And for baseball fans in the North, there is much to look forward to about the state of baseball in this country.
Next month, as spring training gets under way in earnest, Canadian minor-leagues will compete to join the 24 who played on an MLB team last season. A few of them even made significant contributions in the playoffs this past fall, from Mississauga’s Josh Naylor to dual-citizen Freddie Freeman – not to mention Montreal-born Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s postseason heroics for the Jays.
Toronto Blue Jays’ Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is cheered on by fans after catching a line drive in game seven of the 2025 World Series.Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
Canada is well represented in the women’s game, too; in November, a full fifth of the players drafted in the Professional Women’s Baseball League were Canadians, the second-most of any nationality.
Then, in March, 20 national teams full of MLB stars will try to topple Japan as the reigning champion of the World Baseball Classic. As full-roster announcements come out over the coming weeks, expect Canada, which narrowly missed out on a quarterfinal berth in the last tournament in 2023, to boast the most improved roster.
So it’s clear Canada is hitting above its weight class in baseball; the Blue Jays only affirmed it. But this grand-slam opportunity to grow the game has exposed the dire state of the country’s ability to develop young talent in Canada.
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Team Canada faces Australia in the 2025 Little League World Series. Baseball Canada and Little League Canada offer league play for youth, depending on the province.Caleb Craig/The Associated Press
As with too many of this country’s institutions, Canadian baseball is a jurisdictional mess. At the youth level, both Baseball Canada and Little League Canada offer league play, depending on the province. At the collegiate level, U Sports, the national sport governing body for Canada’s universities, comprises four regional associations, and only one – the Ontario University Athletics (OUA) – formally recognizes university baseball. That means that the vast majority of Canadian university baseball teams are effectively clubs, associated with their schools in name only, organized by volunteers, and typically requiring students to pay to play.
But even in the OUA, where there are official varsity teams, the situation is grim. Many of the student-athletes also pay fees, and the OUA’s official university baseball calendar can consist of as few as three games. The rest of the fall schedule is then filled in and staffed by enterprising volunteers, in games that lead to a grassroots-organized Canadian National University Championship, which is put together independent from any collegiate sport association.
Baseball struggles for visibility within the OUA because most member schools do not have baseball teams, with many balking at the liabilities and expenses for staffing them. Unlike in other OUA sports, too, baseball players’ statistics and team standings aren’t officially published. And while some members of some varsity teams can jockey for a limited number of scholarships, they are capped at much smaller sums than what U.S. schools can offer. Little wonder that, between the increased funding, visibility and level of competition, more than 1,100 Canadians are currently playing at American colleges or universities.
“Young people just need to know there’s a path,” says George Rigakos, the general manager of Carlton University’s men’s baseball team. “And if the level of support for baseball was anywhere near hockey or football, the quality of players you’d retain in Canada is gonna go through the roof.”
Pitcher Kevin Gowdy warms up at the Blue Jay’s training facility in Dunedin, Fla. As spring training gets under way next month, Canadian minor-league players will compete to join the 24 who played on an MLB team last season.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Striking out on their own
While U.S. schools have significant advantages, the one Canadian university still competing under an American collegiate sports governing body shows the potential of providing real local paths to success for Canadian talent. Last season, the UBC Thunderbirds made it to the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) World Series over nearly 200 American college teams. And pitcher Ryan Heppner, from Richmond, B.C., was selected in last year’s MLB Draft, making him one of 34 Thunderbirds to be drafted or signed by a major-league team since 1996, the most of any Canadian school.
Becoming members of the NAIA or the NCAA is not a broadly sustainable model for Canadian schools. Both paths are even more expensive and involve more logistically complicated travel – indeed, Simon Fraser University, which has been Canada’s lone NCAA representative for more than a decade, cited financial constraints when it announced in November that it would withdraw from the association to join U Sports, which will force the shuttering of SFU’s varsity women’s softball team. Those American organizations also have their fair share of problems, including a much-reduced focus on the educational aspect of the collegiate sport experience – not to mention requiring young Canadians to move to a more turbulent political context.
All but two players on last year’s UBC Thunderbirds roster grew up in Canada, however, suggesting a meaningful desire by young Canadian talent to remain in the country if there is a real opportunity to widely showcase their skills to potentially advance their careers.
The Vancouver Canadians play at Nat Bailey Stadium in July, 2006. Of the five minor-league affiliate teams Canada was home to at the start of the millennium, only the Vancouver Canadians remain in play.
Rafal Gerszak/The Globe and Mail
The change-up
At the amateur level, Baseball Canada registrations have continued to explode – as a ballpark number, by 94 per cent over the last decade – and youth registrations are expected to spike again as they did after previous Jays playoff runs. But despite this surge in demand, baseball diamonds have been closing down in recent years in the name of redevelopment or to build pickleball courts and cricket fields: Between 2016 and 2020 alone, Statistics Canada recorded nearly 500 fewer public baseball diamonds in the country. As a result, many baseball-curious youth are left to sit on waitlists.
And for the Canadians who don’t make it to The Show, but are good enough to play professionally, there are few obvious pathways to a sustainable career in the country. At the start of the millennium, Canada was home to five minor-league affiliate teams; today, the Vancouver Canadians (the High-A affiliate of the Blue Jays) are all that’s left. These opportunities to watch pro baseball up-close are important for young Canadians, too: witnessing Trey Yesavage pitch at Nat Bailey Stadium in May before he went on to become a playoff legend for the Jays in October likely made lifetime fans of many young Vancouverites who lack access to MLB-level ball.
Trey Yesavage pitches against the Los Angeles Dodgers during game seven of the 2025 World Series. Yesavage became a playoff legend for the Jays during their World Series run last fall.Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
Independent-league baseball has long struggled to find a foothold in Canada, too. But the recently rebranded and fully professionalized Canadian Baseball League, which was founded as the Intercounty Baseball League in 1919, has a real chance to establish its teams as valuable anchors in their communities.
Amid all these structural deficits, the biggest thing young Canadian baseball players need is a way to hone their skills and show their stuff. To that end, Baseball Canada recently announced the creation of the Road to Okotoks, a new multiround cross-country tournament that will culminate in July. The aim is to attract Canada’s top under-19 amateur teams and clubs to compete best-against-best in this country, instead of travelling to U.S. showcase events. Modelled after the NCAA’s College Baseball World Series’ Road to Omaha, a single national championship that helped galvanize a then-haphazard American college baseball landscape in the 1950s, it is an excellent first step. “It’s a gravitational pull, which will have trickle-down effects in terms of getting everything organized,“ says Mr. Rigakos. ”That would be really useful for collegiate baseball, too, because what we’ve done so far is pretty … ad-hoc.”
You don’t need to be a baseball die-hard to understand why it would be such a boost to Canadian baseball; you just need to be familiar with the Kevin Costner classic Field of Dreams. If Canada builds it, they will come.
The Sunday Editorial