Opening Day brings baseball dreams of fathers and sons

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I can’t think about Opening Day without thinking about my dad.

It connects that way for me: Baseball and the Blue Jays and my father.

It especially connects now, almost 27 years after his passing, with all the celebration and circumstance planned for this Blue Jays’ 50th season.

And somewhere, someplace he’s still blaming Bobby Cox for his refusal to pitch around George Brett in the 1985 American League Championship Series against the Kansas City Royals. Dad never quite got over Leon McQuay fumbling in the Grey Cup or the Jays not winning in ’85.

When he was dying in 1999, he had two close friends who would show up every morning at the hospital — they were major executives with companies you would know — and long before there were podcasts, they would hold court, talking about the important issues of the time. Like whether Carlos Delgado ran out every ground ball or whether David Wells needed to lose weight.

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His buddies were there every day, occasionally interrupted by a nurse or a doctor, but the conversation was almost all Blue Jays, all the time.

My dad started teaching me about baseball so long ago that I don’t remember when he first taught me to score a game. There were no Blue Jays yet. I learned at Toronto Maple Leafs International League games at Maple Leaf Stadium, at the foot of Bathurst St.

He scored every game he went to and soon I began to do the same. Baseball was part of our daily language and our summer trips. Our house was full of sloppy scorecards.

Before there were Blue Jays, we went to Montreal and watched Rusty Staub in a tinfoil stadium. We travelled together to Boston — I grew up a Red Sox fan as a kid because the Leafs were their AAA farm team — to watch Carl Yastrzemski play. We did car trips to Detroit and saw Denny McLain and this Toronto guy, John Hiller, pitch for the Tigers. Always with a scorebook and a pen.

Even on vacation, we would go to Fort Lauderdale and watch the New York Yankees or the Texas Rangers play just down the road.

And later, I couldn’t call him in the afternoons because he would be home watching Chicago Cubs game on television on the superstation. I couldn’t call until the game was over. Even dinner couldn’t interrupt Harry Caray.

Why Opening Day is so important to me

The day I’ll never forget — the kind of day every sports-minded kid would want with their dad — came on April 7, 1977.

If that date seems familiar, it’s because it is.

It was the first Blue Jays game ever, that one played in the snow and wet turf of Exhibition Stadium.

Steve Simmons and his father. Steve Simmons

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It was freezing when Anne Murray sang the national anthem and freezing when Bill Singer threw a strike to Ralph Garr — the first pitch in Jays history — and that was just the beginning of our day and night together.

Everyone who was around 50 years ago remembers the snowy images of Major League Baseball’s first game in Toronto, either in person or by television screen. What people don’t remember is the doubleheader element of April 7, 1977: Blue Jays in the afternoon, Maple Leafs playoffs at night against the Pittsburgh Penguins.

My father had his own season tickets for baseball and his company had Leafs tickets. He decided — or maybe we decided, I can’t remember which — that we would do the sporting doubleheader that day.

Baseball in the afternoon, which he loved, except for the weather. Hockey at night, indoors, a game he didn’t care much for.

In between, steak dinner at Barbarians, which still is around and still worth the drive to Elm Street.

We sat through the two Doug Ault home runs, the home run by Alvis Woods, the four hits including a home run by Chicago’s Richie Zisk, before warming up over garlic bread.

Otto Velez quickly became my favourite player that day — eventually becoming Otto the Swatto. He lasted six seasons with the Jays, in retrospect, a lifetime for an expansion castoff.

We left Exhibition Stadium rather elated, shared a steak and some other dishes, and then off to Maple Leaf Gardens for the Leafs and the Penguins, led by Pierre Larouche and Syl Apps.

Doubleheader at Maple Leaf Gardens

The Gardens were like a museum in those days, the hallways so full of photographs and history.

In those days, Stanley Cup playoffs opened with a best-of-three series. This was Game 2 in Toronto after the Leafs won the opener.

This was a chance for Leafs, led by Darryl Sittler and Borje Salming, to close out the series. But the Leafs have been predictable for so much of my life. They lost that night, even though Sittler and Salming both scored, and would need Game 3 to win the series.

Steve Simmons’ father. Steve Simmons

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They lost that night and my dad didn’t care and I was only momentarily heartbroken, a condition that became common for most Leafs fans.

Afterwards, I was slightly heartbroken but mostly elated. Toronto had a baseball team. It didn’t matter how bad the Blue Jays were in those early years, this was our team, our toy, my dad’s new obsession.

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My dad was alive and well when the Jays won the World Series in 1992 and 1993. Five years later, he got sick. Six years later, he was gone.

Opening Day is now a night game in Toronto — it never should be and I can hear my dad saying that — but as it gets closer to this Friday against the nomadic A’s, all those baseball days and nights and conversations come flooding back to me.

The power of baseball. I had the father of my dreams.

Almost 27 years after his passing, he’s still so alive in my mind. He always will be.