Montrealers are split down the middle when it comes to the Toronto Blue Jays.
McLean’s Pub on Peel St. was jam-packed Monday night with folks watching the Canadiens-Sabres game and Game 7 of the Seattle Mariners-Blue Jays American League Championship series. The place went absolutely nuts when George Springer hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the seventh inning to make it 4-3 for the Jays, which ended up being the final score. That home run earned Canada’s only Major League Baseball team a berth in the World Series for the first time in more than 30 years. The World Series starts Friday night in Toronto.
Nezhat ‘Nezz’ Kaddour was wearing a Montreal Canadiens cap and a Toronto Blue Jays jersey while slinging drinks behind the bar at McLean’s that night and Kaddour is a hardcore Jays fan. He’s been to Toronto twice this year to catch games and is actually contemplating dropping $2,500 to buy a ticket in the nosebleeds at the Rogers Centre to catch Game 7 of the World Series (if the series goes that far).
There are lots of serious Blue Jays fans in Montreal like Kaddour and even more bandwagon fans, who have jumped on board as Toronto made its way through the post-season.
On the other side of the divide, there’s a guy like Mitch Gallo, a host on sports-talk radio station TSN 690, who has a hearty dislike for the Blue Jays. He represents the many bitter Montrealers who’re still upset the Expos left town and want no part of celebrating the Blue Jays’ success.
“You can say I’m an anti-Blue Jays guy,” Gallo said. “I’m almost 40 years old. Growing up, baseball was my favourite sport. I loved the Montreal Expos and now I’m extremely jealous that the city of Toronto has something that we don’t have anymore, and they’re currently experiencing something that I as a baseball fan never got to experience, which is their team competing in the World Series. I was an Expos fan from very, very young and I never even got to see my team play a post-season game. So I’m jealous and I’m bitter of what they have in Toronto. It’s not more complicated than that.”
Gallo is a New York Yankees fan.
“I was cheering for the Yankees in the first round, I was cheering for the Mariners in the second round and, yeah, I’ll be cheering for the Dodgers in round three,” Gallo saId.
He thinks the divide with the Blue Jays in Montreal has a lot to do with age. He feels people 35 and up who remember the Expos have mixed to harsh feelings about the Jays, whereas younger fans are 100 per cent on the bandwagon.
“And I think Montreal is very unique compared to the rest of the country,” added Gallo, who feels most other places are solidly behind the Jays.
McLean’s bartender Kaddour doesn’t have any Expos baggage. He was born in Algeria, grew up in Kuwait, then moved to Turkey and, eventually, settled with his family in Montreal in 2017.
He only really got into baseball four years ago when he started playing softball and he immediately adopted the Blue Jays as his team. He sees lots of Toronto fans at the bar, but they tend to be younger.
“It’s a generational thing,” Kaddour said. “When you talk to people in their 40s (and up) who’ve lived with the Expos, they’re not necessarily going to make a big deal out of the Blue Jays. They’re gonna say: ‘Yeah, well, it’s still Toronto.’ But for people like me, we are fans because they’re the only Canadian team.”
But Kaddour, who’s also a hardcore Canadiens fan, wouldn’t be cheering if the Toronto Maple Leafs were the last team in the playoffs.
“The Leafs is a different story, it’s rivalry,” he said. “Actually, it’s not rivalry. It’s hate. The Leafs’ fan base are cocky. They think they’re better than the Habs and it’s not even close, right now or historically.”
But not all older Montrealers are anti-Jays. Daniel Smith was nursing a beer at the bar at McLean’s on Thursday and, though he was a longtime Expos fan, he’s shifted his loyalties to Toronto.
“I had to cheer for some baseball team and it wasn’t going to be an American one,” Smith said. “Eventually, I went to the Blue Jays.”
And Smith thinks they can win the World Series even though most pundits are saying the Dodgers and their superstar hitter/pitcher Shohei Ohtani seem unstoppable.
“You just never know, I didn’t see them going this far,” Smith said.
Then there’s people like Richard May, a 76-year-old Montreal doctor who’s been a devoted Dodgers fan for more than 60 years.
“I’m not a Blue Jays fan,” May said. “I’m going for the Dodgers. There is a Canada thing with people who don’t know anything about baseball jumping on the bandwagon. It’s anti-American, with Trump and all that.”
David Winch, a former Montrealer who now lives in North Hatley in the Eastern Townships, doesn’t cheer for the Blue Jays. He doesn’t buy into the notion you have to simply because they are the only Major League Baseball franchise in Canada.
“I’m not a boo bird, I’m not anti-Jays, but I’m just not a fan,” Winch said. “Pro sports is made up of club teams that are rooted in a locality. They’re not national teams. They’re rooted in a city or a region. And you cheer for that. I can’t get on the bandwagon.”
Another reason Winch is not cheering for the Jays is because he stills feels bitter they didn’t make an effort to keep the Expos alive when they were on the point of going out of business in the early part of the century.
“There were not only just rival teams, they were rival businesses,” Winch said. “So that’s some of the bitterness. I try to play that down, but it’s still there. They didn’t help when the Expos needed help.”
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