It snowed. Of course it snowed.
On the day Major League Baseball tilted its head north to watch Canada’s newest team, the Toronto Blue Jays, play their inaugural game, the baseball world saw a Zamboni of sorts, slowly circling the snow-covered infield at Exhibition Stadium.
It was an absolute mess and the perfect moment for the Blue Jays to be born into. That April 7, 1977, it all began.
Exhibition Stadium was a wretched place, a football stadium with the furniture rearranged to wedge MLB onto the shore of Lake Ontario, like playing baseball in the untamed wild. Those who had the blessing and misfortune to call Exhibition Stadium home look back on it through the same romantic lens, like how you would talk about an old college apartment. Sure, it was a run down shack with mice in the walls and water dripping down through the ceiling when it rained, but it was our first place.
Exhibition Stadium wasn’t just baseball’s worst venue, though. “It was the worst stadium in sports!” Paul Beeston, the first executive hired by the Toronto Blue Jays, said.
For many of the Blue Jays’ players and so many of the staff who’d built this organization, it was enough just to be invited to the party. Toronto was in the big leagues; it didn’t matter if the Blue Jays didn’t exactly play at the Ritz yet. Around baseball, though, Exhibition Stadium had its own folklore: the snowy northern outpost that players from other organizations whispered and warned one another about.
In the days surrounding Opening Day, local news coverage spoke of Exhibition Stadium as if Torontonians were preparing for their first mission to a new planet. Tickets, which ranged from $2 for general admission to $6.50 for a field-level chair, were snapped up quickly as fans flooded in from across Southern Ontario, bundled in coats and scarves and blankets to watch baseball. On the day of the first game, the Toronto Star ran a fashion story on how people dressed at the stadium, from the trench coat and warm tweed suit worn by the police chief to the slacks, sweater, and red jacket lined with white fur worn by Anne Murray, who performed the first national anthems.
In 1977, Buck Martinez was playing with the Kansas City Royals, who came to Toronto at the end of April for the first time. It wasn’t hovering near freezing, as it had been on Opening Day, but it was still brutally cold as the winds whipped in off the lake. Coming to Toronto was still such an adventure for some players in those years, and Toronto itself was growing.
“We sat in our room one of those first nights after we’d been rained out, and we looked up at the CN Tower,” Martinez, who is now the Blue Jays’ colour commentator, remembers. “Lightning was hitting the CN Tower and causing sparks to come off of it. It was just awesome.”
But the stadium simply hadn’t caught up with the expanding city.
“It was like, ‘What the hell is this?’” Martinez said. “There were some cold, cold days. I probably had more cups of chicken noodle soup in that place than anything else. I’d sit down in that bullpen, and you’d be freezing cold.”
This wasn’t supposed to be a ball park. Exhibition Stadium had long been the site of a racetrack, which brought the long bleachers that stretched past the outfield, and was home to the Toronto Argonauts. The Blue Jays even shared the facility with a soccer team, the Toronto Blizzard, who played their home games there in the National Soccer League from 1979 to 1983.
Like SkyDome in its early years, Exhibition Stadium was home to anything and everything. Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, the Who, the Police, U2, and every other headliner you can name played there. When a stadium is built to host everything, it’s ideal for nothing, but that didn’t matter. It was all the Blue Jays had, and even as the years stretched on, there was this strange sense of pride that grew around the misfit stadium.
“I still remember walking back from Ontario Place one day after lunch and it said, ‘[New York] Yankees vs. Blue Jays,’” Beeston said so proudly. “You knew you’d made it. It wasn’t like the [Seattle] Mariners or someone. It said ‘Yankees vs. Blue Jays’ on the marquee over the stadium.” The Blue Jays had arrived. It didn’t matter if they were late to the party and underdressed.
When it came to the games themselves, playing at Exhibition Stadium was unlike any experience in baseball, even before the first pitch was thrown.
“We had to use the water-removing Zamboni quite a bit,” remembers Gord Ash, former Blue Jays general manager. “Unfortunately, the suction was so significant that it used to lift the turf right off the ground. That created some issues.”
Over the years, the Blue Jays tried to frame all of this as a home-field advantage. It was like playing golf at your home course. You know all the breaks, all the bounces, how to hit the blind shots over the hill.
“There’s no question it was . . . different,” said Ernie Whitt, who debuted with the Blue Jays in May of 1977. “As a catcher, I’d look out to our centre fielder, and I could only see him from the waist up. I couldn’t see the legs of the centre fielder.”
“The field was a football field, and it was crowned so that the water would run off the football field,” Martinez said. “If I looked out to centre field, I couldn’t see the centre fielder. All I could see was his thighs and up. He was downhill. That’s why balls would go over the crest and into the alley in left centre. They’d just roll all the way to the fence. Ground balls would speed up.”
The wind was just as much a factor. In those early days at Exhibition Stadium, members of the Blue Jays’ front office and coaching staff would gather on the field at different times of day to launch balls into the air, trying to track the chaotic wind patterns. Perhaps it could be another advantage if they could figure it out, but more often than not, it was a guessing game, the gales turning without warning.
“We had the pigeons, we had the wind, we had the rain,” Beeston said. “Jim Clancy got blown off the damn mound, and Clancy was a big guy! It was windy enough one night [that] we ended up having to cancel the game. Not for rain, not for lightning, not for anything else. Clancy got blown off the mound.”
He’s right. In May 1984, just five pitches into his start, Clancy was knocked off balance by the raging winds at Exhibition Stadium, and the game was called. The home plate umpire, Don Denkinger, said in the Toronto Star that “it was like getting sandblasted.”
The year prior, Exhibition Stadium was the scene of the famous seagull incident involving Dave Winfield, then a thirty-one-year-old outfielder for the Yankees. Winfield was throwing a warm-up ball that struck and killed a seagull, and when the game finished, he was taken into police custody in Toronto and charged with cruelty to an animal. He was held on a $500 bond, which the Blue Jays paid, and the matter was soon dropped, but it lives on in the lore of Exhibition Stadium, the only place in baseball where so many of these stories could have ever happened.
As the Blue Jays lurched out of their early growing pains and began to blossom in the mid-’80s, fans continued to fill Exhibition Stadium.
“When they talk about us doing 4 million people here at SkyDome, the real amazing thing was how did we put 2.8 million people into Exhibition Stadium?” Beeston said, “It’s an unbelievable story. People were coming.”
There was just this one thing . . . they wanted beer.
“We want beer! We want beer! We want beer!” Beeston can still hear the chants.
An MLB team, owned by a group that included Labatt, couldn’t sell beer. It’s like if Rogers Centre didn’t get cellphone service. This was a provincial government issue—banning the sale of alcohol at professional sporting events—and the province was slow to relent. This was still a more conservative version of Toronto. On Opening Day in 1977, Ontario attorney general Roy McMurtry took a carton of milk with him to the game. How refreshing.
“Before that, the biggest thing you had to do was clean up all the mickey bottles. Everyone brought it in,” Beeston said. “We didn’t really check for it. We were supposed to, but we didn’t. They’d bring in their flasks, so you had all these bottles sitting there at the end.”
“It was the perfect incubator for Blue Jays fans,” Martinez said. “It was Canadian. It was outdoors. It was on the water.”
By the late 1980s, though, the Blue Jays needed a serious stadium. They weren’t just about to move to a nicer part of town; they were moving into a mansion.
The Blue Jays got out just in time, after they’d tasted the success of the mid-’80s and just before they went on their World Series runs of 1992 and 1993. They moved out of that old college apartment that made them appreciate just how nice their new home was.
When it opened in 1989, SkyDome was a marvel of modern engineering, a breathtaking project that announced Toronto to the rest of the baseball world. No longer were the Blue Jays baseball’s other team, the Canadian outpost playing their home games in a seaside dump. These were the new Blue Jays, the Blue Jays who won, who spent money, who innovated.
All these years later, this organization has few strengths greater than the plot of land this stadium sits on. Other locations were thrown around, including a development plan for Downsview Park, but in 1985, the Blue Jays landed on this hunk of undeveloped railyard land near the CN Tower and Union Station.
Architects went to work, trying to push the limits of what we understood a stadium to be. After all of those years suffering through the exposure of Exhibition Stadium, the Blue Jays wanted control. A roof when it rained, open air when the sun was shining. They wanted it all.
This stadium also needed to work for everyone, not just the local baseball team. It would need to work for the Canadian Football League’s Toronto Argonauts, who were drawing far greater crowds in that era, and would eventually play home to the National Basketball Association’s Toronto Raptors from 1996 to 1999. It was the Raptors’ own version of Exhibition Stadium, a strange, rearranged stadium that couldn’t have suited their needs less, but it worked. Then came the concerts, beginning with Rod Stewart just a few days after the first Blue Jays game in June 1989 and the countless stadium shows that have followed.
As architects began to work on their designs, trying to score the unlikely contract, the challenges were obvious. This stadium needed to lean into technology, lean into grandeur, lean into newness. In the years that followed SkyDome’s opening in 1989, baseball saw the birth of retro classics like Camden Yards in Baltimore and Jacobs Field in Cleveland. If the idea and money for SkyDome had come along a few days later, perhaps we’d live in a much different baseball reality in Toronto, but this stadium was one of its time.
How, then, would the retractable roof work? Would it slide on and off the stadium, covering some of the land outside? Would sections of the roof tilt up and out? Would this be one big, sliding chunk of roof or dozens of sections, pulling apart like pieces of an orange from the centre?
Architects Rod Robbie and Michael Allen, who won the contract, found inspiration where you would least expect it.
“The inspiration was the idea of crustacea, all of these shells moving on a lobster or a sea animal of that kind,” Robbie said in an old History Channel documentary, The Demand for a Dome.
Think of a lobster. The long abdomen stretching down from the body is typically called a “lobster tail” if you’re ordering at a restaurant. The lobster’s tail curls and straightens, curls and straightens as it moves itself backward, the strong exoskeleton protecting the soft organs underneath. When you hold a live lobster out of the water, this tail will curl quickly and powerfully, whipping back and forth to free itself. As that happens, you can see the sections of the lobster’s back sliding along the edges of one another, fitting perfectly into an armour that moves with the lobster’s body instead of limiting it.
There it was, on the back of a lobster, the answer to it all.
Robbie called SkyDome a “secular cathedral,” wanting the building’s movements to hold elegance, not just process and purpose. There was some romance to this project from the very beginning.
Construction crews from EllisDon typically numbered between 600 and 700 people on site at a time, twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. In the final push to complete the project, there could be up to 2,000 workers at SkyDome at any given time. The winters became particularly difficult, especially with the amount of steel and concrete work needed for the build. The initial roof construction itself required a quarter-million bolts.
This was not just another stadium. We’ve become so comfortable with it now, the old dome that’s always been there, but it’s so important to hold onto the time when SkyDome was something beautiful and new. There are stories of the workers, standing down at what we’d now call field level, looking up at the roof moving above them for the first time with tears in their eyes.
In the first test, the panels of the roof slipped out from their stack on the north side of the stadium, sections of the lobster’s shell moving together along the same body, and moved to the south. “As if it was born from the rest of the structure,” Robbie said in the documentary.
SkyDome, in all its wonder, was born.
Now, it was time for the Toronto we know today to grow up around it.
Find an aerial view of Toronto from the late 1980s, when SkyDome construction was underway.
To the northeast side of the stadium, Yonge and Bay Streets were lined with buildings, but that area stands above the rest. It’s jarring, quite frankly, to see how much of Toronto has appeared in just the past thirty-five years.
The areas directly north of SkyDome and west, from King Street West down through Fort York, were not littered with condo buildings and the insufferable construction projects that continue to pull those towers from the earth. Much of it was completely bare.
“This area had nothing. Nothing!” Beeston said, pointing out the window of the office he still keeps at Rogers Centre. “It ended at Reese Street. You didn’t go down Bremner to York; it ended right here. All of these places were parking lots.”
Toronto was already well on its way, but the birth of SkyDome kicked things into overdrive. There was still so much space downtown to build up at that time, but the presence of this stadium blew the opportunities wide open. If 50,000 people would be spilling out of SkyDome on any given night, all of those people needed to park. Some of those people needed to have dinner before the game. Some of them needed a beer or six after the game. The area around SkyDome began to grow with it.
What a gift it is now, to have this stadium in the heart of downtown. In so many other cities, stadiums are placed on the outskirts of a city or outside of it entirely, surrounded by parking lots for thousands of cars to come in and out. SkyDome was built in the middle of it all. If you live in Toronto today, chances are you know at least one person with a view of the dome from the balcony of the 300-square-foot condo they rent for $3,100 a month.
We don’t marvel at SkyDome today like we once did. That relationship has changed. She’s old faithful now, the stadium that may not belong on a postcard but which still holds so many memories, all of them etched into the infinite weight of concrete. That said, you will never appreciate Rogers Centre more than the moment you attend a game at another MLB stadium and it begins to rain.
The city of Toronto has grown up with the Blue Jays, taking on so many different shapes over the years. It was once Toronto’s job to catch up to SkyDome. Now, it’s Rogers Centre’s job to catch up to Toronto.
The day will come again, years down the line, when the Blue Jays will need to decide what the future of baseball looks like in a bigger, bolder way. The day will come again when someone looks at the back of a lobster as it moves and dreams of something new.
Excerpted from The Franchise: Toronto Blue Jays: A Curated History of the Jays by Keegan Matheson, 2025, published by Triumph Books. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.
