Batter's Box Interactive Magazine: Closing Day

One of da Box's founding fathers, Jordan Furlong, sends us a pinch-hit on the end of baseball in Ottawa. Thanks for everything, Jordan, and take it away.

Ordinarily, one wears black to a funeral. That’s not an option when the mercury is climbing towards 30º C, and anyway, the patient wasn’t actually dead yet — just terminal, and the plug-pulling had been scheduled in advance. So I headed down Highway 417 towards Lynx Stadium on Monday to catch the very last Ottawa Lynx game, a 1:05 start against, ironically enough, the Syracuse Skychiefs, whose parent club was about to become the last professional baseball team in Canada.

The signs were everywhere that this was a momentous day. For one thing, there was an actual traffic jam on the off-ramp leading towards the ballpark. Having been stuck in a few Senators gridlocks in my time, I knew this would be a piker by comparison, so I had time to count all the bumper stickers (37) on the Dodge Caravan ahead of me.

The driver was from Toronto, if his “Proud East Yorker” license plate frame was a reliable guide. The rear door of his minivan was coated with 36 decals for ballclubs major (Red Sox, Cubs, Indians, and some ’92 and ’93 Jays World Series stickers) and minor (everything from the Altoona Curve to the Batavia Muckdogs to the New Hampshire Fisher Cats). Hailing from Toronto, the van also sported the requisite Maple Leafs and Bills stickers. The lone non-sports decal exhorted me to ride something called the Cog to the top of Mount Washington. This was someone who’d put a lot of mileage on his wheels to see a lot of ballclubs. Today, he was coming to watch one die.

The Ottawa Lynx debuted in 1993, the year that the Blue Jays won their second straight World Series and that the Lynx’s parent club, the Montreal Expos of Larry Walker and Dennis Martinez, were in the middle of their own run of excellence. These were heady times, and not just for baseball in Canada, with thriving franchises in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg and various small cities throughout Ontario.

This was also an exciting time for the nation’s capital, still a place where they rolled up the sidewalks at 4:30 pm. The Senators had debuted the previous fall, and the Rough Riders, well, they still existed. Never mind that the Sens were finishing at 10-70-4 for the worst record in league history, or that the Eastern Riders went 4-14. The arrival of a Triple-A franchise signaled the city’s growing momentum, prefiguring Ottawa’s coming technology boom and self-image overhaul.

Traffic had merged with another stream of cars, and another Dodge Caravan had pulled ahead of me. This one, coincidentally enough, was also littered with bumper stickers, but this time for punk bands. Common Enemy, Against Me, Capitalist Casualties and Insect Warfare are the names I can remember. It occurred to me that “Batavia Muckdogs” would make a very good punk band name, and I thought it would be nice if the two van drivers ended up sitting next to each other, though hopefully some distance away from me.

I was scheduled to meet my friend Mike at 12:30 at the main entrance. The lineups at the ticket windows were twice as deep as I’d seen them even for well-attended games (that is to say, more than a few hundred people scattered around the park). Those of us in line were treated to the sounds of a band hired to loudly play cover music in front of the stadium.

When I arrived, they were banging out Takin’ Care of Business, which time and relentless repetition have converted into the lamest of many lame Canadian summer clichés. The man in the line next to me said to his companion, “This is Bachman Turner Overdrive.” Oh, you think? Next came Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World, with upbeat family-friendly lyrics like “Now she’s put the kid away and she’s gone to get a hit/she hates her life and what she’s done to it.” By the time I got my tickets, they had moved on to Born to Be Wild, but thankfully Mike showed up and we escaped inside.

Lynx Stadium used to be Jetform Park, before the eponymous sponsors were bought out by Adobe; for the longest while, you could still see the outline of the name where it had been ripped off the side of the stadium. The field itself is lovely to look at and there are no bad seats in terms of sightlines; but the concession stands seem not to have been upgraded since the building opened, and a fresh coat of paint had never darkened the original cement facings.

I joined another long line to get a hot dog and caramel corn. “We’re out of caramel corn,” said the adolescent behind the cash register. Out of caramel corn? How can you be out of caramel corn before they’ve even sung the national anthems? On the team’s last day of existence? Whatever. I bought a bag of peanuts and we found our seats, about 12 rows up from the on-deck circle.

The outfield wall at Lynx Stadium would be a thing of beauty to a purist, largely thanks to a low supply of advertisements. Most minor-league parks I’ve glimpsed can’t squeeze enough signage onto the wall, but aside from fewer than a dozen small offerings from the likes of Pizza Pizza, Mr. Gas and some motel I’d never heard of, this was one clean wall.

There are two retired jerseys out there: F.P. Santangelo, who developed a cult following in the happy early days of the franchise, and Jamey Carroll, who Mike told me won the Lynx’s only batting title. Mike went to high school with me back home, but has lived in Ottawa for years (he worked for Nortel at one point, as did most of the city) and has been here since day one of the franchise.

The Lynx roster that debuted in 1993 sported some future stars, including Rondell White, Cliff Floyd, Kirk Reuter and a young Canadian slugger named Matt Stairs. But like all minor-league clubs, the most common names belonged to journeymen who populated benches and bullpens across the big leagues over the ensuing decade. Who can forget players like Tim Laker, Gil Heredia, Curtis Pride, Bill Risley, Greg Colbrunn, and the pride of la belle province, Denis Boucher?

The hitting star of the ’93 Lynx was outfielder Scott Bryant, who batted .283 with 12 HR and 65 RBI. The staff ace was 21-year-old Tavo Alvarez, who posted a 7-10 mark in 25 starts with a 4.22 ERA. Ottawa finished second that year with a respectable 73-69 record, and drew more than 663,000 fans to its brand-new stadium. By comparison, across town, the Sens were drawing a little over 880,000 in a Junior-A stadium while waiting for their new facility to be built.

The final game — they were calling it “Closing Day” — got off to a fast start, as the Lynx plated two runs in the first off Syracuse starter Pat Mahomes, who was throwing meatballs in the early going. Every batter on both sides seemed to be swinging early and often, leading me to think that neither team wanted this ultimate getaway day to last a moment longer than it needed to. But the Skychiefs tied the game in the 4th on a long home run by Mike Vento off Lynx starter Gary Knotts, and the pace slowed considerably after that.

By mid-game, the backlog at the ticket windows had eased, and most (but not all) the seats were filled. Mike had mentioned that the last game of the season usually draws a large crowd, but even so, it was remarkable to see actual people occupying the sea of blue seats I’d become accustomed, over several games, to seeing empty.

Like the rear door of my East York driver’s minivan, the crowd had come festooned with numerous logos on hats and shirts, including Lynx, Expos, Red Sox, Yankees and Indians (surprisingly little Blue Jays merchandise, but then again, considering the state of relations between these two cities, maybe not that surprising after all). We spotted one woman in a classic Gary Carter Expos road jersey, reminding Mike and I of a high school friend who was such a Carter fan that he’d attach a little superscript “8” to his signature. (He took Carter’s trade to the Mets pretty hard.)

Unlike me, who had sworn off the Expos the day Pete Rose singled into a double play (it’s a long story), Mike had remained true to his ‘Spos right through to that franchise’s protracted and bitter end in Montreal. I know several former Expos fans, each of whom has found different ways of coping.

One woman follows all the individual former Expo players, pledging to cheer them on till the last former Montrealer retires. Another decided to switch to a different National League team — I think he might have chosen the Pirates, unwisely. Mike chose to adopt the Nationals as his new club — a controversial choice among some Expo fans — and filled me in over the course of the game on the gradual return of Washington’s injury-riddled rotation.

The Expos were the ideal choice for the Lynx’s first parent club — there’s a very strong French presence in Ottawa, and on those many occasions when only a few hardy souls turned out to watch the team, I’d hear a lot of francophone conversations around me. The Jays as parent club would probably have been resented, at a certain level — sensitive Ottawaians would not have liked being Toronto’s farm team, not at all. (That would have gone double had the Lynx kept the affiliation when the Expos became the Nationals — from a foreign-policy perspective, no one here would have enjoyed being Washington’s farm club either). Lynx fans invariably were old Expos fans— and old was often the operative word.

Take the group sitting next to us — I wouldn’t go so far as to call them senior citizens, necessarily, but they were getting well on in years. They were clearly old pros at this ballpark, on a first-name basis with the players, for better and for worse: “C’mon, Matt, you can do better than that!” They knew the staff in the front office, knew when the 50-50 tickets were about to be offered for sale, and had probably endured more cold evenings and blistering afternoons for this team than I’d care to know. They and those like them were the lifeblood of the fan base, but they were growing awfully few and far between.

Ottawa had pushed a run across in the bottom of the fifth to lead 3-2, but then the wheels all fell off. The Skychiefs came right back to score six times the next inning, highlighted by a two-run blast by Kevin Barker off Knotts and a three-run bomb by Wayne Lydon on the first pitch he saw from reliever Ryan Cameron. The Lynx rallied with a two-run double by Danny Sandoval in the bottom of the inning to draw to within 8-5, but those would be the last runs to score at Lynx Stadium.

Mike and I spent most of the game talking baseball, me lamenting the Blue Jays’ plight and him getting a lot of satisfaction out of Dmitri Young’s performance (I had mocked Young’s two-year contract rather mercilessly at our last meeting). We also talked family, comparing notes on bringing up two kids — we each have a boy and a girl — and how there’s almost no time these days to do anything but the must-do’s on your list.

Our get-togethers now revolve around sporting events: catching a few NFL games at a sports bar in the fall and winter, attending Lynx games in the spring and summer (and now we need a new venue to meet up). But that’s life — you take your timeouts when and where you can get them. And at least Mike and I can grab a beer in person; I have to stay in touch with most of my friends via e-mail or Facebook. Everyone’s busy these days, and no one’s agenda is getting any less crowded as we get older.

Between innings, the usual frivolities were rolled out, including the T-shirt fling, the sunflower seed toss, and the always-bizarre yellow mini-truck from the Ottawa Citizen, from which a very cramped young man would reach up to deliver water bottles to the umpires. My personal favourite, however, was the musical chairs game, which followed the same routine every time: six small children started, racing around five chairs while the sound system played the requisite mindless tune. When the music stopped, the kids all scrambled for seats, and the unsuccessful contestant was removed along with another chair, and the process continued.

The funny thing was that invariably, the last two kids racing around the remaining chair were always a tiny one, barely past toddlerhood, and a relatively gigantic seven-year-old, and they’d always stop the music so that the smaller child would get the seat. But today, the older kid hadn’t read the memo, and when the music finished, she grabbed a seat — and for her troubles, actually got booed by the crowd. Booed at seven years old! For winning a game of musical chairs! I’d love to be at the therapy session twenty years from now when that one comes out.

This sort of stuff is what makes minor-league baseball so much fun, but over time, the spectacle started to become the show at Lynx Stadium. The team followed up its strong ’93 debut with a decent 4th-place, 70-72 campaign in 1994, and attendance slipped from the novelty premiere year to a still-solid 596,000-plus. Baseball fans know 1994, obviously, as the year without a World Series, cut short by the strike that crippled part of the ’95 season too.

Conventional wisdom has it that the strike curdled Canadians’ relations with baseball and sealed the fate of the Expos, who had a championship-calibre season taken away. But as far as the Lynx are concerned, Mike doesn’t buy that explanation: Ottawa gave up on the Lynx, he said, “when the team tanked.”

And I think he’s right. In 1995, the Lynx won their first and only league championship, and attendance remained strong at more than 511,000. But in 1996, the team came crashing back to earth, going 60-82 and falling to 5th place, and attendance dropped precipitously to 347,000. An even more brutal ’97 campaign followed, 54-86, as most of the Expos’ young players had moved up to the majors and the Lynx now relied on stalwarts like Everett Stull, Rico Rosy and Hensley Muelens. Attendance collapsed to 266,000, almost half what the team had drawn just two years earlier.

But worse was to come. 1998: 224,000. 1999: 195,000. There’s a bizarre spike in the 2000 attendance figures, 471,000 for a 53-88 squad; I can only assume a case of inflation based on tickets sold, not seats filled (it was the era for such things in Ottawa). In 2001, it fell back to 205,000, and would never crack 200,000 again. Even having competitive teams didn’t matter: in 2003, the first season of Oriole affiliation, the Lynx went 79-65 and made it to the second round of the playoffs, but only 176,000 showed up to see. Last year, attendance bottomed out at a simply sad 122,000. The question isn’t why are the Lynx leaving — it’s how did they hang on so long?

I think the long, slow decline of the Expo organization cost the Lynx dearly: as the big-league franchise became a ghost of itself, operated at arm’s length by a contemptuous commissioner’s office, the minor leagues were left to fend for themselves. Bereft of care or direction from the big club, the Lynx franchise began to wither away: the stadium suffered from lack of attention, on both the fans’ side and the players’ accommodations, and the quality of play deteriorated too. Neither the Orioles nor the Lynx’s final, temporary parent, the Phillies, inspired much interest among local fans and did little if anything to support the struggling franchise. But that’s not the whole story.

The ninth inning began, and you could feel the ballpark ready itself for the inevitable end. Trivia question: who was the last Ottawa Lynx to throw a pitch? Answer: Joe Bisenius, who entered the game and promptly struck out the side. Nobody had left the park —everyone had come to witness the end and be part of it, and no one was moving until the final out was recorded.

Ottawa is not a sports town. I’ve said that any number of times, risking the wrath of the Senators diehards at the office. But the Sens are still with us thanks in large part to a bailout by their new billionaire owner, not through widespread fan devotion. The city thrilled along with the Senators on their Stanley Cup ride, and I don’t doubt the real disappointment people felt when the Ducks took the series. But watch the Sens fall back to 5th place this season, and you’ll see the other side of this city come out, the kind that cares about exactly one thing: winning.

Speaking broadly, Ottawa residents don’t love sports; they love victory. This is a city that lost not one, but two Canadian Football League franchises in the same decade. Even by CFL standards, that’s pretty bad. Montreal gets the rap for being intolerant of losing, but in Ottawa — where the official sport is politics, and they play hardball — you win or you go.

The bottom of the ninth started, and trivia question number two presented itself: who was the last pitcher to take the mound at Lynx Stadium? None other than Jamie Vermilyea, one-time darling of Jays’ minor-league followers like me and now almost officially a tweener relief pitcher. The Lynx got two runners on with one out, and the crowd, which had fallen into a late-afternoon lull, started buzzing again. But Gary Burnham popped to second base, and the Lynx, as they say, were down to their final out.

As one, and unprompted, the crowd rose to its feet and started cheering. It was a startling moment, and actually rather moving. It was as if the patient’s time to go had arrived, and the visitors and witnesses gathered themselves to say goodbye, partly in tribute, and maybe, partly in apology. Up to the plate came the answer to the final trivia question: who was the last Ottawa Lynx batter? Dusty Wathan, catcher and son of the late John, stood in against Vermilyea, and the cheering continued unabated.

Standing and cheering along with them, I felt those pangs of regret myself. I had never taken my own daughter here — she’s not even three years old yet, so it probably would’ve been a disaster anyway — and now I’d never be able to. There’s been talk lately that the stadium will be converted to a soccer pitch, and a local fan group had organized a petition outside the stadium to “Save Our Ballpark.”

I had made several trips to this facility, but either to catch up with a friend or to watch the visiting Skychiefs and get first-hand looks at some Blue Jays prospects. I was just as guilty of treating Lynx games as a means to an end, not as an end in themselves. In that regard, I had no business looking down on all the other Ottawa residents who’d failed to support their team.

I’d had plenty of opportunities to support the Lynx, and I chose to do other things with my time. This truly isn’t a sports town — but maybe just maybe, I’m not truly a sports guy, either. You have to love a minor-league team to keep it, love it the way the older folks next to me loved it, standing and cheering their Lynx now for the very last time. Life is busy, and you have to make your choices and live with them. I’d chosen to live without the Lynx, and so had thousands of others. Here was the price.

Dusty Wathan grounded to second base and was thrown out easily. The cheering subsided for just a moment, then grew again, and the crowd stayed on its feet. The Skychiefs poured out of their dugout, forming a line to shake hands and even exchange hugs: in the minors even more than the majors, careers are transitory and this might be the last time many of these teammates would see each other.

The Lynx relievers trotted in from the bullpen, and a few tossed their hats into the crowd. Everyone was expecting the Lynx players to come out of the dugout and acknowledge the cheers. But they didn’t. Photographers gathered in front of the dugout to shoot the players leaving for the last time, but none of them made to move towards the field.

The crowd kept cheering, and eventually, Stone Russell, the three-year-old son of Lynx manager John Russell, emerged with his dad and proceeded to run the bases, a sort of tradition following Lynx victories. It was a delightful sight: he scampered to first base, ran towards second, collapsed in a heap halfway there but got back up to roars of the crowd and kept going, slowing now and even walking between second and third, before finally gearing up and dashing exuberantly to cross home plate. The crowd loved it, and the grinning manager picked up his son and carried him back to the dugout. But the players hadn’t emerged, and they never did.

“They’re not coming out,” I said to Mike. He shrugged. “They’re sending a message,” he said. “You never showed up for us; why should we show up for you?”

The clapping and cheering eventually faded away to the ordinary sounds of a large departing crowd. There was a scatted boo here and there when the fans finally accepted that their curtain call would go unanswered. A small vocal group near the home dugout, undaunted, started chanting that old Canadian sports standby, “Go Lynx Go! Go Lynx Go!” But the only answer came from the diehard fans next to me. As she gathered her things, one lady smiled ruefully and instead sang out, “Stay Lynx Stay! Stay Lynx Stay!”

Closing Day

Wednesday, September 05 2007 @ 08:40 AM EDT