Results tagged “sports”

The success of Battle of the Blades has brought Maple Leaf Gardens back into the national spotlight. The show’s mix of glamour and excitement fits some of the visions Conn Smythe had for the building when it opened its doors to the public seventy-eight years ago this week. Built in an almost unimaginable span of five months, the building that became a temple for generations of hockey fans is a testament to the executives who used their persuasive skills to raise the necessary funds during the Great Depression.

CBC Radio is reporting that Toronto's bid to host the 2015 Pan Am games has succeeded over those of Lima (Peru) and Bogotá (Columbia). This morning, BlogTO took a look at how the city might change if it landed the games; if you just want to relive the magic of today, you can check out some of the materials from Toronto's pitch, including the official—and multi-lingual—theme song, "Your Moment Is Here" (via the Post).

It’s hard to know exactly what to make of the Toronto Maple Leafs' start to the 2009/10 hockey season. It's not just the lack of wins that's puzzling: it's how bad the team's looked in compiling its 0-6-1 record. Right now, the Leafs seem bereft of talent, ideas, leadership, and desire. Surely they won't be like this all year?

In 1993, CPG (Community Programs Group) began publishing The New Jr. Jays Magazine, an eclectic mix of baseball, sci-fi, health and safety tips, and overt product placement. The magazine was designed to develop the Jays’ younger fan base, and featured comics, baseball articles, interviews with fans and players, and movie, book, and video game reviews. For only five dollars a year, Jr. Jays club members received four issues, a personalized membership card, and several Topps baseball cards. In the words of Ed Conroy, the publisher of The Magazine, a monthly magazine for kids, and a former Jr. Jays writer, "You couldn’t make something like this today."

You gotta credit the Toronto Blue Jays: for once, they're actually treating their fans to a meaningful September.

One game, one blown third period lead. And while Leaf fans can take a lot of positives from tonight's season-opening, 4-3 overtime loss to the Montreal Canadiens, it’s a game Toronto really should’ve won. The Leafs were all over Carey Price’s net the entire game (final shot tally: 46–27). They were also leading with under five minutes left to play—then squandered a weak tying goal (thanks in part to Mike Komisarek, who spent just under a quarter of his Maple Leafs debut in the penalty box) and a totally preventable game-winner (the usually reliable Luke Schenn will want to forget his role in that one). Of course, it’s only one game, and all the work Brian Burke put into shoring up the team’s defense should eventually pay off…but these late collapses will have to stop. Last year, the Leafs’ eight blown third period leads resulting in losses cost them a shot at the postseason. If this year’s team is going to compete, improvement in this one category would be a pretty good place to start.

In retrospect, the post-mortems could’ve been written back in May.

                                   

This past Sunday, over one thousand participants, many wearing only the skimpiest of undergarments, ran or walked to raise awareness and research funds for below-the-belt cancers such as ovarian and prostate cancers in the now annual Underwear Affair. Starting from Woodbine Park entrants took one of two courses: a ten-kilometre run or a five-kilometre walk, both winding through the parks of The Beach.

Vernon Wells is struggling. Everyone knows it, not least of all Wells himself. His body language is practically crying out, “Yeah, I know I’ve been sucking all year; I really am trying, though!” His face is screwed into an almost permanent grimace of frustration. Predictably, he’s begun squeezing at the plate—yet by trying so hard to bust out of his season-long slump he’s actually made it worse.

Alex Rios, ostensibly an integral part of the Toronto Blue Jays' future, is a Blue Jay no longer: Rios joined the Chicago White Sox this evening in exchange for...absolutely nothing, since the Blue Jays had put Rios on waivers late last week. Teams do this all the time, but it seldom leads to anything; apparently Chicago figures it's worth gambling on Rios's contract. Let us be the first to applaud this move if the money the Blue Jays are saving is reinvested back into the team. They're clearly in salary-dumping mode: since early July they've sent Rios, Scott Rolen, and B.J. Ryan packing, moves which suggest the necessity of freeing up payroll for next season. And Rios hasn't looked the same since he broke out in 2006; he might become a decent player, but it's looking less and less likely he'll develop into the franchise-calibre player Toronto expected him to become. Thanks for the memories, Alex, but we think your departure will actually make the Blue Jays better. Eventually.

Real Madrid’s whirlwind tour of Toronto culminated with a 5–1 win over Toronto FC in front of a record BMO Field crowd. It might've been just an exhibition match, but the sense of occasion inside the stadium was palpable. The Madrid players were given the star treatment throughout their abbreviated stay; the biggest star of all was, of course, Cristiano Ronaldo, who joined Madrid from Manchester United for $144-million this summer and who scored a lovely goal in a game which also featured the Madrid debuts of Kaka and Xabi Alonso. Yet despite the star-studded Galácticos in white, the game’s highlight might well have been Toronto FC’s lone goal, scored by Gabe Gala, which made the 22,059 fans in attendance (not to mention the TFC players) go absolutely mad. As for the pitch, which was covered in grass for the occasion: the less said, the better.

We Torontonians like to complain how the Blue Jays and other Canuck franchises never seem to get their due from the Americans, so it’s nice to know that The Onion, the continent's most venerable fake news source, is paying attention.

It’s hard to believe, but tonight could be Roy Halladay’s last start as a Toronto Blue Jay. With the news that Halladay will file for free agency following the 2010 season, the Blue Jays are said to be weighing upwards of six serious trade offers for their franchise player; the leading contenders appear to be the Philadelphia Phillies, where Halladay would join a rotation that includes Cole Hamels and recently signed Pedro Martinez. The potential trade is big news south of the border; in Toronto, meanwhile, it’s given Richard Griffin yet another excuse to continue his bizarre, unilateral war with general manager J.P. Ricciardi. As for Halladay, he’s one of the greatest athletes ever to play in Toronto, and while other superstars have burned their bridges before leaving (we're looking at you, Vince Carter), there seems to be a sense that Halladay's earned the chance to play for a contender. Tonight versus Tampa, he’s still ours—maybe for one last time.

We won’t pronounce the 2009 Toronto Blue Jays dead…yet. But if the team’s going to accomplish anything this season—and even if they aren’t—then this is going to be a big week.

Well, well, well: less than twenty-four hours after saying they'd listen to trade offers for Roy Halladay, the Toronto Blue Jays have given reliever (and former big-money free agent acquisition) B.J. Ryan his unconditional release. The news comes as a shock, even though Ryan hasn't been nearly the same pitcher since he underwent Tommy John surgery in 2007; it's certainly odd from a financial standpoint, since the team still owes him upwards of fifteen million dollars. With Ryan gone, Scott Downs seems poised to become the Blue Jays' everyday closer. Whether the team will create an entrance for him that rivals Ryan's electrifying charge from the bullpen remains to be seen.

When Brian Burke arrived in Toronto last November, he promised a Maple Leaf team full of "pugnacity, testosterone, truculence and belligerence.” He wasn’t kidding: barely seven months into his tenure as the Leafs’ thirteenth general manager, Burke has begun creating exactly that.

Nazem Kadri is the newest fresh-faced teenager to arrive in Toronto with the responsibility of resurrecting a moribund franchise—this, after the Maple Leafs selected him seventh overall from the London Knights in tonight’s NHL Entry Draft. In the end, Brian Burke’s aggressive pursuit of a higher draft position yielded nothing; speculation that the Leafs would trade up in order to select Brayden Schenn, brother of Luke, ended when the younger Schenn went fifth overall to the Los Angeles Kings. Kadri will likely need at least another year of junior hockey before joining the big club. And we’re fine with that: now that there’s a regime in charge with apparent commitment to rebuilding, we’re happy to put our faith in Burke and his plan. Welcome to the Maple Leafs, Nazem! You're forgiven for being a childhood Habs fan.

There are times when the Major League Baseball season is an interminable slog. This is one of those times.

In its early years, the Queen's Plate was a rather raucous and unpredictable annual event. Because the world's oldest thoroughbred race was nomadic for its first twenty years, moving from the Carleton racetrack at Dundas and Keele, to London, Ottawa, St. Catharines, and elsewhere according to the lobbying efforts of politicians, its organization was loose. Rules and the course length differed from year to year. The Plate, intended by Queen Victoria to encourage colonial breeders to strive to develop quality horses, was sometimes little more than a sideshow at county fairs. Names of horses were changed from one year to the next, and the colour of a horse's silks often differed from the description in the official program. There was hardly a running of the Queen's Plate that didn't provoke charges of fixed races, ineligible "ringer" horses, or illegal riding tactics. Confusion reigned. One classic example came in 1865, when the winning and second place horses were both disqualified. Nora Criena was reported to have won the run-off heat, but, months later and without explanation, Lady Norfolk was instead announced as the official Queen's Plate winner.

"The way I've approached it, to make it right in my head, is you start a series off at 2nd-and-10," Bart Andrus, the former NFL assistant hired in January to coach the Toronto Argonauts, told the National Post. "That's my thought process." It might just be a throwaway comment, but it might reveal deeper implications that the fifty-one-year-old California native is approaching the season with assumptions that are fundamentally at odds with the Canadian game. Argos fans have heard it before.

According to the Associated Press, Jim Balsillie—the billionaire founder of Research In Motion, who has spent the last month and a half in a fervent campaign to get the Phoenix Coyotes relocated to Hamilton—has had his bid to buy and move the team rejected. The Globe names the judge in the bankruptcy case as a Mr. "Redfield T. Baum," who we imagine has a large mustache, which he is likely twirling the edges of between his fingertips at this moment.

The 1982 Grey Cup game was not a pleasurable one for Toronto football fans. The major disappointment was not that the Argonauts fell apart in the second half and lost to the Edmonton Eskimos 32 to 16—it was the bone-chilling, rainy weather. Downpours caused fans in fully exposed sections of Exhibition Stadium to risk injury in order to find shelter. Among the fifty-five thousand people in the stands observing the miserable experience were Metropolitan Toronto Chairman Paul Godfrey and Ontario Premier William Davis. As the Globe and Mail observed, as Godfrey "surveyed the scene from his dry seat in Section 42 at the 55-yard line, the falling rain brought a twinkle to his eye. There must have been visions of a domed stadium dancing in his head.” While Davis sighed that the Argonauts "played well," Godfrey told a Star reporter that “if you ever needed proof of the need for a domed stadium, this is your day.”

It was twenty years and one week ago today that the Toronto Blue Jays played their first-ever game at the stadium formerly known as SkyDome. They lost 5-3 to the Milwaukee Brewers; Paul Molitor, who’d be the Jays’ World Series MVP four years later, got the first-ever hit at the new ballpark.

Lou Turofsky's favourite photograph was a sedate shot of an exhausted newsboy curled up on a building's front steps. It's a compelling choice, yet surprising given the countless sports stars, celebrities, and royalty that Lou and his brother Nat photographed in Toronto over the years. Today many of their photos of sporting events and city life remain recognizable—frequently republished on this site and elsewhere—but the Turofsky name and their story are largely unknown.

Nothing’s official yet; so far there’s just a rescheduled game between Toronto FC and the New York Red Bulls. It would appear, however, that the move was made in order to free up Toronto FC and BMO Field for what would be the biggest occasion in the fledgling team’s history: an exhibition match against Real Madrid on August 7.

A spring weeknight. A fan planning to go to that night's Blue Jays game flips on the radio to check on the traffic heading to the ballpark.

It’s still too early to panic.