(Cache #214)
This blog was originally posted on September 25, 2015. At the bottom of the post, Andris reflects on it, here in October, 2025.
“Fans of the New York Yankees were in force at Rogers Centre in Toronto Wednesday night, for a crucial game against the Blue Jays. Many were bearing the American flag, the Stars and Stripes, and waving it proudly in the stands.”
If you’re Canadian, how does that make you feel?
In truth, it probably ticks you off. The nerve! Coming up here and waving their flag in our faces. Unbelievably rude.
Except that, as far as I’m aware – and I have attended several Jays games as they’ve dominated down the stretch – this did not happen. When was the last time you saw an American waving his or her flag on Canadian soil? Maybe at the Vancouver Olympics or the world junior hockey championships or the Pan Am Games, those events being more about nationalism than anything else.
Or maybe Americans have more social grace than Canadians like to imagine. In fact, they do indeed have more civility than we do on this issue, because Jays fans were – and this did happen – seen at Yankee stadium last week waving the Maple Leaf.
As a Canadian, and as a Jays fan, it was embarrassing to watch.
Yankees fans evidently don’t feel the need to come to our building and wave the Stars and Stripes, because they are in attendance to represent their legendary team and their legendary city, not their country. But evidently, for at least some of us, baseball is still – 22 years after winning the World Series twice in succession – about proving Canada can beat the US at its own game.
Which doesn’t make much sense, considering only three of the Jays’ 40 players are Canadian. True, the owner of the Jays (Rogers) has positioned the brand as “Canada’s Team,” and the team’s logo bears a prominent maple leaf. It seems safe to presume that Rogers has done this not out of national pride, but to make more money from more people across the country watching on their TVs, computers and mobile phones. And yet, there is an undeniable Canadian aspect to the Jays’ brand, because people all over Canada love them, and because they are the only major league baseball team in this country.
But Canadian-ness should not be the team’s defining feature.
It made a lot more sense in 1992, when the Jays were driving to become the first non-American-based team in the history of Major League Baseball to win the World Series. We could feel tradition tilting against us as interlopers; of course, if you are old enough, you remember the US Marines flying our flag upside-down.
But we demolished tradition. We’ve been there. We’ve done that. We have the banners in the rafters to prove it. We have a legacy – epitomized by Alomar, Carter and a truly shocking all-time roster of legendary players and their feats – that courses through the veins of every Jays fan who’s ever watched on TV or had the pleasure of seeing them play in person.
So now, 22 years later, let us play baseball, not politics. Is our baseball team good enough to beat its opponent, or not? To my mind, waving the Canadian flag at a Jays game is an instant admission of inferiority. That we are not good enough. That we need something extra – beyond the bounds of talent, and of pride in team and city.
The Number One Rule of Branding is: Be Consistent. A brand is what people think of you, after all, and if you keep changing the message, people won’t know what to think. But sometimes brands and their fans outgrow their positioning. Sometimes they mature. And one would hope that in these more-than two decades, we have become confident enough as Torontonians and sufficiently self-assured as Canadians – and jingoistic just as Jays fans – that we can just play ball.
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New commentary from Andris in October, 2025:
I have been delighted over the past several years to see very few Canadian flags in the Rogers Centre (pardon me, the DOME) at Jays games, a pattern that held up, for the most part, in the ALDS and ALCS. Let me make very clear that I am an extremely proud Canadian – which is precisely why I think the flag should not be waved in the context of a Jays game. Because, in my view, it betrays our lack of confidence.
So, on the flag-waving metric, Jays fans seem to have matured considerably.
I am also thrilled to see that the Canada vs. United States narrative has not yet emerged – at least as I write this at 310pm on October 22nd, 2025. Today I went through the Jays’ press clippings I have kept since 1992, since the team’s first appearance in the World Series, and I was struck by how gigantic a story it was, at least to the Canadian media, that a Canadian team had never before appeared in, let alone won, the Fall Classic. That Canada was somehow encroaching on the Great American Pastime, even though there were a grand total of zero Canadian players on the 1992 championship roster.
So far, I have seen no sign of that kind of discussion this time. To repeat a line from my 2015 post, we’ve been there, done that.
But here is what’s going to happen: Canadian and American politicians are going to get involved. Derogatory statements will ensue. Given the current state of Canada-US affairs, it’s going to get personal. And once again, there will be a distraction from the magnificent game being played on the field, and from the players who bless us with it.
