[charlene]

for you BoSox fans - a little history lesson:
(I, as a kid attended some of the games in Toronto mentioned in the article)
From Toronto Star:
Red Sox Nation – here in T.O.

Oct 25, 2007 04:30 AM
Jim Coyle

Had a birthday yesterday. (Don't ask.) Time rolls on and a man counts memories more than years. So let me tell you about the best birthday present I ever had.

It was delivered 15 years ago in the wee hours at Women's College Hospital, a little redhead (the Vikings passing through Ireland long centuries ago, I figure) announcing himself to the world with a set of lungs worthy of an umpire roaring a called third strike.

As luck had it, she who bore him was an old hand at such matters by then, he being heir No. 3, and we were all home in time to watch the Blue Jays, one birthday boy in another's arms, win their first World Series that night down in Atlanta.

So this date never passes but I think a bit about generations and baseball and, the World Series starting last night in Boston, get a little wistful for temps perdu.

For as it happens, some of us growing long(ish) in the tooth around town actually carry dual citizenship when it comes to the grand old game – associate members, as it were, in Red Sox Nation.

Gather round, kids, and I'll explain. Wait, while we get the pipe fired up and the rocking chair going. There, now off we go down memory lane.

It was a thing of beauty, so it was, that ballpark built in 1926 at the foot of Bathurst St. on the lakeshore. Cost the harbour commission a cool $750,000. Held almost 20,000 fans, the equal of many major-league parks.

It was home to the Toronto Maple Leafs, a baseball team before they were a hockey side, colours worn by legends like Rocky Nelson, the club owned for a spell by the brassy Jack Kent Cooke, skippered by Sparky Anderson.

Long before the Montreal Expos brought major-league baseball to Canada, long before the Jays hit town, it was as good as it got around here for ball fans down at that damp, dank (a lot like Fenway Park, as it happens) diamond by the lake.

By 1965, the Maple Leafs had become the farm team of the Red Sox – the Leafs as successful an operation on the field as the parent club (losing 100 games that season) wasn't.

Under Dick Williams, famous as a dugout despot, the Leafs won the league championship and the Governor's Cup in 1965 and '66. Fireplug third-baseman Joe Foy was rookie of the year, MVP and batting champ in '65. Reggie Smith, an outfield whippet, took the batting title in '66, the same season big right-hander Gary Waslewski was pitcher of the year.

For the 1967 season, the Red Sox called up Foy and Smith and Waslewski and second-baseman Mike Andrews. Williams was hired as manager.

And one of the great Cinderella seasons ever was had, the 100-to-1 underdog Red Sox going from last to first in the American League, all the way to the World Series, losing in seven to St. Louis.

As the Boston writer Dan Shaughnessy rather arrestingly put it, "the skinny little girl next door became a Playboy centrefold overnight."

Teenagers of the day appreciated the imagery. And the way we figured, the Red Sox might as well have been wearing a Maple Leaf on their uniforms for all the help the Toronto pipeline had delivered to the turnaround.

Back home, alas, the Leafs folded the next season. They tore down Maple Leaf Stadium a year later.

But in Toronto, for ball fans of a certain age, the link to Fenway was forged for a lifetime.

So, from those of us who remember the Stadium and the summer of '66, Go Sox.

(And happy birthday, child.)




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