108: Blue Jays fanbase has seen complete turnaround

It's been happy days for Jays fans recently, but it wasn't long ago that this fanbase hit its low point. (Photo: Laura Pederson / National Post)

June 21, 2016

By: Tyler King

Canadian Baseball Network

The 2010 season was a weird year for Blue Jays fans.

If you can recall - and don’t feel at all ashamed if you can’t - that was the year the forgotten son Alex Anthopoulos replaced J.P. Ricciardi as the team’s general manager.

It was also the year José Bautista became, seemingly out of nowhere, impossibly good at baseball. His 54 home runs led the league that season, setting a new franchise record in the process. His previous high was 16.

As a team, the Jays collectively hit 257 long balls back in 2010, which also stands as a franchise record - yes, even after the offensive domination that was 2015.

But what may serve as an even greater shock to your memory is the fact that the Jays weren’t completely terrible record-wise back then either. They finished eight games over .500 (85-77), ending up with 10 more wins than they had in 2009. 

I know it’s hard to believe, but on June 19 they were just 4 1/2 games back of the division-leading Tampa Bay Rays. And although they wouldn’t get any closer, all those figures seem to hint towards what should have been a modestly exciting season.

But if you can even remotely recollect the overarching vibe of that 2010 campaign, you probably share the same sentiment towards it as I do:

It kind of sucked.

So then you may ask, why even bother bringing up a mediocre season that took place over half a decade ago? Well let’s just say it’s my extremely roundabout - no, let’s call it “scenic” - way of reminding the fan base just how far your Toronto Blue Jays have come.

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There’s a case to be made that 2010 was something of a franchise low point, at least in reference to the 16 years of this, the new millennium. Despite the winning record and home run milestones, the season was plagued by an almost unprecedented level of fan disinterest.

Bleacher Report ranked the Jays fanbase as sixth worst in the league that year, which wasn’t an insult to the good people of Toronto so much as it was a wake-up call to those running the ship. It’s also true that “ranking” a fanbase means next to nothing, based on the obvious arbitrariness that such a study would have to entail.

Yet even on a more objective level, the Blue Jays saw their worst attendance numbers since 1982 that year. They finished 26th in league attendance in 2010, with only 1.5 million fans walking through the Rogers Centre gates. 

(Side note, it had already been five years since the Jays ballpark had officially lost the iconic title of “SkyDome”, if you can believe that.)

Now sure, 1.5 million might look good on a bank statement, but in terms of major league attendance it is downright embarrassing. In this case, it’s also somewhat curious considering the Jays had a total attendance of 1.9 million in 2004, the year they won only 67 games ...

Or perhaps the point is best made this way: the Jays have entertained nearly 1.3 million fans already in 2016, despite having played just 36 games at home.

So ... ya, you can be forgiven if your memory of 2010 is a bit shoddy. I mean, who would want to remember that?

But thankfully those long, quiet nights of pin-drop silence at the ol’ ballpark now seem more like ancient history than a mere five years removed from being the reality.

You saw the most latent sign of this fanbase revival last year, when David Price called his first start for the Blue Jays ‘the best environment he’s every played in’ - high praise from someone who has pitched in the World Series. And you saw it again just a few weeks ago, as Jays newcomer Jason Grilli also gushed about pitching in front of the Toronto crowd, further hinting that the reputation of Jays fans is starting to get out around the league.

And you can no longer accuse an incoming player like Grilli, whose favourite team was the Blue Jays growing up, of uttering those words just to make 50,000 new friends. Because there seems to be a lot of truth to what he’s saying.

The Jays are currently on pace to have a total attendance figure of over 3 million in 2016 - which would be their highest total since they won the World Series in 1993. 

Their average home attendance of 37,661 is now third in the American League (seventh in the MLB). As a comparison, they averaged 34,504 in that tumultuous yet euphoric banner raising season a year ago - the one to which most of this conversation is owed. 

If you factor in the attendance at Blue Jays road games this season, then the team’s growing reach becomes that much more impressive. When combining home and away games, they currently have the highest average attendance in the American League.

As warm and fuzzy as those numbers are, it’s still important to - at least once in a while - pause reflect on the dark times that preceded it. The Jays averaged just 20,068 fans in 2010, the closest point in my lifetime of having baseball in Toronto slip into obscurity.

For now anyway, those days are gone. And today fans can gloat as their attendance numbers remain slightly ahead of such universal brands as the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. 

But, of course, attendance alone isn’t the end all be all in terms of measuring the “goodness” of a fanbase. Even if it is the easiest to calculate, attendance does have its obvious faults (ie. how many fans a ballpark can actually hold makes a big difference). 

So don’t go angry-tweeting the Yankees feed just yet ...

Speaking of twitter, since it has been 16 years since we’ve celebrated “Y2K” - you know, the year all those Terminator prophecies were supposed to come true and our computers were meant to turn against us - perhaps a team’s online presence can somehow be correlated with the strength of its fanbase.

With roughly 1.3 million followers at the start of the season, the Jays had the second highest Twitter following of any MLB team, second only to the New York Yankees, who had 1.6 million. 

Over the first two months of the 2016 campaign, they Blue Jays have added approximately 130,000 followers. If you’re keeping score, the Yankees have added about 120,000.

Twitter followers may seem like a meaningless statistic on its surface (because it is), but it certainly doesn’t hurt the Jays’ case for a rejuvenated fanbase, especially when you consider how frail this franchise was just five years ago.

Now if only those Twitter numbers could translate into some extra All-Star votes for Michael Saunders ... 

Or perhaps more importantly, where the hell is Don Cherry when you need him!?

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Follow Tyler and #Section108 on Twitter: @TylerJoseph108