It looks cold. A stiff wind is blowing the flags straight out, and the broadcasters tell us that it's 7°C/44°F. And that Astroturf just makes things look cold and unforgiving. And because of Exhibition Stadium's configuration for baseball, it looks barren, even tho there are 36,000 people there. Seriously, that stadium was a travesty.
Hey, Jim Gott is Toronto's quasi-opening-day starter! I met dozens of athletes when I was a kid and collected autographs, and Gott was one of the sweetest, kindest, funniest guys I met. (Also receiving votes: Dermontti Dawson and Sam Clancy.) I know nothing about his pre-Pirates career, so this will all be new to me. Go Jays! Doyle Alexander is New York's starter. Your managers: Bobby Cox and Billy Fucking Martin. Don Chevrier and Bobby Mattick have the call.
I really liked those '80s Jays teams. Some of the names are magic: Rance Mulliniks, Jesse Barfield, Lloyd Moseby, Garth Iorg.
Form-fitting uniforms. The Yankees wore button-down jerseys, but the Jays were all about the V-neck pull-over. Sadly, they wore their home whites for this game instead of the powder blues.
Ernie Whitt wore a batting helmet with no ear flaps. When he was catching, he wore a mask pulled over a soft baseball cap. Why not make the batting helmet pull double-duty?
Jim Gott pitched into the 7th inning, then was pulled after the first two batters reached base. Steve McLaughlin, who looked like a poor man's Trey Anastasio, came in and walked Dave Winfield on four pitches, then was immediately pulled for another guy with a beard. A lot of beards in Canada in 1983. The game started to bog down in this inning. There were a lot of pitching changes, a lot of shots of Bobby Cox waddling to the pitcher's mound, and CTV apparently didn't sell ad time, so the broadcasters just talked about whatever for minutes at a time as the pitchers warmed up.
Nice sequence in the 8th inning. Goose Gossage came in and put a couple of runners on. Ernie Whitt hit a pop-up to shallow right field. The CF, RF, and 2B all converged and collided and dropped the ball. Jesse Barfield followed this with a home run. There was much joy in Toronto.
This was a CTV broadcast, being shown locally by CKCO-TV in Kitchener, Ontario, so I was hoping to see some signs of 'otherness' in the commercials. Gas station commercials referencing liters instead of gallons? Check. A Labatt's commercial showed almost pornographic amounts of skiing. Even a Budweiser commercial was about skiing.
A commercial for Grecian Formula featured a hockey referee, because Canada. Then, at the end, I realized that it wasn't just any referee -- it was Maurice Richard!
Anne Murray shilled for Commerce Bank. I was surprised that I was able to remember/recognize her, but then I recalled that I owned a couple of Anne Murray albums in 1983. They fit in nicely with my Air Supply and Journey albums. (I wasn't always this cool, folks.)
A series of PSAs about workplace safety were a little too real for my liking. A commercial for a circus that would be passing thru Kitchener and London made me feel very, very sad.
Okay, this Coffee Crisp commercial mimicking Queen is certainly 'other.' Nicely done.
Overall, the commercials were sweet-natured. A lot of singing. I was going to say that it was refreshing to see so many commercials that weren't hyper-sexualized, but these homo-erotic Labatt's commercials made me rethink that.
Oh! Here's something. It's a commercial for the Provincial Lottery featuring cartoon caricatures of old-timey entertainers: WC Fields, Groucho Marx, Mae West, etc. It's actually really cute. And then the money shot: Al Jolson in blackface. This commercial caused a bit of an uproar in 1983, so the blackfaced Jolson was turned white. Problem solved.
