Why Blue Jays’ cricket day has cultural resonance – and personal meaning

Baseball

Published 23.06.2023

Why Blue Jays’ cricket day has cultural resonance – and personal meaning

TORONTO – The bare-handed catches flash throughout my thoughts first. If you’ve ever held a cricket ball, you realize it’s as exhausting as polished rock. And but, gamers in that sport don’t use gloves like we see in baseball. Instead, they’re taught to obtain the ball with out safety. It’s a degree my dad proudly strengthened all through my childhood, and it’s nonetheless the very first thing I consider when cricket is talked about.

Back then, he’d take my brother and me to the diamond throughout the street from our house to play catch. I used to be a baseball-obsessed child, and these rituals have been one of many methods Dad tried to know the game I’d fallen in love with. That effort to know didn’t prolong to gloves, although. We’d whip balls at him full-force and he’d catch them, pulling his naked palms in towards his physique to reduce the influence. Afterward, my brother and I might run again house and marvel to our mother about how he was ready to try this.

My dad fell in love with cricket as a toddler in Guyana. When he moved to England as a younger man, he performed within the equal of the minor leagues. After he began a household and we immigrated to Canada, he didn’t fairly get baseball. Of course, he acknowledged its resemblance to cricket, however even with our video games of catch and my advocacy, it took him years to understand the nuances of the game.

In distinction, baseball grabbed maintain of me instantly. Maybe the bat and ball have been etched in my DNA, or possibly my fandom arrived on the proper time — the Toronto Blue Jays had simply captured consecutive World Series titles once I started to take a liking to the game.

I used to be additionally lucky that my mother and father fostered my curiosity on this new recreation. My mother made positive that Blue Jays’ and New York Yankees’ video games have been at all times on our tv, and my dad’s curiosity grew — not rapidly, however steadily.

While there have been elements of the sport he completely despised — the bloated salaries, for one — he ultimately grew to respect sure gamers, Derek Jeter particularly, and drew parallels to among the greatest cricket stars from his day. The throughline, in my father’s eyes, was that the very best in both sport tended to hold themselves the identical approach, treating opponents, followers and media with respect and delivering when it mattered most, whether or not that was by means of their conduct on the sector or feedback away from it.

In brief, his love of cricket, his capacity to see the parallels between the 2 sports activities and his willingness to place within the work, ultimately led my dad to some extent of baseball fandom — no less than sufficient to know mine.

This Saturday, the Blue Jays will host Cricket Day on the Park, wherein the group will spotlight the game at Rogers Centre by making a gift of a Blue Jays-themed cricket jersey and providing numerous activations all through the stadium, together with batting and bowling simulators. Legendary Jamaican batsman Chris Gayle can be readily available to take part within the festivities by taking batting observe — together with a number of former and present members of the Canadian nationwide cricket workforce — and throwing out the ceremonial first pitch.

It could appear to some like a token initiative, however for me, it’s among the many strongest acts of illustration I’ve felt throughout my three many years following baseball in Toronto.

In the trouble to make use of the shared vocabularies of the 2 sports activities to type new bonds and higher understanding, I see similarities to these journeys throughout the road to play catch with my dad. And I additionally see in Cricket Day an acknowledgement of the sport’s previous failure to create a welcoming house for individuals who appear to be me and share components of my background, and of the gap that failure has left open between baseball and my communities.

That distance is one thing that’s adopted me my whole life. I’m Guyanese with heritage that traces to India, and I’ve at all times been instructed by individuals from my very own Caribbean and South Asian communities that baseball isn’t a sport for me. I particularly keep in mind a brown child in elementary faculty saying, “Dave, why do you even like baseball? It’s such a white people sport.” He wasn’t the one individual of color to inform me that through the years.

Today, I perceive what they meant, however the ache nonetheless lingers. The thought that you just’re not as “brown” as you ought to be is an advanced and harmful one for an adolescent to grapple with. I believe any one that grew up exterior of their mother and father’ homeland has in all probability felt their very own model of it.

Of course, I wasn’t going to cease loving baseball as a result of my cultures weren’t current in it. Instead, my reply as a child was to gravitate towards MLB’s Puerto Rican ballplayers. I’ve some unfastened household ties to the island and if I squinted exhausting sufficient, I might see similarities between us — the curly darkish hair, the brown pores and skin, the swagger — that allowed me to fake I may very well be on the within of this recreation, too.

That was roughly three many years in the past. And although baseball has since grown right into a extra international sport, I can nonetheless see a state of affairs the place a younger brown child feels the identical approach I did when he appears to be like on the area right this moment. Although this weekend’s Cricket Day on the Park clearly doesn’t remedy that drawback or eradicate the gap between the sport and the numerous communities whose members battle to see themselves in it, it does carry the potential for influence.

Simply put, it reveals that Canada’s baseball workforce acknowledges a part of the fanbase that has historically by no means been acknowledged, has by no means felt seen.

If there’s a mother or dad or daughter or son who’s a cricket diehard and is moved to present baseball a more in-depth look, that can be successful. And if the alternative occurs and a baseball fan turns into interested in this similar-yet-different recreation, that’s nice, too.

Who is aware of, possibly there’ll be a father within the crowd who decides that the following time he performs catch along with his children, he’ll ditch the baseball glove and go barehanded.