TORONTO — As Buck Martinez walked through the Toronto Blue Jays dugout and turned down the steps toward the batting cage following the ceremony inducting him to the club’s new Hall of Excellence, he spotted someone running up toward him.
“He stuck his hand out and said, ‘I'm Brett Bateman.’ I said, 'I know who you are.’ He goes, ‘Congratulations. This is very special, what you've done,’” Martinez recalled afterwards. “That blew me away. He didn't know me from Adam. I never had any contact with him before. But he took the time to say how much he appreciated what I did. I told Paul Beeston and I certainly told John Schneider, I said, 'You've got a special kid, right there, to take the time to say to an old man thank you very much and congratulations.' That was pretty awesome.”
The private exchange — on an emotional Saturday that began with the Hall’s unveiling, continued with a first-class on-field ceremony for Martinez and ended with a 4-3 win for the Blue Jays over the Seattle Mariners — highlighted the wider significance of creating a destination celebrating the team’s history.
In transitioning the names on the current Level of Excellence on the Rogers Centre’s façade to the new display centre, the Blue Jays are bringing the honourees' accomplishments to life, in a space where stories can be passed from one generation of fans to the next.
Similarly, the ceremonies reinforce to players that if they accomplish great things on the field, what they do won’t simply disappear with time.
Bateman recognized all of that.
“I feel like that's how it always should be," he said. "Baseball is more than just a sport, it's about the relationships that you build and you saw that today with all the fans and all the legends and players that were in the building. What better time to meet him than now? We're in playoff race and trying to win ballgames, I just feel like that's how it should be done for everything that he's done for this organization, one that's taken a chance on me. I feel like I've got to pay my respects for that.”
The club certainly did that with the forever Blue Jay Martinez, celebrating him with videos, speeches, gifts and the establishment of two awards in his honour: The Buck Martinez Heart of the Game Award, given to a volunteer in Jays Care Foundation’s Challenger Baseball program; and the Buck Martinez Scholarship for Sport Media, given to a student in Toronto Metropolitan University’s Sport Media program.
Nailing the moment as he always does, he ended his on-field speech with a riff on his play-by-play catchphrase, telling a crowd of 41,512, “Swing and a drive, get up ball, get outta here, I'm gone.” He did fib a little, jumping back into the Sportsnet broadcast booth with longtime partner Dan Shulman and Joe Siddall for another inning before making the rounds.
“Today blew me away,” he said. “I just didn't have any grasp for the magnitude of today. But it was awesome. The Blue Jays did a hell of a job with it.”
The plan is for days like this one to be an annual event, since now that there’s a proper space to house inductees, the team aims to clear a backlog of deserving candidates with one or two additions per year moving forward. Fourteen names are currently up for consideration, and while the Blue Jays still “want it to be exclusive and meaningful, the biggest change is we're going to give fans a voice” through a voting portal, president and CEO Mark Shapiro said.
"We took a more data-driven approach and looked statistically at some of the players who haven't been honoured yet that compare very favourably to the guys that are already in,” Shapiro continued. “Sentimentality factored into this initial group. Moving forward, we've got the combination of sentimental and (data-driven candidates) and there are a number of people who deserve to be in here, including some that are playing today and someday will be here.”
On that latter front, Cito Gaston, who managed the Blue Jays to consecutive World Series titles in 1992-93, said he believes the way the club is improving the way its history is celebrated “motivates guys quite a bit.”
“I can remember when they used to have a sign over the parking garage here, ‘Back-to-Back World Series Champions,’ so when visiting teams came to town, they'd look and say, 'OK, I want to be a part of that,'” Gaston continued. “They want to be a part of this. And you know what? If we don't have dreams and ambitions to do things, it will never happen.”
Carlos Delgado, the franchise leader in home runs, RBIs, runs, doubles, total bases and other offensive categories, was awed by the new displays, adding that “it's important to remember the history of the franchise.”
“Having an opportunity to show to people where the Blue Jays come from, it gives an opportunity to the city and the fans to identify with the franchise and the younger players to see who was there before,” he said. “They did a great job. This is a beautiful space and hopefully those guys, they go out there and they have great careers, so hopefully they have their names up here.”
Jose Bautista, who loaned the Blue Jays the bat he flipped in Game 5 of the 2015 ALDS for his display, sees the ties to team history through the lens of a player and now as a sports team owner, as he controls the Las Vegas Lights FC soccer club.
“It's great to have the spaces to celebrate the history, celebrate the accomplishments and to have a place where our legacies are memorialized for the fans to enjoy,” he said. “How will it affect players? We'll know over time, but I think it's great for the fans to have spaces like this to come and enjoy and have reminders of the brand, the values, the Blue Jays' way and how that's been created over the years, and how that's going to continue to develop.”
And that matters, because while “history is such a big part of baseball,” Shapiro said, “we're creating new memories every day here, which is exciting.”
The Blue Jays did that in multiple ways, feting Martinez and then rallying past the Mariners, sparked in part by Bateman, who on a wild-pitch ball-4 to George Springer with the bases loaded cleverly scored from second, narrowing Seattle’s lead to 3-2.
Bateman later added a game-tying RBI single the next inning, in some ways making the past-meets-future exchange before the game all the more poignant.
“I've been here for a month now and I almost teared up, like I had been here so long, watching all the stuff for Buck and all the videos,” said Bateman. “It just shows how strong this community is and the bond is. It was awesome, man.”
It all added deeper meaning to Martinez’s well-deserved moment.
“The connectivity and the connection to something other than just the current moment, to recognize that every day is an opportunity to impact people throughout this country and this city, and that when special moments happen here, special years and seasons happen here, they last forever,” Shapiro said of what he hoped his players would take from the day and the creation of the Hall. “People here remember. And it impacts not just this city, but everybody across the country. Anyone that plays here knows that, that it's lasting.”
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