Blue Jays relish rare PNC Park visit two years after nearly calling Pittsburgh home

PITTSBURGH – Baseball at the stadium perfection that is PNC Park is a delight, with the brilliant backdrop of the Roberto Clemente Bridge, Allegheny River and Pittsburgh skyline making the play on the field seem especially resplendent.

This weekend the Toronto Blue Jays are experiencing it for only the third time ever, and first time since 2014, although a unique sliding door for the franchise is nearly calling the place home during the 2020 pandemic season.

Worth remembering as blue-clad fans road-tripping from Southern Ontario swarm downtown and make the place their own is the generosity the Pittsburgh Pirates showed in trying to house a displaced rival.

“In Pittsburgh, it's what we do – we all lean in,” Pirates president Travis Williams says of nearly sheltering the Blue Jays that summer. “That's just a unique thing inherent in our DNA here in the city. We looked at it as we were helping the organization play baseball at a time when they didn't have a home. We were willing to open up our doors to allow them to play and have their season.”

Pennsylvania health officials ultimately nixed the proposal, leaving the Blue Jays to first attempt lodging at Camden Yards with the Baltimore Orioles before settling on Buffalo’s Sahlen Field. But during the frantic seven days between the Canadian government’s decision to not permit the cross-border travel needed for games at Rogers Centre and the move into the home of their triple-A affiliate, the Pirates did all they could to make PNC Park available.

And they didn’t do it half-heartedly, either.

Williams utilized staffers from baseball operations, ballpark operations and the business side to co-ordinate with Blue Jays counterparts to lay the groundwork. While “they weren't working around the clock, they were working pretty significant time on it for a period of four to five days,” he says.

Helping things along is that Williams, during his decade as chief operating officer of the Pittsburgh Penguins, had struck up a friendship with Mark Shapiro, speaking regularly about the latest trends in the hockey and baseball industries, sharing best practices with one another.

Their bond continued when Shapiro left Cleveland to become president and CEO of the Blue Jays and Williams moved on, too, first to the New York Islanders in 2018 and then back to Steel City as president of the Pirates a year later.

One of Williams’ first tasks with the Pirates was hiring a new general manager and Shapiro was one of the people he contacted in search of potential candidates, which ended up including the man he eventually hired – Ben Cherington.

So, when Shapiro called to ask about the possibility of sharing PNC Park – the schedules of the Pirates and Orioles best aligned with that of the Blue Jays – there was a longstanding history of co-operation already in place.

“I talked to Bob Nutting (the Pirates owner) and we were like, absolutely. Why wouldn't we want to help out a fellow team?” says Williams. “We mobilized our team pretty quickly, got back to Mark, said, ‘Hey, let's get our teams together and start talking through what it would look like.’”

They settled on using the lounge above the left-field bleachers to house the front office, the game production group and other staffers with tenting and temporary structures under the bleachers in other areas of the outfield for a clubhouse and weight room.

To try and satisfy health concerns, they ensured total separation between the two clubs within the stadium and then the Pirates pasted the plan into their previous proposals to Pennsylvania officials.

“They were absolutely incredible,” Marnie Starkman, the Blue Jays’ senior vice-president of marketing and business operations, said back in 2020.

Though all the work went for naught in the end, as state health officials decided that adding a second team criss-crossing the country to the city was too risky, it was still an important exercise in the benefits of co-operation within a competitive industry.

“In that moment in time and what was going on in the world, I think we all were allies and just trying to figure out ways to get through it,” says Williams. “Beyond just Toronto and trying to help out Mark and the whole organization, on our end we were obviously leaning on other organizations to tell us how are you handling this, how are you handling that, different aspects of either health and safety protocols, staffing issues. There were all kinds of things that we're all dealing with. We were all trying to keep the game on the field. …

“And it would have been kind of cool to have two Major League Baseball teams playing here at PNC Park. It's a beautiful park. I think it would have been fun for the Toronto Blue Jays and I think it would have been fun for the Pirates and Pittsburgh, too.”