By Ed White and Divya Rajagopal
WINNIPEG/TORONTO (Reuters) -Canadians hope baseball can bring them some joy on Friday night to counteract economic gloom as the Toronto Blue Jays take to their home field to start the World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, a day after U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly cancelled U.S.-Canada trade talks.
The success so far this year of Canada’s only Major League Baseball team has spurred hope for millions of Canadians who feel beaten and bruised from months of political struggle with their next-door neighbour and long-term ally.
“They definitely are Canada’s team,” said lifelong fan Kirsty Crawford, who was wearing a Jays jersey while picking up a coffee at Tim Hortons in downtown Winnipeg, 2,240 kilometres (1,390 miles) west of Toronto, on Friday morning.
“It’s amazing. There’s people in my office who have never watched a baseball game in their life and they’re watching it.”
For Max Babcock, a Winnipegger proudly wearing a Blue Jays jersey while walking to lunch with his wife, Sarah, seeing the Jays in the series is uplifting in the fraught Canada-U.S. climate.
“It’s an American-dominated game. There’s one Canadian team. It means more,” said Babcock.
Decades ago, the Jays stamped themselves on the Canadian consciousness as a national champion rather than just Toronto’s team. The team was launched with a small maple leaf in the logo in 1976. The maple leaf was greatly expanded in 1996, three years after the team won the World Series for the second time in two years. The maple leaf has come and gone from the logo since then, but today is a prominent element.
For Jays super-fan Marcie Matsubuchi in Niagara Falls, Ontario, investing 38 hours to create her “look,” including a cap with 3,000 beads, for Friday’s game was well worth it.
“Nothing’s getting in the way of us winning the World Series, so, yeah, it doesn’t matter” what Trump says, she said. “They can stay south of the border. We’re Canadian. We live differently. We think differently. We think positively. And this is what’s going to work for us.”
Even Canadians overseas are watching keenly.
Jenn Norrie, from Calgary, has been on an international trip, but watched the Jays in the American League Championship Series on her mobile in the middle of the night while in Kenya. She will watch tonight’s game from Amsterdam.
“Start time tonight is 2 a.m.,” said an excited Norrie.
(Reporting by Ed White; Editing by Caroline Stauffer, David Gregorio and Rosalba O’Brien)
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