Blue Jays post-season success on the field encouraging Canadian youth to play ball

MONTREAL — Does the success of the Toronto Blue Jays have an impact on amateur baseball in Canada? Absolutely, according to Baseball Canada and Baseball Quebec.

“Definitely, every time the Jays are successful on the field, we see interest spike,” said Jason Dickson, chief executive officer of Baseball Canada.

The Blue Jays rallied to defeat the Seattle Mariners 4-3 on Monday night to advance to the World Series for the first time in 32 years.

Dickson says the 1992 and 1993 World Series championship squads, and those competitive teams last decade that included the likes of Jose Bautista, Josh Donaldson, and Russell Martin, all translated into a spike in interest in the game.

“Like in those years, you have a whole country talking about baseball, and you have lots of young kids who are still figuring out what sport to play and who will be encouraged to try baseball. We’re going to see our numbers go up in every province,” Dickson said.

“It has a huge impact when the Blue Jays are successful.”

Maxime Lamarche, executive director of Baseball Quebec, agrees.

“It gives us a reason to talk about baseball,” Lamarche said. “When we get to this time of year, it’s harder to get people interested in baseball, but what the Jays are doing this year is piquing everyone’s curiosity so much that we’re still talking about baseball late into October.”

If the Jays win the World Series, that chatter will spill into November amid all the festivities.

“Scientifically, we can’t measure any of this,” Lamarche said.

“But look at Monday, during Game 7, on Baseball Quebec’s social media, we asked the question: ‘Who do you think will win?’

That post received over 2,500 responses — some thirty to forty per cent more traffic on their social networks.

“So I have no trouble believing that this enthusiasm is being felt elsewhere,” Lamarche said.

Lamarche notes that interest is coming from all over as everyone talks baseball and watches the games.

“It’s clear that these discussions are getting people talking more about baseball, and not just among ourselves, the enthusiasts at Baseball Quebec, or the journalists who follow the game,” Lamarche said.

Success on the field takes longer to materialize, but Baseball Quebec has been seeing results in the past decade, where younger generations were exposed to competitive Blue Jays teams in the 2010s.

The association said it thought a plateau had been reached in 2024 because, aside from years afftected by COVID-19, there has been a steady increase in memberships for 12 years.

But in 2025, that number continued to rise, with an increase of close to 10 per cent, mainly due to women’s baseball. Baseball Canada has about 280,000 members, including about 15 per cent who are female players.

There are about 40,000 members provincially according to Baseball Quebec, about 38,000 of whom are under the age of 18, a 10 per cent increase compared to 2024.

In fact, Baseball Québec now has the same number of members as it did during the heyday of the Montreal Expos in the early 1990s, but with a logistical problem.

“At that time, we had twice as many baseball fields in Quebec,” Lamarche said. “At least half of the baseball fields in Quebec have disappeared and constructing a baseball field at 2025 costs is not the same thing anymore.”

Both leaders also highlighted the Blue Jays’ collaboration with amateur baseball in the country. Major League Baseball’s only Canadian team plays its role as ambassador to perfection.

“We have a really good partnership with the Jays now, who really help us with a lot of our grassroots programming,” Dickson said. At the other end of the spectrum, they also help with our national elite program. We are fortunate to have them as our partners.”

The Blue Jays’ impact in Quebec was most felt the when Toronto ball club played pre-season games at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium between 2014 and 2019.

“Those games created synergy between the Jays and us because they wanted those games to work well (and) on our end, we took advantage of that to get them involved in more projects,” Lamarche said.

Lamarche said that connection is still there.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 21, 2025.