Blue Jays hopeful of playing home games in Toronto later in season

The Toronto Blue Jays are about to open their second season outside of their home city, but there is some optimism that this will not last through 2021.

Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro revealed that the team hopes to seek formal permission within the next few months to begin playing games at Rogers Centre.

“I do think that we have significant positive and objective momentum that would lead us to make a more formal ask sometime in the next month,” Shapiro told Kaitlyn McGrath of The Athletic. “Not to come back in a month, but make that ask for later in the summer, sometime in the next month.

“We’ve got fairly good information that the vaccine will be accessible to our players and other major-league teams in the next two to three weeks or month. So that if by the end of April or early May all of our players or the bulk of our players and staff are vaccinated and other teams are as well and Toronto is a safe place, it starts to feel like the reasons for us not to be there, the risks start to be mitigated. I would say that when we start to have that material progress that we see the vaccinations actually happening, we will start to formalize an ask.”

The Blue Jays spent the 2020 season in Buffalo due to travel restrictions with Canada. This season, they are poised to play at their spring training facility in Dunedin, Fl. until further notice. That’s fairly close to where the Toronto Raptors are playing their own home games.

The uncertainty over Toronto’s home has been a problem for the team in doing business with players. The good news is this looks likely to be squared away in the months to come.