This weekend the Toronto Blue Jays experience it for just the third time, and first time since 2014, though a unique sliding door for the franchise almost calls the place home during the 2020 pandemic season. Worth remembering as the blue-clad fans traveling from Southern Ontario flock downtown and make the place their own is the generosity shown by the Pittsburgh Pirates in trying to house a displaced opponent. “In Pittsburgh, it’s what we do — we all lean in,” Pirates president Travis Williams says of the Blue Jays’ near-shelter that summer. “That’s just a unique thing that’s in our DNA here in the city. We looked at it as we helped the organization play baseball at a time when they didn’t have a home. We were willing to open our doors to allow them to play and do their season.” Pennsylvania health officials ultimately rejected the proposal, leaving the Blue Jays to first attempt to stay 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 not to allow the cross-border travel required for games at Rogers Center and the move to the home of their triple-A affiliate, the Pirates did what they could to make available the PNC Park. And they didn’t do it half-heartedly either. Williams used executives from baseball operations, on-field operations and the business side to coordinate with Blue Jays counterparts to lay the groundwork. While “they weren’t working around the clock, they were working a significant amount of time on it over a four- to five-day period,” he says. Helping matters is that Williams, during his decade as Chief Operating Officer of the Pittsburgh Penguins, had developed a friendship with Mark Shapiro, regularly speaking on the latest trends in the hockey and baseball industries, sharing best practices between their. Their bond continued when Shapiro left Cleveland to become president and CEO of the Blue Jays, and Williams also moved, first to the New York Islanders in 2018 and then back to the 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 looking for potential candidates, which ended up including the man he eventually hired – Ben Cherington. So when Shapiro called to inquire about the possibility of sharing PNC Park — the Pirates and Orioles’ schedules were better aligned with the Blue Jays’ — there was already a long history of working together. “I talked to (Pirates owner) Bob Nutting and we were like, absolutely. Why wouldn’t we want to help a group of colleagues?’ says Williams. “We mobilized our team very quickly, went back to Mark, said, ‘Hey, let’s get our teams together and start talking about what that would look like.’ They agreed to use the lounge above the left field bleachers to house the front office, game production team and other staff with awnings and temporary structures under the bleachers in other areas of the outfield for a clubhouse and weight room. To try to satisfy health concerns, they secured complete separation between the two clubs on the field, and then the Pirates tacked on the plan to their previous proposals to Pennsylvania officials. “They’ve been absolutely incredible,” Marnie Starkman, the Blue Jays’ senior vice president of marketing and business operations, said in 2020. Although the whole thing ultimately went awry, as state health officials decided that adding a second cross-country team to the city was too risky, it was still an important exercise in the benefits of cooperation in a competitive industry. “In that moment and what was going on in the world, I think we were all allies and just trying to find ways to get through it,” Williams says. “Beyond Toronto and trying to help Mark and the whole organization, obviously we’ve been leaning on other organizations to tell us how you handle this, how you handle that, different aspects of either health and safety protocols, personnel issues. There were all kinds of things that we all deal with. We were all trying to keep the game on the field. … “And it would be nice to have two Major League Baseball teams play here at PNC Park. It’s a beautiful park. I think it would be fun for the Toronto Blue Jays and I think it would be fun for the Pirates and Pittsburgh as well.”
