Most of us have listen to or at least heard of the song "take me out to the ball game", however I don’t think most of us have heard of the Canadian equivalent, “Ok, Blue Jays”. Yet I feel like today in our great nation the sport of baseball is significantly more meaningful then ever before. A large portion of this significance should be attributed to the Toronto Blue Jays organization for really establishing itself within the MLB as a winning franchise. The reason why I say a large portion of the credit, and not all of it, is because the Jays were not the first baseball team outside of the United States, they were the second. The Montreal Expos were the first Canadian team to play across the border as they were established in 1969 (Wikipedia). The Jays however, established in 1977, are the only Canadian baseball team to last until present day (Wikipedia). This is arguably due to a cultural divide between the Quebecer nation and the rest of the nation, which I will get into later (Anderson, 2012). In case you’re feeling skeptical about my artifact it is in fact a Toronto Blue Jays hat, despite not reflecting the normal blue, white and red. However this in itself is significant, as the colours in my Jay’s hat resemble much more then an ordinary hat would have.

The colours and symbol of my hat in particular don’t speak about the team specifically, but how we tend to see the team nation wide. The symbol is very distinct as it is deeply embedded within our colonial history, for it, unlike a blue jay signifies our independence as a nation through the representation of the maple leaf, our national symbol. This is fitting, as the Toronto Blue Jays are Canada’s sole baseball team and should allow for Canadians to feel patriotic in what is otherwise a predominantly American sport. This alone gives rise to my artifacts importance as the Jays broke into a stubborn American league sport and remained competitive, although not recently. Thus my artifact unintentionally speaks volumes about the American nation and the way they imagine themselves (Anderson, 2012) In particular it speaks about them as being exclusionary of anything non-American, which is done to create a sense of community (Anderson, 2012). The colour grey in my hat stands testament to this fact as it contrasts the maple leaf significantly, as to suggest that we stand-alone and proud. My artifact also has huge cultural implications as well which can be seen through the bowing out of Canada’s first Major League team, the Montreal Expos. This could be due to the fact that the Expos were depicted to be representative of the Quebecer nation and not the nation as a whole like the Jays. Anderson (2012) suggested, “communities are to be distinguished by…the style in which they are imagined” (Anderson, 2012: 6). In other words what made the Expos fold was what others within the community made of them (Anderson, 2012). Their owners obviously did not believe in the branding of the team, as they were forced to move to Washington (Wikipedia).

Anderson (2012) also argues that in order for a nation to become a nation it must be recognized by other nations as a nation. Thus my artifact is also related to a system of difference, when speaking about how we as Canadians do not generate enough support for nations within our nation. Evident as the Expos did not get enough recognition within our nation as a Canadian baseball franchise, whereas the Jays did and still are (Anderson 2012). Mackay (2002) on the other hand would have suggested that the Expos folded due to Canada’s view of multicultural difference. She suggests that we tend to include, rather than accept differences of culture (Mackey 2002). Which is evident as unlike the Jays the Expos were seen as a French-Canadian franchise instead of a Canadian one. This is what allowed the Jays to establish itself as a nationalistic symbol. Anderson (2012) suggests, “nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with…political ideologies, but with the large scale cultural systems that proceed it” (12). Thus the reason why the Toronto Blue Jays were able to get the support they required was because they were seen as a culture for the vast majority and not for a select few. All of which are indicators of how my artifact is shaped by its nation and our nations sub-nation.

Overall, I found my artifact to be of significant importance to our Canadian nation. Not only does it illustrate our cultural heritage as a nation through its symbolism, but it also points to a prominent cultural divide between our nation and the Quebecor nation. It also indirectly relates with how we see the USA as a nation, and our indifference to that nation. Agnew would indicate, “nationalism as the “sprit of the people” is a form of consciousness that will come to dominate all others” (Agnew, 2012: 131). In the case of the Toronto Blue Jays my collective consensus is that they are a team constructed by the nation, for our nation. It’s a team that holds dominate cultural norms in order to garnish an array of supporter’s nation wide. Baseball is predominately an American sport, as twenty-nine of it thirty teams support the stripes and stars. Yet none of those teams can unanimously unite a nation quite like the one up in the great white north. So, “Ok, Blue Jays, lets play ball”.

Bibliography

Agnew, John. 2012.  “Nationalism.” in Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography.  Edited by Nuala Johnson, Richard Schein & Jamie Winders. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities. London: Verso.

Mackey, Eva. 2002. "Settling Differences: Managing and Representing People and Land in the Canadian National Project." In The House of Difference. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.