Exhibition Stadium

Built on a Football Field

Exhibition Stadium was a retrofit. The builders took the existing CNE football grounds and added new single-tier seating that curved from the first-base side around to third, lifting baseball capacity past 38,000 — some $18 million of work, completed by spring 1976. The Blue Jays arrived the next April, and the football field underneath never stopped showing through.

The inaugural home opener was April 7, 1977, at the tail end of a snowstorm. Bill Singer delivered the first pitch with snow still flying, and 44,649 near-frozen fans watched Toronto beat the Chicago White Sox 9-5. It was the only major league game ever played with the field covered entirely by snow. The club lost 107 games that year and still drew 1.7 million fans, then a record for an expansion team.

The 820-Foot Seats

Because the diamond was laid inside a football footprint, some seats down the right-field line sat as far as 820 feet from home plate — the largest such distance of any stadium ever used as a principal major-league home field. Many of those seats faced each other rather than the infield. The Blue Jays found them too distant to sell during the regular season and opened them only when demand required, during the 1985 and 1987 pennant races.

The outfield wall was a padded chain-link fence, 330 feet down each foul line, 375 to the power alleys, and 400 to straightaway center. On September 15, 1977, Orioles manager Earl Weaver pulled his team off the field after umpires refused to have the grounds crew remove a tarpaulin covering the Toronto bullpen down the left-field line, citing a trip hazard from the bricks holding it down. Toronto was awarded a win by forfeit — the only deliberate team forfeiture in the major leagues since 1914.

Ten years later, on September 14, 1987, the Blue Jays clubbed a major-league record 10 home runs off the Orioles in a single home game. The Blue Jays played their last game there on May 28, 1989, and moved into SkyDome the following week; the building stood another decade before it came down in 1999.

Reporting: Society for American Baseball Research, Wikipedia. Park data: MLB StatsAPI and Retrosheet, via the Fever engine.