“Baseball has been around in Canada a lot longer than people know,” says Scott Crawford, director of operations at the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.

By 1913, 75 years after the Beachville Game, there were some two dozen minor league teams across Canada. The Montreal Expos formed in 1969 as Canada’s first Major League Baseball team. But none of these teams has stood the test of time and entrenched baseball into Canadian national identity quite like the Toronto Blue Jays.

This year marks 50 years since the Blue Jays were founded as an American League expansion team in 1976 — 138 years after the Beachville Game marked the presence of baseball in Canada.

But the Jays as Toronto’s team almost didn’t happen. At first, the San Francisco Giants were set to relocate to Toronto; that fell through. Then, U.S. president Gerald Ford tried to derail expansion plans and get a team in Washington, D.C., instead of Toronto. But by the end of March 1976, the details were finalized, with beer company Labatt footing a chunk of the bill to create a new team in the Great White North (hence the “blue” added to “jays” for the beer Labatt Blue).

The Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame maintains countless artifacts from the team’s history, from the very first game to the historic dual World Series victories in 1992 and 1993. The museum recently acquired the second base from George Springer’s series-winning three-run home run during the 2025 American League Championship Series — which sent the Jays to their first World Series in a generation, though they’d ultimately lose to the Los Angeles Dodgers in a Game 7 nailbiter. 

But Crawford says even though baseball history is his life’s work, the Blue Jays are also his personal life’s passion, as they are for so many Canadians. “1986, I think, is the first year I sort of started really following them, and I’ve been a die-hard fan ever since. So it’s my 40th anniversary — wow — of loving the Blue Jays,” he says. The founding of the Blue Jays sparked a generational interest in baseball in Canada for people like Crawford, one that is reignited with each era’s memorable moments. From those early championships to the fresh excitement of the 2015 playoffs to last year’s brush with World Series glory, Crawford says you can trace the key moments in the team’s timeline to surges in baseball interest across Canada.