We already know that the Toronto Blue Jays open the “home” portion of their season Thursday night against the Angels at their spring training site: TD Ballpark in Dunedin, Florida. It’s the first of 22 games the Jays will play in their spring ballpark to start the home part of their schedule in 2021.
We don’t know how things will proceed after that, though it seems likely that Buffalo’s Sahlen Field is the next Blue Jays home park in 2021.
The Blue Jays will need to get approval from the Canadian government to return to Rogers Centre in Toronto. COVID-19 cases in the area are on the rise and the province of Ontario could enter another lockdown. That means the Blue Jays likely would not be approved to return to Toronto for home games, which would involve them staying in the United States for most or all of their home games, as they did in the shortened 2020 season.
That means after May 24, the Blue Jays are likely to be seeking a new home instead of just staying put in an open-air ballpark in Florida during the summer months. They played home games in Buffalo’s Sahlen Park last year, so it’s the natural answer again this time around.
The big complication in 2021 is that there will be Triple-A baseball this year. Sahlen Park is home to the Buffalo Bisons, the Jays’ Triple-A affiliate.
Mike Harrington of the Buffalo News reports that Major League Baseball is working on a plan that would temporarily place the Bisons in Trenton, N.J. for the 2021 season. There’s a 6,200-seat ballpark that used to be the home of the Double-A Trenton Thunder, who were lost in the reorganization of Minor League Baseball this past offseason.
With the Jays’ last scheduled game in Dunedin on May 24 and plans in the works to send the Bisons to Trenton, the writing is on the wall here for the Blue Jays to play 2021 home games in Buffalo, unless something drastic changes in Toronto here in the coming weeks.