Dodgers in Toronto

No, this isn't a post about the 2025 World Series games! Now that that's off my chest, let's start! :) I always wanted to visit Toronto and seeing the World Series made that wish burn a bit brighter. So when I saw our boys were playing the Blue Jays this year I booked a flight and got tickets for the first two games at Rogers Centre, which I like to call Dodgers Centre ever since the World Series last year.

Toronto is big! It's not that different from US cities. Large department stores, loads of homeless people, but also a city underneath the city. An easy way to move around the place during those cold winters.

I really hoped to book a room at the City Centre Marriott which has rooms looking out over the baseball field. They were a few hundred dollars when I looked for a room in April in January, but prices skyrocketed in March to several thousand dollars. Ofcourse! The Dodgers were coming!

We visited the bar with field view in the beginning of the afternoon, Dodger fans were there as well, checking in into the hotel or just roaming the bar like us. I didn't have to fear being the only Dodger fan at the games.

The first night Rogers Centre was filled with almost 41,000 fans. The booing, when a Dodgers player came to bat, was loud, but I couldn't blame them. Theoscar was amazing with four RBI's. Plenty of homeruns by Hernandez, Freeman, Ohtani, Rushing (twice). Wrobleski had a great outing where Scherzer was done after 2 innings. All in all a great night out.

The next night Yamamoto was on the mound and pitched 6 solid innings. Díaz got the save. No homeruns but a great outing: 4-1.

I was impressed by the stadium. Really a nice place to visit again when the boys play here.

Old Blue New

I wanted to write a book about our boys in blue for some time, but never really had the peace of mind to sit behind my laptop and type. Which is weird, because I do write my short posts on this blog. Somehow I didn't know what kind of angle I could go with. Then, a few weeks before visiting Toronto to see the boys play, I got this urge. A story was forming and I saw before me a beginning, and an end. It was the middle part I had to figure out.

First thing I had was a title, it's a bit out there, but if you read the book, you'll get it. I conjured up an older man so the protagonist had someone to reflect upon. He had to be old enough to have seen the Dodgers play in Brooklyn. The stage turned out to be New York City, around the 2024 World Series.

I visited one game in Yankee Stadium and stayed in NYC for a few days myself so I could incorporate real life experiences together with made up ones. It was fun to delve deeper into my knowledge of the boys in blue and regurgitate facts from (auto)biographies I'd read throughout the years.

I don't want to spoil anything nore, So I'll leave you with the back cover blurb.

"When a Dodgers fan from the Netherlands decides to fly to New York City to attend the 2024 World Series games at Yankee Stadium, he encounters an interesting old man. Both of them Dodgers fans, but worlds apart."